This round-table discussion on evangelism took place during the 2000 National Pastors' Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia. The pastors engaged in the discussion included Alliance Council members Ken Jones, John Nunes, Gene Veith, and Michael Horton, as well as Alistair Begg and Rick Phillips.
Horton: We have a situation today where people often wonder, "Can we have missions and evangelism to the unreached people groups of our own neighborhood and at the same time have integrity in our worship and in our teaching? How can we keep the two together? Or are we automatically left with seeker-resilient churches that don't reach out?"
First of all, what is a "seeker," and should we be gearing our worship around seekers?
Jones: Well, the language itself is indicative of what we used to call evangelism. I think that's where it comes from-when we talk about seekers, basically, those who are potential church members. However, the very use of the term indicates, I think, a shift in our understanding of evangelism. "Seeker" now equals "potential customer." Therefore the goal of reaching those individuals would be somewhat different from the past when we were attempting to share the gospel, and what ends up happening is, essentially, we rearrange the furniture for people who have no desire for being in the house. We end up unchurching the Church, and we remove all of the offense of the gospel for the sake of those who might have a passing interest.
Nunes: The term seeker is really a euphemism for what used to be called "the lost," those who are out of the relationship for which they were created. I like the way Augustine says we are made for God, and so there is this restlessness of heart. That's the restlessness we see in our culture. People are kind of searching for this potpourri of options, whatever works for them, whatever is expedient for them, and putting together a package that can make life make sense for them. But the Bible calls that "lost." Jesus calls those people "lost." Those are the ones he finds. So, then, we won't have wholeness, we won't have that sense of balance, we won't have that sense of salvation, without being in that relationship for which we are created.
Veith: One thing the Scriptures make clear is that the seeker is Christ. It isn't that we are seeking him, he is seeking us. In fact, what we seek as sinners is something very different than God. That's what drives us. And the gospel is about how God takes the initiative; Christ is the seeker of Scripture. I just don't understand how Christians can be designing their worship according to what non-Christians want. Christians need to bring the lost into communion with Christ and his people. And that seems to be what the Church needs to do, rather than to have the Church be formed by the non-Christian world.
Horton: Well, okay, that's great in theory and probably a lot of people, who have large ministries built on the seeker model, would agree but how would you then respond to the criticism there, that reaching even the people in your pew now takes a sensitivity to time and place, where we are right now, and that to really minister effectively, sometimes we do have to tone things down a bit and not use all these big words such as redemption and justification, and so forth, even for the people of God?
Veith: We just have to teach them these words, and teach them these concepts. We don't eliminate them, that doesn't help the people who need to learn the richness of what that is.
Horton: Now, John, you are an inner-city pastor as are two others here, Ken and Rick. How, in your ministry, do you respond to those who say, "Well, but the thing is, it's not really meeting me where I am because what you're trying is culture-bound." A lot of people will say, "You know, there's a different way of worshiping God in Nigeria than there is in Reno." Do you think that the culture thing is overplayed in our churches?
Nunes: Culture can become an excuse. I think that once you become a believer, there's an entrance into a distinct culture itself. Entrance into the Christian Church is entrance into another culture that transcends and cuts through all cultures around the world. Attempting to communicate the gospel in a way that is designed for a specific culture can be culture-bound. You become a prisoner to the culture that you're attempting to use to communicate the gospel. And what I try to emphasize is that once you become a believer you're joining a new culture that is universal and is eternal.
Veith: I think, on one hand, that we do have to recognize the transcendence of the Church; we're talking about a transcendent God. But at the same time we have to begin with where people are. So we do have to take seriously the ethnic, cultural identities of the people who make up the Church. We don't necessarily leave them there, but it's a reality. We do what we do; we enter the building the way we do, we wear our hats the way we do, because of something. So even when it comes to presenting the gospel, because Jesus did come in flesh and blood, he also participated in a particular culture. He went into the temple at Jerusalem at twelve years old because that was part of a particular culture. So, the issue is this: Our culture, our neighborhoods, are still to be subject to the authority of Scripture. We cannot use culture as an excuse to negate the gospel message.
Nunes: Yes, it's a lie for anyone to say that we do things without any culture-in our music, our preaching, our style, or whatever. We need to recognize there is a culture, but we can't use that as an excuse or a scapegoat, for being ineffective in a particular community.
Phillips: What we're saying is, I think, that we all come out of a cultural background and history, but what we're leading them into is not that culture, but into the one new man in Christ. That's why we do have our own terminology; we do have our own way of doing things that are distinctive from other social sets-every meaningful cultural or social organization will have its own language, its own forms, but we want to be leading them into something that's distinctively Christian rather than distinctively Euro, African, Spanish, or whatnot.
Veith: There's another cultural issue today, and I think we use the word culture in many different ways. It's one thing to speak of an ethnic culture. This is a community with its own history, customs, and those are very traditional, and it's part of a people with a certain history. Another term is the high culture, the culture of people, of individuals, who achieve something great, whether in writing or in thinking, or in science or the like, those things can be called cultural. The issue today that we're struggling with is not culture in either of those senses. It's to what extent can the Church embrace the popular or mass culture where everything becomes an economic commodity? Most students of culture are saying that right now in America we're having a problem because it's the ethnic cultures that are being destroyed by the pop culture. It's the high culture that's being destroyed by the pop culture. This is because pop culture can't handle any kind of traditional values, or any kinds of excellence or truth, or something that is demanding.
Horton: So, popular culture is not multi-ethnic, but anti-ethnic.
Veith: It's anti-ethnic; and another irony is that a lot of times ministries in trying to reach a particular cultural group, the Hispanics, for example, or the Asian, try to apply American pop culture. That is totally foreign to the Hispanic mind, which is very focused on family and on traditions, on rituals-and the Asian, very focused on the group, and giving in what you need to the good of us all, whereas the pop culture is driving all that out.
Horton: A meeting was held recently in Latin America where missiologists were saying, "Look, get your American stuff out of our continent." And it was basically marketing. They said, "We're sick of McDonald's. Could we please have a little space down here where we could develop a Latin American missiology?"
Phillips: I think that the Church has felt the need to capitulate to that mass-commodity culture, the same way small towns have to capitulate to Wal-Mart when it comes in.
Jones: That's right. We end up destroying ethnic identities in the name of pop culture. People will look at a sitcom, like Sanford and Son, or Good Times, and think because that's their favorite show on television, "I know what it's like to live in the inner city," not realizing that these are scripts written by people who have never even visited those areas. And the people who are actually the actors are just collecting a paycheck. These shows have nothing to do with living in the ghetto.
Horton: And why is it the case that there is no thirst for the mega-church movement to plant churches in the inner city?
Veith: That is because it's appealing to white, affluent, suburban baby boomers-a very narrow group. But the demographics are such that you can attract a lot of them together. I think Christians need to realize the many ways in which different ethnic cultures spell good news. Those cultures are probably more open to a kind of a Christian worldview that can be taught than American pop culture. Ours is the culture where families are breaking apart, that rejects any kind of moral values when it comes to sexuality and other things. You don't have that in ethnic cultures, except to the extent that they eagerly adopt the American pop culture values. And it's those communities that are suffering. And yet, there is a lot of literature trying to scare churches into adopting mega-church techniques as, "Wow-immigration is coming, and white people are going to be a minority . . . " Actually, that might be the salvation of the Church when that really happens.
Horton: I just read a book by John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Marketing of Culture and the Culture of Marketing, that talks about the extent to which marketing isn't simply something that people do but is an epistemology. This is the way we think. And in an interesting issue of Civilization, which is published by the Library of Congress, there was an article there, "The Choice Fetish: Blessings and Curses of a Market Idol." And in there, former Labor Secretary Robert Reisch notes, "Instead of liberating us, the new world of choice is making us more dependent on people who specialize in persuasion." In relation to the Church, can't we argue that what is happening with the Church is an episode of its capitulation to marketing consultants? That now, churches feel more and more like they are dependent? Pastors don't have to read J. I. Packer's Knowing God, but they have to get out there and read the latest demographic.
Phillips: And our anthropology is formed by advertising and marketing data…rather than the Scriptures…rather than Romans 3.
Horton: The worst of it, I think, is this notion of niche marketing to specific age groups. You used to have marketing that appealed to consumers because it was good enough for your mother and so is good enough for you. Now the ads say, "This is not your father's Oldsmobile." This mentality is coming into the Church. Instead of "this is the church where my father went, and my grandfather, and my grandmother is buried out there-you can see her grave through the window."
But today people come to church on Sunday, and then the church, like the culture, rips them apart. These people who hardly spend any time together anyway end up being ripped apart by demographics. People talk about how divided it is ethnically on Sunday morning. Well, half of that is probably not racism, but marketing, niche marketing.
Jones: I think of when I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, one of our favorite pastimes was to point out the narcs, the undercover cops, that were so undercover that all we had to do was sit at the corner and say, "Okay, well, there's one, and there's one…" because the fact of the matter is that they weren't cool at all. What they thought was being cool was what made them uncool.
Nunes: I know where you're going here…
Jones: We rap to them instead of catechize them, and then we wonder why they don't take the Church seriously when they're going through adolescence. If we teach them the categories, teach them the truth of the gospel, we will recover credible evangelism. The biblical categories are very simple: people are either saved sinners or lost sinners. Period. Instead of fitting in, we actually attract the world's contempt. They're not laughing with us, they're laughing at us, because we don't rap very well.
Horton: Yes. C. S. Lewis made the point that keeps coming back to me as we talk about these issues where he says we human beings think food, drink, sex, power, success are the ultimate pleasures of life. He says we're like little children making mud pies in the slums because we can't imagine what it would be like to have a holiday at the sea. Isn't our job, as ministers, to try to give people, every week, such an encounter with God, in his judgment and his justification, that they say, "Whatever I came in with this morning, I just realized what's really important in life. I didn't have Christianity filling the vacuum I decided I had. I was completely undone and shown something that I couldn't even conceive of, and the result is I now have a gift that is far greater than any of the felt needs that I could wish for being fulfilled."
Begg: That takes it back one step, at least for me, as I hear you speaking, Michael, because you and I will never be instrumental in giving people, some of whom we know and many of whom we've never met, any sense of divine encounter unless we ourselves have come from the place of a divine encounter. We can be the purveyors of theological accuracy, we can be the instruments in a variety of forms of spiritual insight and guidance and yet fail to be involved. That existential encounter we long for, which is the in-rush of God into the experience of our finitude is key. It's a responsibility that none of us can handle. It's a responsibility that none of us can embrace. We have nothing to bring, unless we ourselves have been brought there. And I think that has been the mark of great preaching throughout the ages, that there's been a sense of the greatness of God. Whether it was a fabulous sermon, whatever else it was, you know, we knew that the person was serious about God, that he had something to say that he felt passionately that we needed to hear, rather than that he'd found something really cute in US Airways Magazine when he was flying to Pittsburgh and managed to find four verses for it, stuck it together and banged it out, and did it twenty minutes before he turned the TV on for the evening.
Horton: Alistair, you're a pastor of a suburban, white, middle-class church. Do you think that the ministry in your church is significantly different from the kind of ministry that John or Ken or other inner-city pastors-Rick, in Philadelphia-might encounter?
Begg: Well, I'm sitting here . . . and I'm fascinated by the discussion and I'm learning as well, which happens all the time. But, you know, the way that we reach people, irrespective of the immediate context in which we find ourselves, is essentially one person at a time. And effective evangelism is evangelism that is based not on some kind of program but is based on people living out the life of Christ in their own community. And the most exciting things that are happening in our church are not directly related to any strategy that we have or any methodology that we've adopted, but simply as a result of people who have had their lives turned upside-down by Christ, and their friends and neighbors are asking, "What in the world has happened to you?" Now, in that sense, that cuts across every ethnic boundary, or socioeconomic boundary, because everyone has a context in which they're living their lives. But the idea of being able to start where people are is not an unbiblical idea, I'm sure we would agree. So, we have to be careful. I want to guard against distancing myself from the reality of the approach of Christ, which was able to take people where they started and move them to where he wanted them to go, whether it was the woman at the well, or whether it was Zacchaeus up a tree, or whoever it was. And I think there's a sense in which some who may not share our same theological presuppositions at least are a challenge to us in being imaginative and creative in bringing our own biblical understanding of things to bear upon the opportunity.
Horton: You mean we shouldn't be seeker resilient? Some of our churches are, of course, not seeker-sensitive but don't really want seekers.
Rosenbladt: Something like Judaism in the first century. A proselyte at the gate had to be really, really dedicated to getting in.
Phillips: We believe we should be doing intentional evangelism. We should be doing things to equip our people, for instance, to go out there and share the gospel. That's a world of difference from believing that the seeker is a consumer, and his or her decision is sovereign, and we've got to conform. First of all, we know their need better than they do. They don't know their need.
Horton: If they come as consumers, they already don't know their need because you only really know your need if you come as a sinner.
Phillips: People are dissatisfied. And they are seeking things, it's just not God. And so there is a readiness, a willingness to try new things that are accessible and seem to be attractive. I think in that sense if there is a seeker, our goal is to get them to see that what they need is not what they're seeking.
Rosenbladt: I wonder if we're trying to make the Sunday morning service do evangelism to get away from equipping our people from having a private conversation at the next mechanic's stall. In the past, the prep for inviting somebody to church, the background, was that the layman had some kind of idea what he believed and maybe why, and could have that conversation. I don't think any church service and hot young pastor can make up for that, on Sunday morning.
Horton: So you are saying that if the Church did its job of informing that kind of a person, focusing on the Church, focusing on the professing believers, that believers would then actually have more effect in evangelism because they would be ready to give everyone an answer.
