A Different Life
Evangelism looks like living according to God’s future in the present and thus doing whatever we can, whenever we can, to embody the Good News for everybody.
1 Peter 1.23
You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.
“Evangelism” can be a strange word in (and out of) the church. Like many words it’s not entirely clear what it means because it can mean so many different things to so many different people in so many different places. For instance, when I was in college, evangelism looked like people scattered across the campus holding signs and handing out tiny Bibles in order to get people saved. To people on the news, evangelism is a descriptor of a community of people who have vested political interests that may (or may not) have something to do with the church. To people on the internet, evangelism is a tool by which people are made to have the right options about the right issues at the right time.
And yet, evangelism in the strange new world of the Bible means, bearing the Good News. In other words, evangelism looks like living according to God’s future in the present and thus doing whatever we can, whenever we can, to embody the Good News for everybody.
The most distinctive quality of the earliest Christians was their weirdness, at least according to the terms of the world. Rather than giving over to selfishness, they lived for the well-being of others. Instead of taking up their swords with every new political machine, they confessed Jesus as Lord, not Caesar. Rather than acquiescing to the challenges that came with every new day, they kept the faith because it made a new way.
To put it another way: The Gospel makes us weird. It takes root in our souls (not unlike a mustard seed) and begins to grow until it bears fruit in the world. It gives us a new story about our past, present, and future. Our past mistakes no longer define who we are because Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Our present anxieties are soothed because Jesus calls us to give our burdens to him and him alone. And our future fears are redeemed because Jesus comes to raise the dead.
The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann was once asked about the differing understanding of evangelism and what we, in the church, can do about it. This is what he said:
“Evangelism is helping people come to awareness that this dominant world of greed and anxiety and self-sufficiency and denial and despair and so on, will never give you what you want. So come over to this world of trust and abundance and truth-telling and memory. Come over to this world that will give you what you need for safety and joy. And, what that really means is, ‘Come join the church!’ If the church is faithful to that, our way of being in the world contradicts the way the world wants us to be. Except, most of us want to have it both ways, but we can’t. [As Jesus says] No one can serve two masters. So, evangelism is ‘Join the company of the covenant people gathered around the God of the Gospel.’ And that will give you a different life. Theology is not a head trip. Theology is the living out of a different way to live in the world.”
If we are evangelical it is only because we believe we’ve been born anew, we’ve been given a different life, and that life is worth sharing with others.