Abstract
Evangelism is a tricky subject, even for evangelicals, whose name would seem to indicate a level of comfort with the topic. Among Southern Baptists, who tend to talk about evangelism quite frequently, there is widespread acknowledgment of a tremendous gap between denominational rhetoric and practice: Southern Baptists fret publicly about the failure of Christians to share their faith. Southern Baptists can hardly see the reality of declining church membership as anything other than a product of this failure, but leaders find themselves trapped between a felt need to “do something” about all this and a frank recognition that evangelism efforts revolving around a “program” or canned “gospel presentation” are off-putting to others and unappealing to laypeople and pastors.
This short volume, Sharing Jesus without Freaking Out, offered by Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professors Scott Hildreth and Steven McKinion, must be read as an attempt to thread the ever-narrowing needle’s eye of personal evangelism under these difficult conditions. The authors should be congratulated for carefully but clearly repudiating some aspects of evangelism as Southern Baptists and other evangelicals have tended to practice it, stressing instead a conversational form of evangelism through which believers weave the gospel into interactions with friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Although they do not use this phrase immediately or often, they do label their approach “lifestyle evangelism” despite their explicit affirmation that evangelism necessarily involves a self-conscious effort to offer the “gospel story” to others. Interestingly, the authors affirm that successful evangelism is not necessarily evangelism that results in “conversion,” but only that which leads a person one step closer to a possible decision later in life. This, however, is as close as the book gets to acknowledging a role for the wider community of faith in evangelistic work.
Interestingly, Hildreth and McKinion stress that evangelism is not the communication of bare facts, but a story, one drawn from the Bible alone. In this explanation of evangelism, testimony can serve as an illustration but can never displace the telling of the story of what God has done, not only in salvation and forgiveness, but also in God’s original creation and provision. In defining evangelism so narrowly, the authors communicate with admirable clarity. There is tension, however, in so explicitly identifying evangelism with communicating the story of God’s relationship with humankind to the exclusion of personal experience and the assertion that the gospel matters because it changes lives.
This emphasis on story points to another feature of the book that marks it as rather unusual, given its conservative source. In several respects, the authors have offered a manual of evangelism that resonates deeply with postliberal theological emphases. Beyond the focus on communicating story rather than bare propositional assertions, the book is also blatantly anti-apologetic. The authors admit that those who seek to offer the gospel will have to field questions that they cannot answer, but also assert that convincing answers to these questions are not really the path to Christian confession. Denying that personal testimony can undergird the gospel as a sort of evidence, the authors state, “Our testimonies do not prove the truthfulness of the gospel. The gospel is true because it is God’s story” (p. 147). In addition, the authors’ concept of “gospel fluency” whereby Christians “don’t merely apply his gospel to our lives” but “apply our lives to his gospel” runs parallel to George Lindbeck’s discussion of the use of typology in The Nature of Doctrine (pp. 80–81). Given the mixed messages that scholars associated with Southeastern Seminary have offered about postliberal theology in the past, this turn is unusual. At the same time, other postliberal emphases are missing. For instance, the authors do not emphasize the importance of community for faith development. Instead of seeking to invite new persons into congregations, the authors urge readers to find ways to come into close contact with friends and neighbors for conversation in neutral spaces such as gyms, coffee shops, and the workplace.
The articulation of such a simple thing—friendly conversation—as an evangelistic method reveals the very heart of the problem inherent not only in this book, but in any book about evangelistic methods in our time, whether conservative or postliberal, evangelical or mainline. While the authors are rightly averse to identifying people as “targets” or “marks” for evangelism and seek to avoid this approach through a concern with building authentic relationships, in the end, readers are still exhorted to identify explicitly those for whom they will pray and with whom they will share. Although we have come to see evangelism according to some “method” or other as vulgar and depersonalizing, we are yet unable to imagine evangelism as anything other than just that: the application of the method. This is what evangelism is. Whatever might lie beyond this is still hidden from view.
This sobering realization comes to us in a world in which the “new measures” pioneered by Charles Finney and others seem to be failing as evangelistic mechanisms and in which Alan Kreider can remind us convincingly that the early church seems to have had no interest whatsoever in “evangelism” as a separate function. Instead, the early church’s intense interest in worship and catechesis, engaged for their own sake, attracted new members to the faith despite considerable disincentives associated with joining. Is this the future of evangelism, after evangelism? It may be. In the meantime, Hildreth and McKinion have offered a readable guide to having gospel conversations that will help pastors, laypeople, and students learn how to talk with those close to them about Christian faith. Nonconservative and mainline readers should note that the authors are intentional in deemphasizing political issues and that “fire and brimstone” rhetoric is strikingly absent.