Evangelism and Education

Evangelism and education do not function separately. They go hand in hand to present everyone mature in Christ. Those who are called to share the gospel often have no concept of education behind their proclamation. Those who are called to teach don’t want to proclaim the gospel to non-believers. In Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), Robert E. Webber laments the superficiality of the church in today’s world, saying:

This loss of evangelism in education as well as the loss of education in evangelism is one of the root causes of superficiality in evangelism today. The message of Christianity is a historical message with content.

Whenever Christianity is preached without its history or content, it is reduced to a social or psychological panacea, or worse, a manipulation of feelings…On the other hand, whenever the content of Christianity is presented as factual or intellectual data without an accompanying call to commitment and change of life, Christian education loses its power to form character in the convert. Clearly, evangelism and education must stand together. There must be content in preaching and proclamation in teaching (p. 153).

“Go… and teaching them what I have commanded you…” (Matt. 28:19-20) is a biblical command that we often obey partially. I am not denying the fact that some are called to be evangelists, and some are called to be educators. But what is unacceptable is that we over-emphasize the one over the other in our beliefs. Such imbalance of understanding the Great Commission in Matthew’s gospel leads to what we now call the situation of the church: growth without depth. Converted Christians are born again. But they have no root. It sounds good to tell the church that Mr. B believed in Jesus and has decided to follow him. It is good news. However, unless we continue to help Mr. B to grow with the Good News, Mr. B would end up swimming on the surface and miss the depth of the sea. In Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2010), J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett write:

As we contemplate today’s complex concerns, hopes, dreams, and ventures of Christian renewal, discipleship impresses us as the key present-day issue, and catechesis as the key present-day element of discipleship, all the world over. The Christian faith must be both well and wisely taught and well and truly learned! A far-reaching change of mindset about this is called for, without which such well-worn dictums as “American Christianity is three thousand miles wide and half an inch deep” will continue, sadly, to be verified. Recovery of the educational-devotional discipline that we are advocating cannot, to our mind, come a moment too soon (p. 17).

Dialectical Tension

Matthew’s gospel concludes with the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. It is not new that the command of Jesus in the Great Commission is the hermeneutical key to interpret Matthew’s gospel. Jesus called the disciples in Galilee, and he gave them the Great Commission in Galilee. From Galilee to Galilee, how did Jesus call and make disciples in Matthew’s narrative? Matthew’s Gospel became the discipleship blueprint for Matthew’s community in the first century.

In discipleship, there is no fairy-tale or magic. The ups and downs of discipleship path are real and inevitable. We grow along the way with the guidance and power of the Spirit. I find it interesting to realize that some disciples still doubted when they saw the resurrected Jesus on the mountain in Galilee. “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted.” (Matt. 28:16-17, ESV) At the end of the gospel, after Jesus had done and proved everything he said through the cross and resurrection, they worshipped. However, some doubted.

In commenting on the Great Commission, David J. Bosch notes:

Clearly these references to the weakness of the disciples have an important meaning for Matthew’s readers. Being a disciple of Jesus does not signify that one has, as it were, arrived…The weaknesses of the disciples in Matthew’s gospel do not, however, have a dark side only. In Matthew 28:17 the disciples’ doubt is strangely juxtaposed to their worship: “They (all!) worshiped him; but some doubted”…[Matthew] wishes him community to know that mission never takes place in self-confidence but in the knowledge of our own weakness, at a point of crisis where danger and opportunity come together. Matthew’s Christians like the first disciples, stand in the dialectical tension between worship and doubt, between faith and fear.[1]

There is always a dialectical tension between trusting and following. Matthew’s gospel recognizes it in the path of discipleship. It seems to imply that there is a place for disciples to worship and doubt God at the same time even though Matthew does not promote it as a norm for the life of discipleship (see Matt. 8:23-27). We worship with doubt; we doubt in worship. How true it is in real life.

I wish I can say that we worship wholeheartedly and trust in His authority all the time. I wish I can teach something like that. But I am glad that Matthew put the weaknesses of the disciples toward the end. And Jesus did not rebuke them. Rather, Jesus gave them a mission and a promise: I will continue to be with you at the end of age as you continue to make disciples of all nations in the name of the triune God. The life of discipleship is grounded in the promise of God in Christ as we continue to fulfill His mission commissioned to us. In the midst of fulfilling this great task, we grapple with the dialectical tension with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

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[1] David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), p. 76.

The Gospel Commission

Michael Horton’s new book The Gospel Commission: Recovering God’s Strategy for Making Disciples (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011) is a very thorough exposition of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20). If you want to know about the Great Commission in depth and what it practically means to the church, this is a must read. In one of the chapters, Horton deals with contextualization: “the attempt to situate particular beliefs and practices in their cultural environment.” (p. 115) In other words, in order to make the gospel relevant, we must understand our cultural contexts.  At one extreme, we totally ignore the context that we are in. Preaching the Word is what we care. We are passionate about the Word; however, we are not sensitive to the world. At the other extreme, we are so in tune with the world. As a result, we fail to offer an alternative. The prophetic nature of the Word is mute in the world.

An Excerpt:

Many evangelical seminaries today offer a panoply of elective courses on contextualized ministry (e.g., urban, youth, sports, sub-urban, emergent, African-American, Latino, men’s and women’s ministry). Obviously, something has to give—the seminary curriculum can only handle so many credit hours. Increasingly, at least from my conversations with friends, it seems that it is the core courses in biblical languages, systematic and historical theology, church history, and more traditional pastoral theology that are being pared down to make room. As a result, many American pastors, missionaries, and evangelists today may know more about their target market than they do about the “one Lord, one faith, and one baptism” that they share with the prophets and the apostles, the church fathers and reformers, or their brothers and sisters in China, Malawi, and Russia.

In the 1920s Princeton New Testament professor J. Gresham Machen was already issuing the complaint that the obsession with “applied Christianity” was so pervasive that soon there would be little Christianity left to apply. Are we seeing the effects even in evangelical and Reformed circles of a pragmatic interest in the methods of ministry that downplays interest in the actual message? Do our pastors coming out of three or four years of seminary education really know the Bible as pastor-scholars ready to proclaim, to teach, and to lead the sheep into the rich pastures of redemption? Or are they becoming specialists in pop culture and demographic marketing? Turning aspiring pastors into connoisseurs of their own consumer profile builds churches with a cultural hegemony (sameness) in spite of sometimes wild diversity in Christian doctrine, worship, and life. By contrast, the gospel creates spiritual unity rather than cultural uniformity. (p. 116)

What a critique!

Of All Nations

For the past few years, I spent time to read, study, and apply discipleship in a local church. Perhaps, I know this topic fairly well now. My interest has been gradually shifted from a local setting to a global setting. In other words, it’s shifted from “make disciples” to “of all nations.” God has been doing surprising work around the globe. How should I respond to God’s work? For the past few months, I’ve started to read books on globalization or global faith. How can I prepare myself to go globally in the future?  I just start to read Timothy Tennent’s Theology in the Context of World Christianity: How the Global Church is Influencing the Way We Think about and Discuss Theology (Zondervan, 2007). There have been many shifts in the “center of gravity” of the world Christian movement. The gospel is for all people and all nations. It’s not owned by any particular group.

An excerpt:

We live at another one of these important transitions in the history of Christianity as we experience the rise of the Majority World church and the signs of the possible, although once unthinkable, demise of Western Christianity. Evidence of this development is seen, for example, when we observe where the majority of Christians are now located around the world. This is often referred to as a shift in the “center of gravity” of the world Christian movement. The statistical center of gravity refers to that point on the globe with an equal number of Christians living north, south, east, and west of that point.

After its birth in Asia, Christianity had its most vigorous growth as it moved steadily westward and northward. As more and more people in the West embraced Christianity, the statistical center of gravity moved north and west. However, beginning in 1900, the statistical center began to shift dramatically southward, and in 1970 it began to move eastward for the first time in 1, 370 years! Today, the statistical center of Christianity is located in Timbuktu! This means that for the first time since the Reformation, the majority of Christians (approximately 67 percent) are now located outside of the Western world.

Some specific examples of how the church is changing will, perhaps, help to illustrate this shift better. At the turn of the twentieth century the Christian church was predominately white and Western. In 1900, there were over 389 million Christians in Europe and less than 10 million on the entire continent of Africa. Today there are over 367 million Christians in Africa, comprising one fifth of the entire Christians church. Throughout the twentieth century a net average gain of 16, 500 people were coming to Christ every day in Africa. From 1970 to 1985, for example, the church in Africa grew by over six million people. During that same time, 4, 300 people per day were leaving the church in Europe and North America.” (pp. 8-9)