What is Evangelism? — Quotes from the National Evangelism Presbymergent Party Friday Night
“Hey its Jessie. I am here at the Presbymergent party in Nashville TN. We are hanging out together at the Opryland Resort at the first night of the Presbyterian Evangelism Conference. So I think we will all be learning a lot more about what evangelism is. I think the best definitions are usually simple ones.
In my view, the best example of evangelism is the woman at the well, a Samaritan who no one else in the inner religious circle would have given the time of day. After time with Jesus, she ran to her people and brought them back to see her savior. She wanted them to “come and see”. And they did. It worked.”
“Evangelism is what Jesus did. ‘nuf said.” -Shawn
Evangelism is someone out of the shower telling someone else where the soap is. punslinger
Evangelism is the greatest news… I come from a multicultural church, so my question for my new friends at Presbymergent is, why does our party room look so uni-cultural? =Pastor Susan St. Louis
Sharing the outrageous grace that has been offered to you in Christ - Chris, EvangelismCoach.org
I’ve been in conversation with a bunch of folks this summer, and we keep coming around to “we’ve got to tell the story!” - “No, no, we’ve got to witness by our actions!” - and I’ve finally decided we are all wrong, and all correct. We have to do both and we have to love doing both (at least as the body) or we haven’t really heard what Christ is calling us to. ~ Randi, rhenderson@pts.edu
Comment by lagibby on 1 September 2007:
Just before we went to the party mentioned above, we heard Jim Wallis speak. Here’s my account:
Jim Wallis is predicting the decline of the religious right. “Lets not worry about them anymore,” Wallis told a group of nearly 500 Presbyterians in Nashville Friday night. (August 31).
“Our faith can be a catalyst for a new movement,” Wallis told the clergy and lay leaders who were in Nashville for the first national conference on evangelism that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has held in more than a decade. He called for American Christians of all denominations to join a “Justice Revival,” focusing on the teachings of Jesus. Such a revivial movement would focus on national social and political issues, but would go far beyond politics.
“People acting out of faith can do more powerful things” than people activated by hate or greed, he said. Wallis envisions a tour of cities that would combine powerful evangelism preaching at night with protest marches in the daytime – a combination of Billy Graham and Martin Luther King.
“We need a new spiritual movement for social justice,” Wallis said. After such revival events, small groups of enthusiastic Christians would need to follow up the preaching and marching with disciple-making – calling people not just to believe the tenets of Christianity, but to act on Jesus’ call to feed the hungry, shelter the poor, visit the prisoner and to “let justice roll down like water.”
Wallis, president and executive director of Sojourners/Call to Renewal and author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, is a frequent guest on TV talk shows as an alternative voice to Christian Right leaders such as the late Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.
After Wallis appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he said the Sojourner organization got e-mails from people saying they had lost their faith because of money-hungery TV preachers who distort the gospel, clumsy evangelism phone solicitations and pedophile priests. The e-mails went on to say that the writer “didn’t know you could be a Christian and care about poverty.”
Wallis sees “much confusion about what we mean by the gospel message.” He says America has “had some bad religion under the name of evangelism – bad religion pulls out the worst in us. Good religion can pull out the best in us – a love for justice and a pursuit of peace.”
Wallis, who calls himself a progressive evangelical, said Christians “have lost battles in Congress [over the issue of immigration] that were more than justice issues. It’s a matter of welcoming the stranger, and also a deeper opportunity” for American churches to be transformed by immigrants who often have “a deeply personal faith.”
Wallis noted that Congress recently passed a farm bill that continues subsidies to wealthy American farmers – subsidies that ultimately threaten the survival of subsistence farmers in Africa and other areas of the global South.
The liberal Presbyterian denomination has taken “the right positions” on social justice issues for years, he said.
But members of Congress don’t pay attention to position papers. They have their fingers in the air, looking for the way the wind of public opinion blows, he said.
“If we’re going to change this country, we have to change the wind. Having the right position doesn’t change anything until you change the wind.” He called for a “prairie fire” of activism that “would make it impossible for congressional representatives to vote the wrong way.”
Virginia Gilbert St. Louis
Comment by Markus Watson on 3 September 2007:
I think evangelism means to both demonstrate and announce, do and say. When Jesus sent out the 72 (Luke 10), he told them, “Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.” In other words, care for people’s physical needs and then tell them the good news of God’s coming in Jesus.
Comment by Mark on 5 September 2007:
Virginia,
I imagine there are others like me who would like to have gone to the Evangelism Conference, but could not. Thank you for your summary of Jim Wallis’ talk. I hear the gospel in it and pray that the spirit of what he said will take hold and take shape in our congregations.
The PCUSA, like many other denominations, seems deadlocked in doctrinal debates to the point that we’ve lost sight of Jesus’ teachings. All the words spoken and approved on the floor of GA and the presbyteries mean little unless they first flow forth from active discipleship at the congregational level.
Yours in Christ,
Mark
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