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Mission is Evangelism, Evangelism is Mission and Both Are Church.
By Riviera UCC | March 15, 2009
a sermon based on Mark 16:14-20
given at Palm Bay, FL on March 15, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Today I’m going to be talking about “Mission” and “Evangelism” a couple of words we hear in reference to church and Christianity that can kind of make us uncomfortable; and so shy away from discussing.
Mission is often heard as how Christians recruit others in foreign lands, often by imposing our own foreign ways on them. Evangelism is often heard as how Christians impose our views on others we know or meet on the street. Being in another’s face about our religion. This is rather unfortunate. We do not have to view Christian mission and evangelism as something we inflict on others. We certainly want to share Christianity, but we don’t want to force it on anyone. We see God as love and our goals as love oriented and, well, the Love we know is not one of imposition and coercion.
Despite the often negative perception of “mission” and “evangelism,” they are actually words that can fairly be understood to have meanings we as God-is-love people can fully embrace. Mission is not actually supposed to be about imposing on others in strange lands. Mission is what God calls us to as church and as individual Christians, to bear good news. It is “more than and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God” 1 In today’s reading Jesus tells his disciples to “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”
Mission is about proclaiming love through our words and deeds– anywhere and everywhere. And we do this in partnership with God, 2 and in so doing we hope to affect “human transformation.” 3
In a nutshell mission’s “purpose is to change lives”4 for good and through God. In this partnership with God we are called to be the agents of God on earth. Scripture sums it up pretty well at Leviticus 19:2 which reads “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am Holy.” 5
Bishop Desmond Tutu has this great way of looking at it. He suggests this particular directive means [w]e are exhorted to work for a just order where all of God’s children will live full lives characterized by shalom. Concern for justice, righteousness, and equity is not fundamentally a political concern. It is a deeply religious concern. Not to work for justice, peace and harmony against injustice, oppression and exploitation is religious disobedience, even apostasy.6
St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century put it like this: Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.
You see mission includes “a delicate network of cooperation and interdependence” where we work for social change and act as God did with the Hebrews in Egypt, exodus-wise, by striving to deliver the oppressed and the poor from suffering. 7
And Christians are to act as Jesus did siding with the oppressed, advocating for love of all and acting with love for all.
And mission is more than working to deliver the oppressed and poor from suffering. Popular church theologian, Anthony Robinson, accurately notes that churches are seeing more and more that “everything the church does is, in some sense, mission.” 8
It stands to reason that if everything a church does is mission, then all of church is mission.
In other words, all we do as church should be “alerting people to the universal reign of God” 9 This, of course, is an ideal, as frankly some of what happens in church fails to alert folks to God’s reign, that is our human pettiness, prejudices and other foibles can and do fall short of any sort of good news, let alone the Reign of God.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the fundamental function of the church, it’s Body of Christ-ness, is missio dei, 10 that is, the mission of God. Church is supposed to always be doing God’s work.
Simply put, all we do as church is supposed to be Divine mission. “The Bible clearly commands world mission” for the church.11 As another theologian, David Bosch, beautifully puts it “[m]ission is the church sent into the world, to love, to preach, to teach, to heal, to liberate.” 12
Now historically mission work has been thought of as occurring in other countries.
In fact “[s]o closely identified were Western culture and the Christian faith that the tendency to think of the mission field as ‘over there’, ‘overseas’ – focused on non-Western and ‘foreign’ peoples and lands.” 13
While there has been a lot of church related aid provided on American soil, this aid for the most part was not considered mission work.
Consequently church-goers in America usually do not consider themselves missionaries, that term has instead traditionally been reserved for those who went abroad working with “others.” Mission has until recently been at best a line-item on churches’ budgets.14 This is changing.
As we begin to acknowledge that mission work includes tending to God’s Reign on the home front, our partnership with God must know no political boundaries, so that we work to deliver the oppressed and poor from suffering in our community and neighborhoods, as well as overseas.
Our work right here in Palm Bay is to proclaim God’s Reign with our words and deeds!
One of my favorite theologians, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, argues “ that God is calling us to a new and more intense form of mission activity in the world today – not to convert the world to our own religion, but to convert the world toward friendship.”15
Suchocki hears this call beginning at the local faith community’s level where “[b]ecoming friends means to share a meal together.” She suggests differing faiths in town invite one another to each other’s place of worship for meals and then during those meals become acquainted as neighbors ought to. 16 There is a fine example of this in the bible: Jesus’ open table. Jesus shared meals with everyone, absolutely everyone, at a time when tables were often closed. 17. Jesus’ meal mission brought together neighbors and enemies toa feast centered in Love.
Suchocki is on to something. Our churches could take a cue from Jesus and eat with other faiths and denominations together in peace. Maybe one of our first meals with our new kitchen ought to be with Mateh Chaim and Renewed Hope Church, the two faith communities that share our space with us. One is a Jewish synagogue, the other a new African American church. How great it would be for all of us to break bread together!
And a shared meal is only one of the many, many facets of church mission we can explore in order to “alert people to the universal reign of God.” Such an alert includes any Love-filled proclamation by word or deed of God’s Reign.
Jesus sets up the standard for us in the Gospels where he repeatedly instructs his followers that it is through the deed of loving your neighbor that God’s saving Reign breaks in.
Jesus clearly taught that those who take care of the poor and imprisoned will come into the Reign of God; and illustrated in the “Good Samaritan” that an exemplary neighbor takes care of those who are injured (even the enemy) – and Jesus tells us to “Go and do likewise.”
Mission, then, is not limited to verbal instruction about Jesus Christ. Nor is it limited to going out to “others” in foreign lands. Mission is much more than verbal proclamation far away. It is everything a church does, from tending to the oppressed and poor, to worship service, to community relations, to pastoral care.
Mission is a call by God to be God’s partner in creation, everywhere: abroad, within the walls of the church, in our own backyard and down the block. We are, all of us, meant to be doing mission in all we do as church.
And as I mentioned it is not just mission that we need to rethink, the meaning of evangelism can be heard differently too.
According to The Westminister” Dictionary of Theological Terms “evangelism” is “[t]he sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ through a variety of means.” 18 This definition is broad enough to cover all of mission, that is evangelism should also be mixed in with all our church does.
Anthony Robinson, sees evangelism as sharing the gospel through a variety of means. 19 It’s “sharing the good news of the gospel, the good news about God and what God has done and is doing in Christ.” 20 This good news, Robinson asserts, can be shared by people, by ministries, and by the congregation’s embodiment of that good news.21
Robinson seems to say in effect that all of a church’s activity (including all that I just described as mission) can “be [Jesus’] witnesses to the ends of the earth.”22 This not only comports with the definition in Westminister’s Dictionary, but it also finds support in Christian tradition:“The evangelistic activity of the early Christians . . . was not limited to preaching, for it informed and involved everything the church was called to be and do in its worship, fellowship and service.”23
Such a reading finds support with Walter Brueggemann’s claim that “evangelism . . . in large part consists of attending to and participating in the transformational drama that is enacted in the biblical text itself.” 24
For Brueggemann this drama is about evangelism as a process of victory by God over evil, proclamation of that victory by word or deed 25 and an appropriation of the story by the one(s) experiencing the proclamation. 26 In other words, the “come and see” and witness-to-the ends-of-the-earth commandment in the Gospels are not limited to vocal proclamations, but encompass all acts of mission– all the church does which proclaims the Reign of God.
Evangelism can be understood, then, like mission, to include all the church. We are to share the good news . . . or at least we ought to. Evangelism is, then, exactly like mission.
This way of understanding evangelism begins with Jesus whose life exemplifies what we as the church, as the continuing embodiment of the Body of Christ, should do.
Jesus did not just bring the gospel through preaching, he also brought it through personal acts of healing, compassion, gathering and praying. And it is no small matter that he emphasized that our conduct along each of these lines can also bring about the Reign of God (e.g., Luke 10:25-28, 29-37; Matt 25:31-46).
Paul’s letters point to a similar view of the proclamation of the gospel. In Romans Paul writes of being a “minister of Christ Jesus in the priestly service of the gospel” and he notes that his service, his “work for God,” in winning over Gentiles included Christ’s accomplishments not just through his preaching, but “by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God . . .”(Rom 15:16-19).
Similarly in Philippians, Paul notes that happenings, not just preaching, served to proclaim the good news: “I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has actually spread the gospel” (Phil 1: 12).
And, finally, in 1 Thessalonians Paul affirms that the gospel came to the Thessalonian church, “not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you” (1 Thess 1:5); and Paul specifically notes that the Thessalonian church’s acts its welcoming, and its turning to and serving God, and its imitating Paul and Jesus, all proclaimed the gospel to others. Accordingly Paul wrote: “the word of the Lord sounded forth from you” (Ibid., 6-10).
So when all is said and done the word mission can be understood as “alerting people to the universal reign of God; “and the word “evangelism” can be understood as “[t]he sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ through a variety of means.”
The difference between the two seems to be that mission shares news about the reign of God, while evangelism shares the good news about Jesus Christ.
But isn’t this really a difference without distinction since for us sharing the good news about Jesus Christ alerts us to the universal Reign of God and alerting people to the universal reign of God is about sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ? 27.
Mission and evangelism seem to be merely different ways of speaking about the same thing.
Call it mission, or call it evangelism, both mean our verbal or non-verbal acts of Love as a church and the message those acts convey to the world. This is true whether we’re tending to the broken-ness of the world, worshiping God or otherwise acting in community.
Such acts of Love always, always share the gospel and alert people to the Reign of God. And we as church are to do both in all we do.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
1.Bosch, David, Believing in the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, (1995), 33.
2. D. Tutu, “The Role of the People of God in Divine Enterprise,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research,1991, 33; see also, M. T. Thangaraj, The Common Task, Nashville: Abingdon Press, (1999), 65.
3. Robinson, Anthony, Transforming Congregational Culture, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, (2003), 33.
4. Ibid.
5. The quote is from Lev 19:2; but I got the idea from Bishop Tutu’s article.
6. Tutu, 33.
7. Ibid., 33-34.
8. Robinson, 74.
9. Bosch, Believing in the Future, 33.
10. Bosch David, Transforming Mission, New York: Orbis Books, (2005), 493.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. Ibid., 412.
13. Robinson, Transforming Congregational Culture, 73
14. Ibid., 74.
15.
Marjorie Hewitt. Suchocki, Divinity & Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism. Nashville,Abingdon Press, (2003), 109.
16. Suchocki, 114.
17. A nice summary of Jesus’ meal ministries can be found in H. Anderson and E. Foley, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1998), 154-156.
18. McKim, Donald, Westminister Dictionary of Theological Terms, Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press,(1996), 96.
19. Westminister” Dictionary of Theological Terms, 96.
20. Robinson, 120.
21. Ibid.
22. Acts 1:8.
23
The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Philadelphia: The Westminister Press (1983), 192..
24. Brueggemann, Walter, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism, Nashville: Abingdon Press (1993), 8.
25. See, Ibid,87-88, but see, 14.
26. Ibid., 129.
27. E.g., Patterson, Stephen, The God of Jesus, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, (1998), 93. “Jesus spoke of the Empire of God as here, now, arriving, already breaking in”
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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