- You can call evangelism and compassionate ministry hard work or you can acknowledge that it’s the only way a church can fulfill the Great Commission.
I’ve been in Boston this week attending the Evangelical Theological Society annual meeting, where professors and pastors gather to deliver high-falutin’ papers on topics that would numb the average brain.
Which is to say, they numb mine.
Still, I came to Boston scheduled to deliver one of those papers. Meanwhile, while awaiting my turn at the appointed hour I slipped in and out of the lecture halls in search of a scholar whose presentation might keep me awake.
In the back of one of those rooms, I introduced myself to a former professor/now pastor and we chatted for a while. Upon finding out that I teach evangelism, he posed a question: “I am new to my community as a pastor. What should I do to win people to Jesus in my town?”
Well, I teach whole courses on this question, so it was a bit hard to pare my answer down to thirty seconds, but I gave it a shot. “I think I would land down and start pastoring, but in the first several weeks schedule coffee with the police chief, the sheriff, the superintendent of schools, the principals of those schools, and some teachers to find out where there is ‘pain’ in your community. Then, lead your church to run to the sound of that pain.”
“Oh, my,” he said. “That sounds like a lot of work.” Someone interrupted us and I didn’t have time to tell him the other eighteen points of the plan.
As I walked away, I agreed that even those two steps was, indeed, a lot of work. But you can’t win the world for Christ by staying in your office and just working on your sermon, the bulletin and the website. “But,” he sputtered, “I like staying in my office.”
It bothered me that he didn’t even crack a smile as he made that comment. I have hardly thought about anything else since.
Being salt and light in our communities and winning the souls of humankind to the Lord is work. But I have found the opposite to be a heavier burden in light of eternity – staying in my office and hoping something will happen without Christlike effort. As I read my Bible that is a lot more of a hardship than running to the sound of the pain.
You can call evangelism and compassionate ministry hard work or you can acknowledge that it’s the only way a church can fulfill the Great Commission – the “one job” Jesus has given His followers.
“Imagine for a moment,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard in a journal entry, “that geese could talk – that they had so arranged things that they too had their divine worship and their church-going.” Kierkegaard then penned a tale about how the geese would gather every Sunday to hear the lead gander preach. The weekly sermons were strikingly similar; each one described the destiny of geese: that is, flight. The geese could spread their wings and escape to distant places where they truly belonged, rather than being hemmed in by fences and boundaries.
Every Sunday these geese responded enthusiastically to the message. Then…they waddled home. And, says Kierkegaard, they “throve and grew fat, plump and delicious” and were very much appreciated by the humans in the land because then they were butchered and eaten. The gander’s message was inspirational, but since the geese never acted on what they affirmed, it became their demise.
Kierkegaard was poking fun at his church, as he most assuredly would at contemporary evangelicalism to the extent that it espouses beliefs but doesn’t embody them and shuns the hard work – or the flapping of its “wings” – necessary to be true to God’s calling.
E. Stanley Jones envisioned going to heaven one day and doing what we all imagine– worshipping the Lord and greeting our family and friends. But after that, he said, he wanted to approach His Lord and ask if there is a world out there that hadn’t yet heard of Him. If there was, he wanted a new assignment, for “heaven for me is telling people about You.”
A very nice heaven, indeed.
