Evangelism is in the news. And, much as previous times (almost always entailing some high profile evangelist falling from grace) it has managed to capture the media’s attention, it is negative. This time it is because of a quote from one of the Southern Baptist Church (SBC) leaders, D. August Boto, that was included in the executive summary of the Guideposts report detailing the SBC Executive Committee’s response to sexual abuse allegations. It reads:
The whole thing [i.e., allegations of sexual abuse being brought against SBC ministers] should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism. It is not the gospel. It is not even a part of the gospel.
This passage, which argued that sexual abuse victims seeking for the church to acknowledge them and address their concerns was antithetical to the gospel, was so striking that mainstream media picked it up. NBC Nightly News, for example, quoted it verbatim in their coverage of the report on Monday 24 May.
It makes sense that evangelism rarely finds its way to being portrayed positively in secular new coverage (and, by using the word secular, I do not mean to denigrate the coverage, but simply to acknowledge that it is not oriented around faith). Those people who have been positively influenced by evangelism are brought into the Christian fold, and so whatever uplifting conversation they might have about it tends to remain within the church. For those who were not moved to become followers of Jesus Christ, evangelism remains a matter of curiosity and bemusement or potentially of harm and trauma, depending on how they were treated by the evangelist.
This is not to say that “evangelism” has not found its way into the secular world in other ways. In a May 2015 Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Art of Evangelism,” Guy Kawasaki described how evangelism had become a powerful concept for corporations. Reflecting on his experience as a corporate evangelist, he wrote:
My job at Apple was to proclaim the good news that Macintosh would make everyone more creative and productive. I wasn’t just marketing a computer; I believed in it so much that I wanted others to experience it too. Now, as the chief evangelist of Canva, my job is to share a platform that democratizes design. Evangelists truly have the best interests of others at heart.
This is a point that evangelism professors in seminaries everywhere (including me) have emphasized over and over. Evangelism should be entirely good. It should be about sharing something that you really believe has made your life better and that you think will bless others. In this sense, whether it is sharing about the latest Mac or about Jesus, the same logic applies.
Except that there is something qualitatively different between sharing about a consumer product and sharing about Jesus. One fits neatly into the existing ethical structures and patterns of your lifestyle. Indeed, it is meant to facilitate you living according to that pattern. The other demands completely restructuring one’s life around him and his teaching, even to the point of dying to the old way of life (Matthew 10:39, 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24, 17:33; John 12:25).
This difference can best be seen in how people respond to evangelists when they are caught in a lie. If Guy Kawasaki had been found out secretly using a PC in his home while working as an evangelist for Apple, most people would likely chuckle and brush it off as simple stupidity. His employer would undoubtedly fire him for his breech of trust, and people would wonder that he would so easily give up such a good job for such a silly thing as wanting to use a PC, but they likely would not think less of him as a person.
There is a difference between being hypocritical about a consumer good and being a hypocrite in one’s character, though. The person who claims a certain level of virtue and then demonstrates that their moral character fails to live up to that claim becomes untrustworthy. This is why each candidate who is running for office has their campaigns work so hard to find examples of the other candidates voting or acting or saying something that is contrary to how they present themselves. If this kind of hypocrisy can be proven and made to stick, it undercuts the confidence that people will place in the other candidates, swinging voters away from them.
As bad is that is, there is another difference between being a hypocrite in one’s personal character and being a hypocrite in character when claiming also to represent a faith. Faith is meant to explain the ultimate logic of how people deal with the world. And, when someone claims to be a representative for a faith, what that person says and does reflects not only on the person’s character, but on the God and all the other people associated with the faith that the person claims to represent. The result of hypocrisy here is to lower the credibility of everyone related by holding to the same faith.
“The same faith” is broad. Most people outside of a specific faith tradition neither know nor care about the fine lines of demarcation within the faith itself. Whether it is an independent evangelical megachurch pastor who cheats on his wife and evades taxes, a Catholic priest who molests a child, or a Southern Baptist denominational leader who covers up rape, all Christians are smeared. And so, evangelism is in the news once again as the act of hypocrites and charlatans who prey on those who are easily manipulated and who do not care for anyone’s souls, including their own.
So, what’s to be done? Of the roughly two billion people who claim to be Christian in the world, there are undoubtedly hundreds of millions who are faithful, actually living in accordance with what they believe. They are not celebrities and are only known to the people in their immediate circles: coworkers, school friends, neighbors, family members. The only hope left for evangelism is in the Holy Spirit’s work through these Christians. The church’s prayer must be that the credibility and witness that they build through how they relate to people in their daily lives will be enough to convince others that the loud proclamations about evangelism and terrible hypocrisy emanating from Christian institutions are not emblematic of Jesus or those who follow him.
It is no accident that St. Paul linked his admonition about how to be a faithful witness for Jesus with instructions on living a sexually pure life in 1 Thessalonians 4:3-12:
3 It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; 4 that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, 5 not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God; 6 and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister. The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before. 7 For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.8 Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit. 9 Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. 10 And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, 11 and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
In effect, Paul’s claim was this: evangelism should never be in the news, not only because it avoids the kind of scandal that his brought attention to it in recent years, but because it is never supposed to draw attention to itself. Evangelism, when practiced rightly, is not a discrete activity that is forced over top of normal human interaction. Rather, it is a life that is lived well, that stays faithful to the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus, and that treats others with respect. This kind of life does not make the news, but it is the foundation for others to consider whether there really is good news that is worth believing.