February 04, 2007

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Need-oriented Evangelism

Isaiah 6:1-13; Luke 5:1-11

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

 

“A family in my church lives so far away, I was curious about what brings them,” said a preacher friend recently.  “So I went to them and asked what’s going on.  My friend had said to these new members I know you drive 45 minutes to come to our church, and believe me, I’m glad that you do.  But I’m puzzled.  You pass by several other churches, some with respectable programs, on your way.  You make the trips not just on Sunday, but you bring your children to our weekly programs.  So tell me, why?  What makes our church so special?  Why do you go out of your way to be with us?”

 

The new family admitted that they had a bit of a commute, but they commuted even further to work.  They acknowledged that they passed other good churches on their way to their new spiritual home.  What made the difference, they said, was that in the past year, when the husband had been in the hospital for a few weeks, several members of my friend’s church had come to see them.  Others had brought meals, without once being asked.  Even though they were not yet members, just occasional visitors, people in the church had reached out to them in their distress.

 

This expression of caring when they were in need made all the difference.  The people of the church had rallied round, responding to their need with love and concern. “It didn’t seem too difficult for members of the church to drive up here to help us,” they said.  “So now it doesn’t seem too hard for us to drive down there for worship.” 

 

Maybe they didn’t talk about it theologically, but my friend’s church members were evangelists.  Without once being asked, they used their gifts of kindness and compassion.  They visited. They listened.  They cared.  They cooked.  They baked.  One of the ones who organized the meals for the new family had, herself, had a crisis in her own family a few months before.  She understood the need for tangible expressions of love and concern.  Walking up the steps and into the kitchen of this new family, my friend’s church members modeled the very best kind of evangelism.  After all, sharing a pie may be just the way God invites us to share our faith with one another.  Using their best gifts, these folks reached out to a neighbor in need.  We might call such behavior “sharing the love of Christ.”  Theologically, it amounts to evangelism:  bringing good news to a difficult situation.

 

But such talk is hard because we resist calling ourselves evangelists.  This resistance originates, at least in part, in discomfort with the word, “Evangelism.”  For some of us, “evangelism” conjures visions of a fiery preacher holding a Bible in one hand. 

 

But there is another side to our resistance:  the distance we perceive between our world and God’s world.  Whether we imagine God’s world as a far-away heaven or the dusty streets of Israel where Jesus walked, we don’t much see ourselves in that world of the Bible.

 

But the world of the Bible is our world.  Or it can be so, if we let it be so.  “In the year that King Uzziah died,” begins the lesson from Isaiah today.  Not knowing King Uzziah, already we feel a distance, but the words of the lesson evoke the mood as well as the date.  It’s a time of transition; it is an unsettled time.  Some of us might use a similar phrase to evoke the memory of such an era in our own lives:  “In the year that Dr. King was shot in Memphis.”  We could as easily say “1968,” but calling up the event evokes feelings of the time itself, even while naming the year.

 

Think about just one of the unnamed women in my friend’s story, the one I referred to as an ‘evangelist’ in that congregation.  Telling the story of taking the meal to her neighbor, she might have said, “About six months after my husband’s heart attack, I heard about this family in a similar fix.  Knowing the situation myself, I didn’t wait to be asked.  I just made a roast, a bit of rice, and took a cake out of the freezer, and I went.” 

 

In a time of transition, Isaiah the prophet remembered God’s call to him as a voice:  “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’  And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’”  In a time of transition, God’s voice can be heard in one’s feelings of compassion, the sense of shared pain:  “Something had to be done.  I knew that.  So I did what felt right, what I knew how to do.”  Both prophets and loving neighbors, it seems, can hear and carry the word of God.  Perhaps there is not such a distance between our world and the world of the Bible after all.

 

Years ago, in my final year of seminary, I took a course because it had an intriguing title:  “Ministry in a time of crisis.”  Crisis?  The whole world seemed in crisis.  It was 1974.  Our university’s chaplain had been arrested for counseling draft resistance; the Berrigans were on the run; a president had resigned in disgrace.  The streets of Newark and Los Angeles had recently been aflame.  Crisis?  Our whole world was in crisis.  The course title fit the mood of the times. 

 

But the seminary course had little to do with these events.  It was, rather, a course in pastoral care involving several hours of supervised ministry as a chaplain at the Yale-New Haven hospital.  Personal illnesses of any kind, the instructor explained, constitutes for the patient, a personal crisis.  He further noted that it is just at such times that people most need the gospel and are most receptive to expressions of the love of God.  Appropriate pastoral care at such times is not manipulative, but it is important.  Oddly, it is a kind of evangelism, a sharing of the good news of Christ with a person most ready to hear such news.

 

Years later I heard about how the television evangelist and pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, relates the reason for his church’s phenomenal growth.  In addition to hard work and clever marketing, Schuller’s own pastoral passion shaped this ministry:  he attended to the needs of the people in his area.  Or, as he put it in his own motto of ministry:  “Find a need and fill it; find a hurt and heal it.”  I might disagree with several elements of Dr. Schuller’s theology.  I might dispute his taste in church architecture or worship.  But I find resonance in my own life in his motto.  Being the church means share the best of God’s love out of our own sense of compassion:  “finding hurt, and healing it.

 

Simply put, I believe that evangelism with integrity is evangelism of compassion.  I believe that we are all called to share our faith, not with artificial words shaped by someone else’s “laws” of faith, but with the integrity of our own experience of both the pain of living and the joy of God’s love in every moment of life.  After all, Jesus himself knew the passion of the cross that no one might ever claim that he knew nothing of the pain of life.  No person can ever doubt that such a savior can understand her own situation.  No one.

 

The research that led to the launch of the Natural Church Development process identified eight quality characteristics of growing, dynamic churches.  Regardless of pastoral leadership, regardless of theology, regardless of locale, growing churches exhibited a passion for Need-oriented Evangelism.  Such evangelism is not based on clever slogans or simple tracts or relevant video messages.  The phrase, “Need-oriented Evangelism” describes evangelism that has at its heart a love for the people we already know, people whose lives ache for the truth of Christ and the good news of Christ’s abundant love – news that has already touched our own hearts.  In such a church, sharing the gospel is simple:  every member uses his or her own gifts, from his or her own experience “to serve non-Christians with whom one has a personal relationship, to see that they hear [about the love of Christ], and to encourage contact with the local church.”  (Christian A. Schwarz, Natural Church Development:  A Guide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches, page 37.)

 

God comes to us in our lives through the intersection of our needs with the gifts of others.  Most of us are here, if we think about it, because we’ve been touched by the love of Christ.  That’s all evangelism is:  letting our own lives touch others whom we already know.  We’re called to love others in the name of Christ.

 

Isaiah said, “Here I am, send me.”  God used him to bring challenge and comfort to a nation.  Martin Luther King, before he died in 1968, certainly must have said, “I’m here, Lord.  Send me.  Help me love the people of this country.”  His love made a difference.  You’ve known pastors and friends who have also responded to such a call.

 

God asks you and me to pay attention to those around us, open to seeing the needs of a hurting world in the lives of those we already know.  We’re asked to do what we naturally do:  sing (some of us), bake (others of us), listen, drive someone to the doctor’s office.  Along the way, if someone asks “Why?” simply say, because God loves me, and God loves you, too.

 

Amen.