Saturday, May 5

Question of the Day

So...I have decided to revive my blogspot and give it a little test run. I'm going to keep my Xanga up and running for now, but we'll see what happens.

I was just having a discussion with my roommates about how we should go about sharing the gospel. I'm a little skeptical of Billy Graham-type crusades where everybody is in an emotional uproar, they go up to the front to get "saved," and then the next day two-thirds of them are back to the same ol' same ol'. But maybe I'm just jaded. My roommates said "Well, if God uses it to save people, then who cares?" That is pretty darn hard to argue with. If I had my way, we would drag everybody to catechism class to be seduced by our sexy Reformed theology, but that isn't exactly practical. So what do you think? Am I being an intellectual snob? Should we suck it up and embrace a pragmatic approach to evangelism?

Here's a quote from The Scandel of the Evangelical Mind that pretty much summarizes my concern:

"The form of revivalism that eventually came to prevail as the dominant mode of evangelical church life was activistic, immediatistic, and individualistic. As such, it was able to mobilize great numbers for the cause of Christ. But also as such-with its scorn for tradition, its concentration on individual competence, its distrust of mediated knowledge-American revivalism did much to hamstring the life of the mind."

2 comments:

bethany said...

I'm really persuaded by the Brian MacLaren etc position of a missional lifestyle. Billy Graham stuff is alright I guess, but real change and real profundity happens through relationships and leading by example.

I also wonder if the saving-souls focus is so neccesary; that maybe evangelism shouldn't be the #1 priority of the church. But that's a different discussion for a different day.

steve d said...

Good stuff.
These days I think the way God is using this thing called evangelism is more through prolonged community exposure and involvement. The Spirit is moving through the whole church to transform the whole person.

The rapid fire messages at crusades, while often packed with Truth, might be a thing of the past. I agree that our focus should be the lifestyle of a church as a body.

But God works when and how God wants to work. We just need to be open to how he wants us to work.