Evangelism: What's Messy and Slow and Can't be Measured?

Diana Butler Bass challenged my hospitality thinking with a comment she makes in her book, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. It's a great read...the history of Christianity for those of us who find it challenging to stay engaged in historical conversations. My favorite aspect of the book is she finds the positive contribution of every era in history.

Anyway, she talks about the time of the desert fathers and mothers, people who left the cities, after Christianity had been made law-of-the-land, and went into the wilderness for solitude and reflection...attempting to find and nurture closer and more authentic connection with God. She describes their connection to prayer.

[Jesus invitation to] 'Come follow me' was intimately bound up with the practice of prayer. For prayer connects us with God and others, 'part of this enterprise of learning to love.' Prayer is much more than a technique, and early Christians left us no definitive how-to manual on prayer. Rather, the desert fathers and mothers believed that prayer was a disposition of wholeness, so that 'prayer and our life must be all of a piece.' They approached prayer, as early church scholar Roberta Bondi notes, as a practical twofold process: first, of 'thinking and reflecting,' or 'pondering' what it means to love others; and second, as the 'development and practice of loving ways of being.' In other words, these ancients taught that prayer was participation in God's love, the activity that takes us out of ourselves, away from the familiar, and conforms us to the path of Christ."

Contrast this with the "evangelism" I was taught as a child...and taught to avoid as an adult in the Presbyterian tradition. The first step was judgment...deciding who was or wasn't living as a "Christian." The next step was condemnation. The next, sharing that condemnation of both you and God with the targeted person. Then, sharing a process that required asking for forgiveness and "believing" in Jesus. The end. Mark your Sunday school envelope that you saved someone and look for the next poor schmuck that needs salvation.

I find an invitation to wholeness far more compelling as the invitee and the participant than the responsibility of judgment and condemnation. I also find it interesting to approach prayer as an invitation to think and reflect on what it means to love others, then develop and practice "loving ways of being." (and oh...oh how I wish our politics was founded on this way of being...)

Being loved inspires the best in us. Being judged simply inspires the worst.

So I think there's no "program" or "steps" or "procedure" that works for evangelism. I think its an investment in prayer and trusting God.  But I also know that investing in prayer is not doing nothing. It is, in the words of our desert fathers and mothers, "developing and practicing loving ways of being."

That may be the hardest job we undertake. Developing and practicing loving ways of being requires giving up the understanding that there is one way of being in the world, one way of worshipping, one way of relating. It requires radical acceptance of even the most troubled and difficult. It requires setting aside my preferences and listening to God and to others to discern the road ahead.

It's messy and slow and can't be measured effectively.

Which, ultimately, is God's way, is it not?