Relevance or Faithfulness?, 3

The question is what to do with issues of faithfulness or relevance when neither of the models present has a complete picture. Let me make it clear -- we can be faithful and passionate about communicating the truth to people of our day!

My help in this was that I was trained as a missionary (though we never served in this capacity full time). Our early adulthood included a sense of call to take the Gospel to Muslims – and with that call came the pursuit of the best training possible. It was during that training that I discovered an important truth – repeating biblical words is not communication. To take the Gospel to Muslims required a lot of reflection on how to state the Gospel in a way they could understand. I also spoke with people who served among Hindu’s and Buddhists – in those situations the complexity was multiplied.

But this much I saw – missionaries who were thoroughly committed to be faithful to the truth of the Gospel were also so passionate about evangelism that they practiced an endless pursuit of improved ideas and concepts and illustrations for the Gospel. They looked for redemptive analogies everywhere. And they kept looking. 

Their effectiveness seemed tied to their ability to do so. It was becoming harder to pass this all off on the inscrutable sovereignty of God. Granted, there is a matter of anointing – and there are places in the world where it is very HARD – but even Spurgeon said we should not be content with few conversions and we should not be so quick to blame God for it.

My Reformed friends and I were always suspicious of anything that may look Arminian – and the idea that the effectiveness of the preaching of the Gospel was tied to cultural contextualization or method seemed to us to be Arminian. I remember hearing Dr E V Hill speak in seminary about their summer ministry in South Central Los Angeles (a very tough place). He called it “Operation Everything” and said tthat hey take the summer to do everything they can to explain the Gospel to everyone they can so they can see as much fruit as they can. My Reformed friends and I went mental on this – “God will bear fruit no matter how many our efforts!!” “Does he really think that the elect may be missed if he is less diligent?” BLAH BLAH BLAH.

We entirely missed the point that our doctrinally faithful churches every summer did “Operation Next-to-Nothing” which usually consisted of a few vacation Bible Schools co-opted by the church kids who lived in the neighborhood. Hill saw hundreds of conversions – we church saw a few – and we insisted it was all because of the sovereignty of God and our commitment to the truth.

By the time I was forty it was very clear that the American churches were pretty much ineffective in evangelism – that our churches grew by transfers – and that portion of our culture that had NO church background was growing and remained essentially unreached.

Was their no such thing as passionate evangelistic effort combined with theological faithfulness? I was once told Spurgeon said he was so passionate for the Gospel that if the elect had yellow stripes painted on their backs, he would go around pulling their shirt-tails to find them.

My wife and I (our story is elsewhere on this BLOG began to make very feeble efforts to know unchurched people -- and we began to hear questions and issues in the hearts of people we loved -- and we wanted to answer those questions.  I began to think about how a typical Sunday service would seem to a total outsider -- including my preaching.

But the debate raged on – there were people entirely focused on being relevant and people entirely focused on being faithful – both had fallen off the horse – and both were shooting at the other for their wrong choices. Not a very pleasant sight at all – lots of shooting and no one was riding the horse – or at least very few.

Comments

[DanD]

Becoming a missionary seems to have been the crucial part. Practice of communication really was practice of relationships in a whole manner, i.e. more than mere theorem but truth that makes a real difference where the person lives, at that time.

It strikes me that the phrasing of the issue as a continuim between truth and mercy or faithfulness and relevance is at its root missing something. Both realities are important. The big challenge is of course that we humans are trying to hold together something that in reality only God holds perfectly. Hence the need for the gospel for ourselves as servants of others. We can't understand it let alone do it on our own. Add in the complexities of individuals within systems and our minds almost burst with trying to get it.

None of that is to say the task isn't called for. But it can't be mental games. It has to be lived out in the reality of serving God and loving people. That too makes us utterly dependent on the gospel.

What a great story of God's work in your life. My prayer is that God gets us off dead center.

grace