Avant-churches don’t spend much time talking about evangelism anymore. Maybe for good reason.
The fifty years following WWII Western evangelicalism produced hordes of evangelism techniques, manuals, tracts, laws, programs, para-church ministries, etc. This was vital to the modern evangelical project. The modern evangelical project took a number of forms stemming from concern over the salvation of the individual, and I would argue the explosion of evangelical fever may have been most driven by the dispensational or at least premillennial notion of “bringing back the King.” The idea behind “bringing back the King” was that Christ would not (or could not) return until everyone had had the opportunity to “receive Christ.” A visible church for every people group, Bible translations for every tongue, a Christian witness to all subcultures became the battle cry of the modern imperialistic evangelical. This is my heritage. And this was, of course, solidly proof-texted.
So are we no longer concerned about evangelism?
What might the surge of avant-church plants signify regarding “evangelism”? Many of these new churches are formed giving unique Christian witness within people groupings, and communities formerly ignored, or at least marginalized by established churches.
I believe that the decrease in “evangelistic talk” may be signaling something very important. We do evangelism because we don’t live well.
Evangelism and evangelists are giftings God seems to give his church, though looking at scripture we see that those gifts are primarily used in an itinerant way. To be a Christ-follower is to live a full life, an abundant life (unpacking “abundant life” is a topic for another day) and ready to give voice to one’s life of hope. But it is the life well lived that was the draw of the early church, not the preaching, preforming or presenting of the gospel.
At the height of the modern project we figured that whittling the Gospel down to the key propositional phrases and then spinning those phrases to the needs of the “unsaved” audience would serve us well in bring back the King. Today Christ-communities are struggling to learn to live well together, to live particularly and to live locally, and to live responsibly in a global context. As mission becomes a worldview and less of a task, the idea of evangelism is being radically re-visioned.
I’m not sure we need to rush back to evangelism anytime soon; let’s live and love. As we journey with God’s Holy Spirit in being guided into fullness evangelism just might take care of itself.
Peace, dwight