Barry’s post today on evangelism got me thinking. Evangelism has gotten a bad rap with a lot of people thanks to the high-pressure approach of a few—the sort of folks who grab random strangers, stick a half-dozen Scripture verses in their ear, badger them into saying a certain prayer, stuff a tract in their pocket, and walk off confident they’ve “saved another soul.” I’m sure God can use that; after all, God used Jacob, he used Jonah, he used Peter—who am I to say God can’t use anybody or anything. But what we tend to forget is that in Acts 1, Jesus didn’t say, “You will do witnessing,” he said, “You will be my witnesses.” Our call as Christians isn’t to “save souls” in that sense, but to share the life Jesus has given us with the people around us; and we aren’t called to witness to Jesus just by memorizing some spiel, we’re called to be his witnesses by the way we live our lives. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”
Now, the downside at this point is that we often don’t hear this correctly; we have the tendency to mentally translate this into “I don’t have to tell people about Jesus, I just have to go out and live my life and that’s good enough.” Well, yes and no, sort of. Go back to that quote from St. Francis and think about this for a minute: “Preach the gospel at all times.” That’s the standard: our lives are to be sermons on the word of God, backed up by our words. Our call as disciples of Christ is to go out into the world and live in it as he did—talking with others about our Father in heaven, and just as importantly, showing his love to those around us in every way we can think of. We are called to do the work he did: to feed the hungry; to care for the sick; to welcome the outsider; to defend the oppressed; to lift up the downtrodden; to love the unlovable; to break down the barriers between race and class and gender; and to speak the truth so clearly and unflinchingly, when the opportunity arises, that people want to kill us for it.
Hear, hear! It’s interesting that you tagged this post with the title “orthopraxy”. That’s something that’s too often ignored in the church in favour of orthodoxy. The two should go together.
Indeed. Unfortunately, those who emphasize orthopraxy too often tend to overcorrect by devaluing orthodoxy. (Which in turn tends to cause the “ortho” to drop off the “praxy” . . . but that’s another post altogether.) The end goal is to be so close to Christ and know him so well that it’s hard to tell us apart . . . but it’s easy to forget that.
As an explanatory comment, I got to thinking today about discipleship, and I decided to replace the label “orthopraxy” with the word “discipleship,” for two reasons. First, I think they mean the same thing, except that if anything, “discipleship” means more; and second, “discipleship” is a biblical word, and I think we should always favor biblical words over our own coinages when they serve the same purpose.