This is the next instalment of the serialisation of my book – The Teeth of our Exertions – full details of which can be found here.
As we have just seen, few Bible-believing Christians would argue with the view that deprived communities need the gospel. The very nature of Evangelicalism makes it obvious. David Bebbington notes:
There are four qualities that have been the special marks of Evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.[1]
As an essential definition of Evangelicalism, nothing has supplanted Bebbington’s famous quadrilateral. What this tells us is that Evangelicals are people wedded to the importance of conversion, expressed in evangelistic effort, based on scripture with a focus on the cross. As Derek Tidball notes, ‘Evangelicals are gospel people. Evangelicalism is the movement associated with the gospel’.[2]
Evangelicals then, perhaps more than most, are familiar with Jesus’ Great Commission to ‘Go… and make disciples of all nations’ (Matt 28:19) or ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation’ (Mark 16:15). All of us accept that deprived communities are included under the banner of ‘all nations’ and ‘the whole creation’.
Further, Paul’s view of evangelism in Romans 10:14 is clear enough: ‘How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?’ Taken together, the Biblical call is for us to go and share the gospel with all people on the understanding that if we don’t, those we have neglected will not, and cannot, be saved. This is a central tenet of Evangelicalism.
Yes… but not me
But, of course, these verses relate to evangelism in general. Whilst the Bible is clear about the need to take the gospel to all people, the first line of defence when pressed on a specific evangelistic need we are not meeting personally is the ‘overseas missionary’ defence. The argument runs like this:
- The Great Commission calls us to take the gospel to all people;
- If we were all overseas missionaries, the gospel would not be heard in our own nation;
- Therefore, we are not all called be overseas missionaries.
That logic is essentially sound. We are not all called to overseas mission and a view that we are would leave our own nation unreached. However, if we concede the logic, it can then be applied to any need that we are not meeting. I am not involved in overseas mission because we are not all called to be overseas missionaries. By the same token, I am not involved in taking the gospel to deprived communities because we are not all called to mission in deprived communities. Those that make the argument will still affirm the need for someone to go overseas, or for someone to reach the deprived community, but they are also sure that someone ought not to be them. They are, after all, involved in evangelism in their own community.
Where the argument fails is that it assumes that we have no duty to go out of our way to make Christ known where he currently isn’t. It may be true that we aren’t all called to overseas mission, but that doesn’t mean we should all work to reach one small group of people. The argument cuts back. If we all took the ‘we’re not called to…’ argument, it would soon become the case that we would find ourselves called to the easiest and most comfortable forms of mission available. We may not all be called to deprived communities, but the church at large most certainly is and, at the moment, we are failing to reach them.
We can see this phenomenon in our churches. I remember encouraging people into evangelism in one church and, to help, decided to give them various outlets as to how they might do this. I made it quite clear I didn’t mind what they did, so long as they involved themselves in some form of evangelism. It won’t surprise you that most people opted for the softest, easiest and lowest intensity option available. That is not to denigrate the work they opted to do, it is to say that if we have an easier option available to us that allows us to feel as though we are fulfilling our obligations, with few exceptions, we will take it. Of course, in so doing, there are swathes of others not hearing the gospel because we have chosen to content ourselves with the view that we’re not called to it and we’re fulfilling our calling by doing the same comfortable thing all our friends are doing. It is worth noting that had the apostles taken such a view, the gospel would never have left Jerusalem.
[1] Bebbington, D.W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, Routledge, (Abingdon, UK 2002), pp.2-3
[2] Tidball, D.J., Who are the Evangelicals? Tracing the roots of today’s movement, HarperCollins, (London, UK 1994), p.11