Evangelism: The Way Back

In our last post, we talked about how evangelicalism took certain parts of the evangel and crafted it into a persuasive message to stir up renewed enthusiasm for the practice of religion. We then talked about how that message broke the bonds of the traditional contexts in which it lived and became a religious energy that, over time, became increasingly individualistic, then fervently ideological, and finally a tool of polarized political causes. 

American Evangelicalism is an ideology that has become wed to a search for power. Many Christians of good faith have been confronted with this and have been presented with a question of what to do next. Some have been unable to see Christian faith apart from it and have renounced the Faith. Some have doubled-down and sacrificed integrity to uphold the permissibility of this shift. Then there are the rest of us. How do we turn and start walking back to the gospel of Christ and His Kingdom away from this awful parody of it? It helps to know something about where we are going.

Evangelism is always primarily the telling of the things we have experienced. As St. John says in the beginning of his First Epistle, “that, which was from the beginning, which we have seen, which we have heard, which we have tasted concerning the word of life…that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full.” That joy is founded within a person, not a kind of abstracted persona looming in the cosmos, but a person they encountered, with whom they walked and talked and learned, whom they watched die and rise again. 

The testimony of the Apostles to Jesus Christ is the center of the whole witness of the Scriptures, it is the Faith once delivered and the gift we have inherited through conversion and Baptism. But the Bible knows nothing of an evangelism that does not begin with our own account, with how we have met and experienced Christ. There is no such thing as an abstract Christian life–the gospel is always incarnational. It always comes down. It comes down from the lofty world of ethereal ideas, it penetrates through the smog of ideology and worldview, and it becomes a story because it takes place in time and space among people. 

So what does the path from evangelicalism to a proper Christian evangelism look like? In a recent interview with Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper, Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Church in New York candidly remarked that the fervor and energy of evangelicalism needed a church structure to hold it accountable. In essence, what he went on to describe as a need was ‘tradition,’ which we might define as the way of being Church together in a place over time, belonging to no person or generation in particular but welcoming all who come to it as it is. That tradition is presided over by the authority of Scripture as it has been read over the centuries by the Church in her conciliar decrees and as pastorally defended and applied by her Bishops. Only there, I believe, the enthrallment of evangelicalism to individualism can be lifted and replaced by a common life. There, the persuasive fervor of evangelicalism is rescued from the merely political by being directed to look upward beyond the sphere of the earth again. It can once again energize the practice of the ancient faith to welcome others, proclaim the gospel, and immersively order life around Christ. The first step evangelicalism needs to take for its renewal is the step back into the traditional, ecclesial environment in which it can be rehabilitated. 

It would be easy here to say, as a person under tradition, ‘Aha! Of course, tradition is the answer!’ So here’s what I am not saying. By advocating for a return to the evangelism whose proper habitat is the ancient tradition of the Church, I am not advocating for another ideological distortion of the Church’s patrimony called ‘traditionalism.’ I will draw out more this error in a future post, but for now, we might define traditionalism as the tendency to excerpt some thread of the Church’s tradition, her organic life together over the centuries, along with her constancy in common prayer and truthful liturgy–her orthodoxy–and to form an ideology around it by which to presume a power to call out and exclude all those who do not conform to it. Mere traditionalism cannot answer the good and necessary desire at the heart of the evangelical emphasis; it is rather a pendulum swing to a different kind of problem.

Traditionalism doesn’t actually care about tradition–our debt to the generations who’ve gone before us to care for right order in the gathering of the faithful. Traditionalism cares about control and self-preservation and wields its appeal to the past against the rightful call of the Church’s evangelistic spirit to attend to the living concerns of the present and to the willingness to engage in the messy hospitality of welcoming others into our midst. Tradition is thoughtfully engaging the present moment with the wisdom of our spiritual mothers and fathers, of the apostles and of Christ as the Head. Traditionalism is a hobbyist spirituality, it is LARP-ing the 19th, 16th, 4th, or 1st Centuries of Christian worship.

Many of us, in trying to navigate our way back to Christian evangelism, will bounce back and forth between evangelicalism and traditionalism. Both are inadequate hypotheses concerned with preserving an enclosed sense of safety and power. Those fleeing the chaos of a politicized evangelicalism will not find rest for their souls in the rigidity of radically-traditional Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox practices. Nor will those who are fleeing the inertia and inwardness of traditionalist churches find more than a temporary relief in the exuberance and spontaneity of evangelical gatherings. They are both quick fixes, and either will return us to the proclamation of Christ crucified– ever folly in the eyes of the world and its ideologies, but ever the power of God to those who are being saved. In our final post of this quartet, we will turn to the refreshing practice of evangelism after its return to the homely and stabilizing environment of ‘tradition.’ It is from there, I believe, that we will be able to take our first steps forward in a new direction.