With Nine Years Left, Where Will the Decade of Evangelism Lead the Episcopal Church?
Episcopal News Service. May 14, 1991 [91125]
Jan Nunley
Wherever you find two Episcopalians, you can still find at least three opinions on what evangelism is and how the church ought to go about it.
For Episcopalians in a pluralistic society, evangelism can be a sticky subject. In its report to the General Convention, the Standing Commission on Evangelism noted, "Episcopalians are often reluctant to proclaim with assurance that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. But this ambivalence leads us to an evangelistic dilemma. Why should we proclaim Jesus at all, if other paths are equally acceptable, both to us and to God?"
What is evangelism, Episcopalian style? The General Convention will consider a raft of resolutions aimed at promoting the Decade of Evangelism. It will likely affirm a definition from the 1973 convention that evangelism is "the presentation of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, in such ways that persons may be led to accept him as savior, and follow him as Lord, within the fellowship of the church." Yet, across the church, Episcopalians are already giving shape to the decade in some traditional ways -- and some bold new ways.
Evangelism begins with prayer, said Temperance Parker, evangelism coordinator for the Diocese of South Carolina. "We began with an evangelism prayer covenant in January 1990. Then we sponsored a series of lectures by evangelist John Guest, with 'labs' to teach people how to share their faith."
Just what that faith means has to be clarified first, explained Parker: "Part of the thrust of any evangelism program is to evangelize the people in the pews with faithful preaching and teaching. As the church grows and people come into a vital relationship with Jesus, they want to share."
Congregations have to be moved from a "maintenance" mode to a "mission-minded" stance, said Parker. "Proclamation and the presentation of the Gospel intentionally is a very important part of evangelism. It's important to live our faith, too, but it's not enough simply to do good works; our good works must be done in the name of Jesus."
But what does that mean? Across the country, several examples offer clues.
In Wichita, Kansas, the Rev. Robert V. Parker finds evangelism every time the doors of Venture House open, a ministry of Episcopal Social Services. Parker, a deacon, serves as executive director of the eight-year-old ecumenical effort to serve the homeless of Wichita. "Evangelism," said Parker, "is that part of the mission of the church in which we take some reconciliation and hope and the Good News of who Jesus was out into the world-not necessarily with our motive being that we can seduce them into the confines of our parish walls.
"We too often think of evangelism as church growth for the sake of erecting a bigger building so that we can attract more people like us, so that we can go out and build an addition on the bigger building, so we can attract even more people like us," Mr. Parker said. "Jesus wasn't talking about gathering up the sheep that are kind of like us and have the same socioeconomic and educational background and the same taste. He said, 'Feed the flock.'"
Yet the flock is constantly changing, observed the Rev. Nelson Pinder, rector of St. John-the-Baptist Episcopal Church in Orlando, Florida. "Neighborhoods are changing tremendously," Pinder said. "Those who moved to the suburbs 25 years ago are moving back to the city. Those in the inner city are being moved to the suburbs. Predominantly white parishes in those changing neighborhoods need to be able to work in them instead of selling
property and moving someplace else. When these new people come, we ought to be able to reach out and touch them, invite them into the body of Christ."
The church is the last outpost of segregation in society, said Pinder, and that has to change or the church will die. There's a need to train priests to deal with multicultural and multiracial congregations, for more non-Caucasian clergy and deputies, and an openness to liturgical opportunities to tell the Episcopal Church story: "Our funerals are pieces of evangelism. Weddings are evangelism. We have a group of non-Episcopalians in church, and we have a chance to make people say, 'I want to come back."'
The General Convention will consider resolutions to promote "new congregation development which will include both ethnic specific models as well as multi-cultural models" and to affirm ministries "among Asiamerican, Black, Hispanic and Native American peoples." However, some wonder whether those resolutions go far enough.
Dr. Louie Crew, an active layperson in the Diocese of Newark, said that evangelism can be as simple as inviting houseguests and friends to worship. Yet, he said that newcomers may be turned off by the racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia they may encounter in church. "I keep going back to Carter Heyward's statement, 'Love without justice is cheap,'" said Crew, the founder of Integrity, a national organization for lesbian and gay Episcopalians. "It's sentimentality; I think that's what's being passed out as evangelism."
Blandness, said Crew, is the deadly enemy of evangelism. "Good news is always going to be misunderstood by the world. Good news is always going to be, 'My gosh -- he spends all his time with prostitutes and tax collectors!' I live in a place that has so much bad news around, yet I have so much good news to tell, in terms of what I know about God's redemption."
Telling the story is an integral part of Dr. Lynn Huber's approach to evangelism with older adults in the Diocese of Tennessee, where she is director of Affirmative Aging. "Story sharing is an essential and necessary developmental task for late life, so it's a perfect fit. We think of the church as one of the most important institutions to reach out to older adults, but I've come to believe that the church is dependent on them for models of what spiritual life is."
Sharing her own story wasn't always easy for Huber. "I used to think Episcopal evangelism was an oxymoron," she said. "Then I heard Wayne Schwab say that 'if you found gasoline that cost ten cents a gallon in unlimited quantities and every mile you drove your car went better than before, you'd tell your friends about it. If you tell me that Jesus Christ is the most important thing in your life but I never hear you talk about him, then I don't believe you.' I said, 'Okay, Wayne, I'm an evangelist."'
Throughout the church, attention to the needs of the aging are feeding a need for new models to enable evangelism in that group. In the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, for example, an 87-year-old woman was recently ordained a priest to serve in her retirement community. The General Convention will consider a resolution to "affirm the ministry of evangelism among the aging by recruiting and utilizing the diverse skills and experiences of the aging as a valuable resource... [and] allocating significant financial, personnel, and material resources of the church to develop this ministry...."
The Episcopal Church's congregational development officer, Arlin Rothauge, maintains that evangelism is more than just telling a story; it's listening and offering as well. "We fantasize that we have a franchise on the Gospel, that God constructed the Gospel and gave it to us. In fact he just offered himself and said, 'What will you do?' Until we are ready to say the Gospel is free to express itself in other peoples' lives in any way it wishes and we will declare that wholesome and exciting, we're very limited."
What would count as success for the Decade of Evangelism? "I'm not sure we've gotten deep enough to answer that," Rothauge said. "Whether we're going to have the courage to work on apologetics and indigenization of the Gospel and the strengthening of congregational life, I don't know." Rothauge sees the interest in small group ministry as an encouraging sign, but warned that "the last time that happened it was the Wesleys, and we know what the traditional church did to that."
Maintaining the integrity of Anglican tradition is important to Dr. John Booty, historiographer for the Episcopal Church. The former dean of the School of Theology at Sewanee fears that an emphasis on evangelism may crowd out the kind of critical thinking that makes Episcopalians what they are. And as for the numbers? "The church is going to continue to decline in membership. There's no reason why God should want the Episcopal Church to grow; the success of the kingdom of God does not depend upon the Episcopal Church. And it may, in the economy of things, be right that we not grow -- because if we are obedient to the Gospel, we may not grow in numbers and financial wealth. But I think it will have greater integrity in the eyes and lives of people."
Bishop John MacNaughton of the Diocese of West Texas takes the opposite view from Booty. For him, evangelism is unequivocally growth in all its forms. "The Decade of Evangelism is going to be successful because it is God's decade, not ours," MacNaughton said. "The only question is whether the Episcopal Church will decide to participate, and where it does, it will be larger, more spiritually oriented and filled; its stewardship will be stronger and its social outreach broader and more effective, because it will not be based on some political agenda but on a spiritual energy."
MacNaughton said that he believes evangelism should be the number-one priority of the church, and it should be explicitly evangelism, not social service or liturgy or Christian education: "To the extent that everything becomes evangelism, nothing is evangelism. And that's the temptation of the leadership of the church: to defend what we've been doing by calling everything evangelism."
Nine years remain in the Decade of Evangelism, and three more General Conventions. No one is sure just what the Episcopal Church will look like when the decade is officially over, but the words of an essay by Dr. Huber"The Episcopal Church," Huber wrote, "has always had four major streams from which to draw: Evangelical, Catholic, Charismatic, and Liberal. Each has its function within the church -- Evangelicals emphasize Scripture, Catholics emphasize the liturgy, Charismatics emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit, and Liberals emphasize inclusiveness and social service." None should be left out, and in fact, Huber said, the best thing would be for Episcopalians "to become... Catholic, Evangelical, Charismatic, Liberal Christian(s). Come on in; the water's fine!" may hold a key.