Words'nTone

I usually don’t start at the beginning when I write something seious—that is I leave the “intro” to last.  But in this paper for this particular topic, I had to start at the start.  I thought I’d share it with you all.  Now mind you it is only a start and it is most certainly draft, very rough…but pretty close to where I want to go and how I feel the paper’ subject from my point of view needs to start.  Sorry you don’t get the footnotes…you’ll just have to wait for the paper…Here’s my intro to “Wasted Evangelism” (Mark 4): The Task of Evangelism and Social Action Outcomes

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A number of years ago my former pastor had a great idea to get people to come to church.  One Sunday morning he asked us to list on the 3 x 5 card in our bulletin topics that our friends would like to hear.  He was planning a “relevant and practical” sermon series during the evening services.  The pastor hoped the topics would interest our friends and the non-churched—perhaps they would come to church if the topics had some “practical” value to them.  This was a no-brainer for me, so without hesitation I wrote down “workforce development” and “poverty” as topics my friends would be interested to hear.  Some weeks later, I asked the pastor if he planned to preach on my suggested topics.  He acknowledged he saw my 3 x 5 card and the topics I had written and then made this comment, “That’s your area.”

For sure, these areas are “mine” in the sense that I work professionally within the social service world, and in particular, a Community Action Agency, whose mission is to alleviate the causes of poverty and move families toward self-sufficiency.  The pastor never preached on the topics that would interest my non-churched friends, but I do mark that interchange as a decisive moment when I realized I needed to develop my own “theory of evangelism” as it related to the Christian faith and issues like “workforce development” and “poverty.”

The pastor’s comment was in line with a history of dissonance over the Church’s social responsibilities and how the Bible speaks to the issues of poverty.  It is an understatement to acknowledge that for the last century and a half there has been a rather impassioned debate and divide among evangelicals on these subjects.  Mid-century, Carl Henry confronted this tension in his book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947).  This dispute plays a major part in George Mardsen’s renowned Fundamentalism and American Culture, originally published in 1980.  Perhaps as an outcome of the 1960’s Jesus movement, the 70’s and early 80’s reflected a renewed interest in the subject Christianity and social responsibility.  Through “intellectual” associations and “convening” bodies, evangelicals wrestled with the church’s relationship to salvation, evangelism, social responsibilities, and in particular, the poor.

Christians, today, cannot avoid the renewed attention—inside and outside the institutional church—given to issues of poverty and the church’s relationship to the socio-economic structures.  This interest is everywhere—in the political arena (both among conservatives and liberals), for younger college graduates who ask “how does your company serve the needs of the community?” when considering job opportunities, and, of course, within the emergent Church community and among emerging Christians.  Again, it is time for the community of faith to wrestle with the relationship between evangelism and social action as it seeks to be both biblical and relevant to the social-cultural context surrounding it.  Lacking, however, is a theory of evangelism that addresses the Church and its social responsibilities.

I start with two assumptions: (1) Evangelism is a biblical mandate for the Church and (2) the Church’s task of evangelism is to have a biblical foundation in order to determine valid outcomes and activities.  Therefore, developing a theory of evangelism is an important step for determining valid evangelistic outcomes.  In this paper I will argue for a narrative-based definition for evangelism, as a basis for a theory of evangelism (fn 1), through an examination of the Mark 4 parables and their surrounding narrative that will offer the plausibility that social action outcomes are a valid aim for the task of evangelism.

I will strongly advocate that social action can, indeed, be evangelism.  I will build my case (I) by examining how definition can determine scope and outcomes, (II) by developing a narrative-based definition of evangelism from the parable of “wasted seed” (in Mark 4:3-20), (III) by understanding evangelism as subversive parable (the follow-up parables in Mark 4:26-32), (IV) by showing how Mark’s programmatic framework (Mark 1:1-3) and the deeds of Jesus (Mark 5) support social action outcomes as evangelism; and finally (V) by presenting how “high impact” social action strategies can produce biblical outcomes for evangelism.

I. Evangelism: Definition, Goals, Limits, and Outcomes

In the field of social services, of which I am vocationally related, outcomes are an important element in determining what programs, services, and actions are needed to bring about the outcomes being sought.  So, likewise with evangelism—if the outcome of evangelism is “personal decisions for Christ,” then activities such as soul-winning, witnessing, crusades, and salvation-centered preaching are reasonable; if church-growth (i.e., increase in church-attendance, numbers of members, etc.) is the outcome, then activities that promote such “growth” are justifiable as activities of evangelism (fn 2); and, as I will posit here, if addressing the issues of poverty and social-righteousness are valid outcomes for evangelism, then social action is a legitimate avenue for the evangelistic task of the Church.

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Two notes are important here:

1. In order to develop a “theory of evangelism,” the start must be at the simplest level, i.e., the basis, the foundation.  Informed by the text, a narrative-based definition offers such a foundation.

2. Some consider certain activities “pre-evangelism” or “bridges.” Although I will briefly mention such types of activities further in the paper, the attempt here is not to make too much of a delineation between evangelism and pre-evangelism activities.