The Institute of Evangelism

Every Church an Evangelizing Community!

Ross Lockhart

Ross Lockhart

About Ross Lockhart

Ross Lockhart is Dean of St. Andrew’s Hall and Professor of Mission Studies at The Vancouver School of Theology.

Not Our House, But God’s

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In children’s ministry over the years, I have often pulled out the guitar and sung the famous line from Richard Avery: “The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place, the church is a people!” While the affirmation that the church is not a physical building made of human hands is wonderful to sing, Covid-19 has put that truth claim to the test. Tim Soerens writes in his latest book, Everywhere You Look that as a parent he decided, to avoid using the phrase “we are going to church,” instead opting for expressions like “we are going to a church building or a church gathering.” His purpose was to avoid confusing his children regarding Christian identity versus participation.[1] The church is not the building. We’ve been saying it for years, but how has Covid-19 tested that sentiment for your congregation, and what implications might it have for our evangelistic witness?

 

What is “the Church”?

As a missiologist, I approach ecclesiology from a particular perspective. The church is not a fraternal organization, country club or social service agency. At its core, the church is not a building for religious services or yard sales, or a rental space for choirs or yoga groups. Instead, “the church is missionary by its very nature,”[2] and that nature impacts any expression of a Christian community that is gathered and sent. The church is missionary by nature since, as it defines itself as the body of Christ, it is consistent with the nature of God, and as such, “mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God.”[3] The church is the sign, instrument and foretaste of the Kingdom,[4] a place where we discern Father, Son and Holy Spirit at work in our local context, and become witnesses famously summarized as “the congregation is the hermeneutic of the gospel.”[5]

It is important for us to note that “Church”, Ekklesia in the Greek, is mentioned 114 times in the New Testament and never once does it mean “building”. Ekklesia means “the called-out people”, folks who are summoned out, an invited concourse of people, an assembly. It doesn’t matter where they gather, but who is gathered and why—they are God’s gathered, equipped and sent people, participating in God’s reconciling mission made known to us in Jesus and continued even now by the Holy Spirit.

 

The post-Covid church

In some ways this Covid-19 disruption feels a little bit like the dilemma faced by the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple by the Roman forces in 70 CE, following yet another failed rebellion.[6] The result was a shift of worship and the centre of religious/relational life from the temple to the synagogue network in Israel, and throughout the Empire in the Jewish diaspora. In this sense, because of the closure of our church buildings due to Covid-19, we were forced to expand our understanding of ecclesiology from seeing church buildings to seeing our homes as our worship centres. But shouldn’t they have been all along? Our house has become God’s house!

The post-Covid church has an opportunity to help make the home and neighbourhood (what missiologist David Fitch would call the dotted and half circle[7]) a more fulsome place for discerning the presence of Jesus in everyday life. Darrell Guder has suggested that witness moves beyond the traditional understanding of evangelism as a speech act of sharing the gospel. Instead, Guder argues that we are called to be “be, do and say” witnesses in a more holistic way. How has this time of being “deployed at home” for Jesus shaped the way that your being (character) is an evangelistic witness? How have you enacted signs of mercy, justice and healing in partnership with the Triune God (doing) through evangelistic witness? How have your conversations been shaped and blessed (saying) with an evangelistic witness?

 

Being, Doing, Saying

For the two years before Covid-19, I served as the Interim Moderator of a faithful, small Presbyterian church in the most violent and troubled neighbourhood in Surrey, BC. The church had vibrant outreach ministries and faithful leadership, and just a few months before Covid-19 they welcomed a new pastor. I checked in a few weeks after the start of pandemic restrictions to see how the congregation was doing. I was delighted to hear that instead of retreating online to focus solely on their “member’s needs,” the church wanted to continue serving their homeless neighbours, with whom they had built such good relationships over the years.

By the time the local newspaper rolled around in June for an article, they were packing their 10,000th bagged lunch of the pandemic, feeding their neighbours both on the steps of the church and through their local partner, Surrey Urban Mission. Their longtime loving relationship with neighbours (being-character) encouraged them to show Christ’s love through daily meals (doing-action), and when asked by the media and others why they were doing such a thing during a pandemic, the leadership (in true 1 Peter 3:15 style) had a testimony to share about the saving power of Jesus (say-speech act).

 

How have you been engaged in the being, doing and saying of evangelistic witness with your local church in these Covid-19 times? What might you try at this time to demonstrate that the church is not the building, but the redeemed people of God in Jesus Christ? How might you look back years from now and celebrate the risk and reward of evangelistic witness to a sin-sick, anxious and watching world?

 

[1] Tim Soerens, Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are, (Downers Grove: IVP, 2020), 17.

[2] Darrell Guder, “From Mission and Theology to Missional Theology,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 24, no. 1 (2003): 47.

[3] David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), 389-393.

[4] Newbigin, The Open Secret: An introduction to the theology of mission, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 110.

[5] Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1989), 227.

[6] The destruction of the temple also had a tremendous impact on Jewish Christians who were people of the Way.

[7] David Fitch, Faithful Presence: Seven disciplines that have shaped the Church for Mission, (Downers Grove: IVP, 2016), 40. Fitch argues that Christians attend to the presence of the risen Christ in the close circle of Christian worship where Christ is host, in the dotted circle of our homes where we host others, and in the half circle of the community around us where we are guests.

Is There Good News beyond Toilet Paper and Hand Sanitizer?

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“I’m sorry, sir,” the drugstore cashier in New Jersey said politely, “we’re all out of hand sanitizer and the toilet paper is going really fast too.” It was the first week of March and I was on a break from my research and writing in the Princeton Theology Seminary Library. When I had left Vancouver a few days earlier, there was growing concern in the media regarding the virus spreading around the world, but life appeared normal. By the time I got back to Vancouver a few days later, everything was shutting down and we were living fully into the Covid-19 reality that has defined the rest of 2020.

 

Church-focused adaptive leadership solutions

In the blink of an eye, church leadership has shifted congregations from a known form of leadership to a dizzying array of adaptive leadership solutions. Who could have ever guessed at the beginning of 2020 that so many churches would become little television studios and that we would be experiencing Bible studies, pastoral care and even Communion online? While churches and their leaders have been working hard to care for church members, isolated and anxious during this pandemic, we must also ask how this has impacted our ministries of evangelism – of helping people take steps towards faith in Jesus. Many pastoral leaders are delighted that their online worship attendance has increased compared to what they might see in the pews.

Could this be an evangelistic outreach opportunity? Is it a chance for people to move beyond what Don Everts and others call the first threshold of evangelism, “trust”? Or is it simply a “recycling of the saints,” as believers hop from one online church service to another? And then there is the research from Barna Group suggesting that up to 1/3 of regular worshippers have given up on connecting with their congregation online during the pandemic. Australian missiologist Mike Frost pushes this further by wondering if the online buffet of worship services might set back the gains of the missional church movement and return us to an attractional model of church, whereby people are encouraged to be consumers of religion looking for the best “worship production.”

 

Evangelism and a community of affable agnostics

 But do you notice how all of these questions are still church-focused, and not directed towards the world around us that Jesus died to save? While some in the church have assumed that a global pandemic would bring people flooding back to church for answers and assurance, for those of us who live in highly secularized places like Vancouver there’s no such thing as “returning” to church. So, what might evangelism look like to a community of affable agnostics in a pandemic who, while fearful and anxious, have never turned to God before in their lives?

Of course, a pre-Covid church too often assumed that our secular neighbour was really just an anonymous Christian, to borrow Karl Rahner’s language. In other words, the church assumed that in a time of crisis, people would naturally turn towards God like Daniel did in the lion’s den or Meshach, Shadrack and Abednego did in the fiery furnace. But stop and think: in those cases, their faith in God got them into trouble. Instead, this is a good time to check our assumptions from a pre-Covid church about what our secular friends think they really need.

With Boomers and Gen Xers, the line was what? “When they have children of their own, they’ll come back to church.” For Millennials we said, “They’re spiritual but not religious.” In other words, don’t worry, their vague spiritual references are really just an underdeveloped Christianity. As Jen Twenge’s book iGen demonstrates through solid research, the next cohort – Generation Z – is now often neither spiritual nor religious. We are fully secularized as a society, living into what Charles Taylor would call secularity 3.

 

Jesus at work in our relationships close to home

But what if God was giving our churches the opportunity to learn more about our actual neighbours, secular or otherwise, in this time of disruption? What if, like Jay Pathak and Dave Ruyon’s book The Art of Neighboring, we were to pay (pray?) attention more closely to sharing life and attending to the presence of Jesus at work in our relationships close to home, including those that we see more often now since so many are working from home? What if, instead of an evangelism program, we challenged our church members to see themselves as evangelists, or perhaps first and foremost what Alan Roxburgh calls “detectives of divinity”, wherever God places them?

Could we make room in our online worship not just to comfort the faithful but to have “God sightings” that allow us to share where we have seen the Triune God at work? Could we have prayer requests for specific neighbours and friends whom we long to see in a relationship with Jesus? Could the Word preached and the bread broken focus on equipping us as missionary disciples, saved to be sent into a world that is fearful, anxious and ready for redemption? What if this time of isolation was understood as a time reminiscent of Luke 10, where we have been sent on a mission to the places we call home in order to testify to the saving work of the Triune God in our midst?

Will Jesus rejoice when we return together in the church building after all of this is done, like the disciples regrouping at the end of Luke 10, or will we look back and discover, as the servant did in Matthew 25, that the talent we were given has been buried just when it was needed most by the world?

“First Preach”: Homiletics with Training Wheels

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A pilgrimage in Turkey prompts a reflection on how we learn to preach—and how we encourage others to learn preaching.

Our intrepid group of pilgrims wilted under the midday sun and stumbled over the rocky landscape of rural Turkey, awash in the deep crimson of late spring poppies. The bright lights of Istanbul were long behind us, along with its fading memory of Constantinople. Exotic Cappadocian cave churches lingered in our minds, their frescos of Christ like stones shouting, “The gospel once thrived in this dry and barren land!”

Now, I invited our pilgrimage group to join me in the footsteps of Paul on his first missionary journey. East of the more famous Ephesus, congested by cruise ship passengers, sits a quiet archaeological site called Pisidian Antioch. It was here that Paul came in Acts 13:13, as an evangelist with training wheels on, to share the gospel.

Paul’s rookie sermon

We had the place to ourselves. We walked slowly down the old Roman roads, paulpisidianantioch3imagining a passionate yet amateur apostle, feeling his way forward with the help of the Holy Spirit, burning in his desire to share the Gospel with others. Near the end of the walk sat the ruins of an ancient church and the excavated ruins of the synagogue where Paul preached his rookie sermon. In the delightfully loose translation from Turkish to English, the sign boldly declared that place to be the site of “Paul’s First Preach.” I liked that. As I preached in that space to our pilgrimage group, I found myself reflecting on how one gets started in the proclamation of the Word.

If you are a preacher, do you remember the first time you preached? Perhaps it started with a testimony in church. Or was your first time when you were put on the spot in the church to give an account of the hope that is within you (1 Peter 3:15)?

I still recall my “first preach.” It was a couple of years after my own teenage conversion from the cultural Christianity of my childhood to a passionate discipleship to our risen Lord. My pastor asked if I would take on preaching at a new evening service, led by with our praise band. I was 18 years old—just young and foolish enough to say yes. Those poor, sweet people who showed up in suburban Winnipeg to listen to my “first preach.” Of course, they didn’t show up to hear me, but to encounter the living God in Christ who is revealed in Word and Sacrament. Thank God (literally) for that.

The risk of trusting others

Sure, my “first preach” was awful. At least, I would mark it so now as a seminary professor. But that’s not the point. My pastor loved the Word so much that he was willing to risk placing that “Holy Hand Grenade” in the hands of a teenager. Then again, God risked placing the Word in the womb of a teenage girl in the backwater of Galilee.

In these curious post-Christendom times, forming disciples who can live and speak their faith into our increasingly pagan culture is critical. Many years ago, I believed that the ultimate goal of evangelistic preaching was conversion. But today I believe that only to be the penultimate goal. Surely the ultimate goal of evangelistic preaching is that at least some of the converted become evangelistic preachers themselves. These evangelists then help people take steps towards faith in Jesus in the places where they live, work and play.

In other words, part of the pastoral leadership we strive to offer today is to enable people, awakened by the Holy Spirit, to find ways to do their own “first preach” with training wheels on. In many ways, this mirrors the objectives of the Missional Christianity movement which continues to bubble up across North America today. Because we are firmly convinced that the church doesn’t have a mission, but that God’s mission has a church, we continue to help make disciples for Jesus who will join God in the living and sharing of the gospel in neighbourhoods they call home.

Growing in our preaching

Just as we trust that God accepts us just the way we are, yet has no intention of leaving us the way he found us, so too we strive by the Spirit’s power to become more seasoned and effective in our proclamation of the Word as disciples. Paul’s letter to the Romans is a wee bit more sophisticated than his “first preach” in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13!

How has God shaped and grown your preaching over the years? If you were to look back on your “first preach” could you see signs of “sanctified stretch marks” in your homiletical footprint today? Who is the last person you encouraged to take the leap of faith to speak publicly about their faith in Jesus in this sin-sick world? Who might God place in your journey this week that needs that gentle, grace-filled nudge to form the words for their “first preach?”

With our feet sore, our lips parched, and our hearts full from worship and wonder at Pisidian Antioch, we boarded our pilgrimage bus and continued on our 2,000 km journey to Corinth. But in the days that followed, our conversations returned to that quiet and meaningful space in the Turkish countryside. How might God grant us a bolder vision of speaking about Jesus back home in Canada? How might we testify to the one who is living water in a dry and barren spiritual landscape? How might we help others experience their “first preach” and, in the process of sharing Jesus, be converted again and again by the One who grants life before death and holds life beyond death?

Ross Lockhart is an Associate Professor and Director of Ministry Leadership and Education at St. Andrew’s Hall, UBC.

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