Evangelism & Conversion

my fellow YASC missionaries and I at our training in July 2015

“Do you see conversion as necessary [to Evangelism]?

 

A few weeks ago, a dear friend & fellow YASC missionary in the Episcopal Church asked me this question. Admittedly it’s a question I’ve not considered all too often. As it happened, I received her message while sitting on atop a stellar mountain vista in the town of Orvieto during my brief mini-vacation, about which I wrote my last post. It was a very good time to ask such a question, as I had just the time, space and clarity of mind that one would need to consider such a deep and important musing.

Typing out as thoughtful a message as I could from the keys of my tiny cell phone keyboard, I responded a few minutes later as best I could:

“long story short, yes “conversion” is a necessary result, but not “conversion to Christianity” as is often assumed. In true evangelism, we’re not convincing anyone that ‘my religion is right & yours is wrong’. Instead evangelism is a process by which all of us are changed by God and one another”.

The original question, I think, fundamentally revolves around how one defines “evangelism” and “conversion”. According to its strict definition” my friend posited “[evangelism] is the proclamation of the Gospel with the intent to convert people to Christianity”. My fellow missionary asked me to say a bit more about “what [evangelism] means to you and why it’s important”, particularly in light of my well-known and oft-expressed fondness for the zealous evangelical message of our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry.

So I continued: “At our refugee center here, most of our refugees are Muslims. I don’t ever try to get them to become Christian nor do they try to make me Muslim. But we all evangelize and spread God’s Love (the Gospel) even when we’re not doing anything directly to do with religion”.

Are you saying that you see loving others as a form of Evangelism? And if so, why call it Evangelism when for most people it implies conversion?

My hands nearly leapt from the keyboard with energy.

“I see loving others as the ONLY form of evangelism! Anything else is self-important sectarianism masquerading as evangelism. Progressive Christians need to lead the charge to redefine “evangelism” and “conversion” in popular imagination. To continue to define those terms in the ways that others have often done in hurtful ways is a huge mistake we’ve too often made.”

My friend and I continued, and for the sake of brevity I won’t share the entire conversation here on this blog. Part of what made this conversation so fascinating to me is what it revealed about the mission of serving God in this world. I proudly identify as an “Evangelical Episcopalian” and I unabashedly claim evangelism – which I would define as “sharing God’s love with others” to be the most important thing the Church could possibly do. I cheered vociferously to hear Bishop Curry’s stated mission to be the Episcopal Church’s “chief evangelism officer” in addition to its “chief executive officer”.

Yet I was reminded that to others, that word “Evangelism” has been warped and twisted in ugly ways that have caused generations of irreparable damage to countless people and souls along the way. The philosophy that insists that “winning souls” is the Christian’s true mission fueled the brutal colonization of Africa and virtually every continent on the globe by Europeans. It gave strength to racist theologies that promoted “civilization” and “Christianization” as the whitewashing of non-white cultures, and used the story of Lot’s sons in Genesis to espouse segregation as a noble cause. This ugly “evangelism” to this day continues to give birth to vitriol, discrimination and even violence against LGBT people and others in the name of Jesus Christ.

While I and other progressive Christians use “Evangelism” to denote an open-minded and loving outreach as we believe the Gospel calls us to do, so many others hear in that word the exact opposite – pain, brutality and death. While I am inclined to take that word and fight even harder to redefine it in the minds of popular imagination, I am given pause, quite reasonably, of concern for those to whom that word has only been a harbinger of destruction.

Friends, I earnestly do not know what the “solution” if there is any, would be. But I am reminded of the mission statement of Canterbury Cathedral, the mother church of our Anglican Communion: “the mission of Canterbury Cathedral is to show people Jesus.” Period. Full stop. I have said often before and I will say again – I think that needs to be the mission of every Christian and every Christian institution. Whether we call that “Evangelism” or not – and what we say about “conversion” are questions we will continue to discern together as the people of God.

What I do know, is that God will be there reaching with open outstretched arms toward us every step of the way. May we always have the grace and courage to do the same for one another.