How far back in the Bible do we need to go to find the idea of evangelism? Perhaps the first moment of evangelism in the Bible can be found in Genesis 3:9. There we find God calling out to the human, "Where are you?" God's search for us, like for the hiding humans in this story, does not always seem like good news! Yet, there is no better news than God the Creator seeking us out despite our destructive tendencies. Over the last two months we looked at some of the new insights that developed on the theme of mission in the 20th-century, particularly the idea that mission is in the first place God's activity, or The Mission of God-Missio Dei. Last month we looked at definitions of mission and learned how our mission joins God's mission of peace and justice as the church crosses frontiers in humility and service and looks for the new things God is doing. Mission is the church joining the reign of God that is coming to us in Jesus Christ. In joining God's reign, working in faith for peace and
justice, we establish signs of this good news for all to see. Thus, mission and evangelism are inseparable.
Evangelism simply means good news. If mission is about God's gracious reaching out to us, then evangelism is about sharing this good story with others. One of the saddest things in our present North American situation is that the word evangelism became associated with cheap talk, television hype or simple formulas that people are asked to pray. These contemporary religious expressions associated with evangelism have almost no bearing on its real meaning. A helpful way to understand the breach between contemporary popular ideas of evangelism and its real form is to look at what an unknown author in the second century wrote to Diognetus about Christians:
They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. They are in the flesh, but do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but are citizens of heaven.
If we live that way today, evangelism will be a natural byproduct of our congregations. The disciples are promised the power of the Holy Spirit to bear witness in Acts 1:8. In Matthew 28:16-20 the disciples are sent to make disciples and teach because all power in heaven and earth is given to Jesus Christ. In Mark 16 the disciples are told to tell the Good News to every creature (not just people!), and in John 20 the disciples are sent in the way God sent Jesus. In all these cases there is a close association between how the disciples act and live, and the verbal account they give of it. Evangelism is about this whole package, not just words, and specifically not words disembodied from a church community and extraordinary lives. Evangelism is about faithfulness to God and bearing witness with our lives and words. It is a habit of the life of those who are part of the church, not a technique to make converts, or get some new members for the church.
The word for witness in the New Testament is martyria, a word from which our word martyr originates. The association between witness and martyr is not accidental. Tertullian, an early Christian leader, said the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Where we join God's mission for world repair, God's reign already present, there we bear witness and the Good News is spread – something that often leads to suffering among those who do so.
This process is fundamentally associated with hope not optimism. Such inexplicable hope is the spirit of mission and the substance of evangelism. Such hope finds is strength in the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God who continues to call all humankind in the agony of the loving Creator, "Where are you?"
