There has been a lot written about the importance of friendship in evangelism but I wonder if it needs a bit of a re-think. Maybe it needs dumping as a concept altogether.

Friendship evangelism pretty much suggests that evangelism happens amongst those who are… you guessed it… my friends. When we think about ‘friends’ most of us have to admit that we don’t have too many of them, and if we are happy with the ones we’ve got we’re probably not likely to seek too many others. Such is life in our busy world.

However ‘friendship evangelism’ (as I have understood it) tells me that I must first be in an authentic relationship with a person before I venture to tell them about Christ.

How long does an ‘authentic’ friendship take?

‘Authenic’ means what?

And then there’s the question ‘are you only being a friend so you can tell them about Jesus?’

Is that authentic?… or not?…

And what if your friends don’t want to hear about Jesus? Is evangelism a non event for you?…

This is a concept fraught with difficulties

Perhaps a better way to look at it is that we are called to tell everyone about Jesus and some of them will finish up being our friends… and some won’t. We might not even like some people who we tell about Jesus. I think that’s ok. I don’t like everyone I meet. Not everyone likes me. (No its true)

By linking evangelism to authentic friendships I think we have painted ourselves into a stupidly tight corner. ‘If I don’t really know you I shouldn’t open this topic up’…

Really?

Or… maybe its a convenient corner, where ‘I can’t talk about Jesus because I don’t know the person and don’t have the right to go there’. For those who shy away from publicising their faith this is a nice card to play. It sounds very respectful when maybe its just fear driven.

I don’t want to pull the ‘this is biblical’ line, because some of scripture is definitely descriptive rather than prescriptive, but… I wonder how much friendship evangelism we could really see in scripture?!

The other problem with ‘friendship evangelism’ is that I then don’t ‘do evangelism’ among people who aren’t my friends, so the people I don’t like, or just don’t click with, will never get to hear about Jesus from me.

If you’re feeling nervous right now then ask yourself why?

Am I saying evangelism is event not process? Noooooo

Am I suggesting we preach on street corners? Noooooo

Am I saying we vomit a verbal gospel over everyone we meet? Nooooo

But download snow buddies movie gingerdead man 2 passion of the crust download maybe we need to toss this idea of friendship evangelism and just get on with living and sharing the gospel with the people we meet, and along the way a fewof those folks will become friends and a whole bunch of others won’t.

And… That’s ok.

Note: Before you quote me on this post make sure you read the two paragraphs below! This is quite intentionally a polemic piece of writing, and while it reflects much of what I believe it is said in a way that I normally wouldn’t choose to say things. So before you either quote me or write me nasty emails read the fine print 🙂

I mentioned a few days back that Scott had asked me to write a piece on ‘Incarnational v Attractional Mission’. It was to be a maximum of one A4 page size 12 font… approx 500 words… How hard is that?!

Knowing the potential for biffo with this particular topic I often try to be a peacemaker, but here’s 500 words that go a little bit harder. I do this not to bash the attractional expression of church, (because many of my close friends live there), but because its hard to have a good debate if we’re all just being nice to each other. This isn’t quite ‘gloves off’, but it does get a little more pointed.

Here goes…

Over the last 7 or 8 years I have become increasingly convinced that the incarnation is the primary biblical lens through which we are to view the missionary activity of Jesus and in turn the church. When ‘the word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood’ he had many options as to how he would live his life as the ‘son of God’. Yet, somewhat paradoxically it would seem, he spent most of that journey quite intentionally as the ‘son of man’, living a simple life in a small town for his first 30 years, prior to any recognised ‘ministry’. So much so that when he returned to preach the people laughed and mocked him saying ‘He’s just a carpenter” Mary’s boy” Who does he think he is?’ It begs the question, was Jesus a lousy missionary or was there something quite intentional and radically subversive about the way he approached his life and mission that we need to learn from and emulate? If Jesus were alive today and his mission was still to ‘seek out and save the lost’ what might he do?…

Would he hire a building, set up a sound system, develop a music team, drama team, and then do local letterbox drops advising people that they could come and be part of his church on Sunday? Frankly I don’t believe this approach to mission would rate a blip on his strategic radar. The so called ‘attractional’ mode of mission centres its focus on the church service and is dedicated to producing an event that pagans will want to come to. The theory goes that the more professional the service is, the funkier the music, the better the coffee, and so on” the more likely the punters will come, hence the term ‘attractional’. As such the success of mission in this mode is almost always measured by the number who attend on Sunday. While a small minority of larger churches do experience some success with this approach, the overwhelming majority of smaller churches attempting to be Hillsong clones continue to haemorrhage members every week because they cannot offer the same quality of music, preaching or other services that their mega-mall comrades down the road are able to provide.

I would argue that this ‘attractional mission’, while effective for a few, is actually a case of putting the cart before the horse. Deciding on a form of church and then trying to make it so that people want to come is mission in reverse. There is a growing awareness that pagan Aussies do not want to come to church and simply making the Sunday event more attractive is not the answer to this problem. Perhaps the question we ought to ask ourselves is ‘why do we think they would want to come to church?’ Was it ever Jesus’ intention that non-Christians should seek us and desire to attend our worship events? Or didn’t he say quite clearly that it was his calling, and now ours to ‘seek out and save the lost’ to ‘go’ to their world and enculturate the gospel there. Little Bo Peep evangelism (leave em alone and they’ll come home) is fast running out of steam as the Christian story ceases to be the dominant framework for Australian people to interpret their spirituality.

By contrast the incarnational approach to mission is refreshingly simple. It requires us to live amongst the people in our communities, love them, share the good news of the kingdom both in action and in speech and then as people become followers of Christ to form up indigenous communities of faith that reflect the specific context. This requires no great resources or buildings, no slick marketing plans and no highly talented people. In incarnational mission the gatherings exist to support the believers as they move out in mission rather than being seen as the place to bring people to. While attractional churches will continue to dominate the landscape of the Christian world, I strongly believe that hope for the future lies increasingly with an incarnational approach to mission that takes both gospel and context seriously and sends Christians out as missionaries rather than calling pagans to come and attend church.

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Ok… fire up!

I came across this image on Flickr today.

I reckon its a great picture of what I hope happens with our community and other missional communities around the place

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