Being the Good News
After “knowing the Lord two years, the average Christian has no significant relationships with non-Christians.” In recent years, we have paid closer attention to the difference between proclaiming the gospel and incarnating the gospel. Articulating, words, are easier than integrating the gospel into our life. In plain language, we talk better than we walk. “Christians,” the late Joe Aldrich argued, “are to be good news before they share the good news.” To state it differently, the lyrics, the words of the gospel, need music – and that’s the music of our transformed lives. We are the evidence. Doing evangelism without evidence of its effect in our transformed life is a dead end.
The music, Aldrich says, “is the beauty of the indwelling Christ as lived out in the everyday relationships of life. The gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ has solved the problem of man’s sin and offers him the potential of an exchanged life…” That’s a life lived out of grace, not striving; out of faith, not human effort alone; it is the life of Christ, lived in us, from the inside out, not mere conformity to religious standards.
The old evangelism was all about saying the right words, quoting the right scriptures, winning the argument, getting the person to say the right words – of repentance and confession. It often sounded like a memorized sales pitch. The new evangelism does not disregard scripture or Biblical truth, but in a post-truth culture, where my truth is not your truth, and everything is relative, a new beginning place has to be established in evangelistic encounters – and that begins with us, not with the individual needing Christ. We need to incarnate his beauty. Paul says, as believers, we carry a fragrance about us (2 Cor. 2:14-17). He also says, we are open letters to be read – our lives telling the story of transformation (2 Cor. 3:2). Finally, he says, we are to be the carriers of God’s glory by a radiance that we cannot always see ourselves. One greater than the shining face of Moses when he descended the mountain with the law (Ex. 34:29-35; 2 Cor. 3:7). In summary, the fragrance of Christ, a life that can be read by others pointing them to Christ, and the glow of God’s glory, evidence that we have been with him – are the ways we incarnate Christ.
This is the ‘music’ of our lives, the joy, the peace, the love, the grace, which causes others to ask us about the source of such hope. This evangelism is letting Christ be himself in us. The best argument for Christianity is Christians – true Christians. “Christ in us, the hope of glory!” (Col. 1:27). When we are joyless and ungrateful, self-righteous and proud, narrow and judgmental, we deny the work of grace in our lives.
God’s desire for us is that we are holy, but not stuffy and segregated, not untouchable. No, the idea of holiness is wholeness, wellness, completeness in Christ. It is the place of rest and peace. First, God declares us holy that He might make us holy or whole. He does that by constraining us with His love. Love acts like an anesthesia as God trues us with truth. He changes us in ways we cannot change ourselves – and He does this in our prayerful surrender to Him. He declares us holy – and then a process of sanctification begins. He makes us increasingly holy, by our pursuit of Him, our consecration, until in the final stage of sanctification when we exhibit wholeness, wellness, and maturity. This is His purpose, a people who walk in the beauty of holiness.
In evangelism, we use words, sometimes inadequately, to explain the change in our life. We never claim perfection, but we demonstrate a growing hunger for God and His transforming grace. All of this happens without being completely disengaged from the world. We have practiced extraction evangelism – we help people find Christ, get them in church, and disconnect them from their friends. This is a failed missionary model. It is the church as a compound, as a retreat from the world.
Rather, the church is to be the visible embassy of the invisible kingdom of God, training and sending ambassadors, representatives, to every sector of the community, with a blessing, with joy, with the music of our lives. Christ did not come to the earth and live in hibernation. In the incarnation, Christ radically identified with the world – its pain and its people.
Paul claimed to “become all things to all men so that by all possible means [he] might save some” (I Cor. 9:22). To win his Jewish brothers, he restricted his liberties and lived like a conservative Jew. He went to Gentiles (non-Jews) as well.
He became a slave to all to win as many as possible (I Cor. 9:19). Some see this as hypocritical, as chameleon Christianity. But it is not Paul’s core values that changed, nor the centrality or supremacy of Christ, but rather, Paul gives us a picture of cultural adaptation. This is often what the church is not willing to change – its culture. Notice again, Paul “became all things to all men.” The central ideas at the heart of the gospel, the message, the information, does not change, but Paul’s face changes, he adapts his identity. In one place, Paul is a Roman citizen, in another, a Jew. There is, he knows, liberty beyond the cultural constraints of the law. But he again claims his old Pharisee identity. As Bonhoeffer would say, “Christ bids us to come and die!” To self. To customs. To preferences. To comfort, at times. To stature. To titles. To entitlement.
What a shock it must have been to the angels, to heaven, even to hell, to see God become flesh, to see the Word hidden and veiled in human flesh. Christ became a man to win us back to the Father. He didn’t change – he was still God, the Word, though made flesh. It was not the information, the Word, that changed, but the identity, the face, the form, the culture.
The incarnation respected humanity, even in its fallen form. It stretched, it reached, it chose to live among men – disguised. This is organic evangelism, not institutional. It is personal, not positional. At times, it postures as the underling, invisible, serving, flexible, not stiff and condescending. The old evangelism cornered a potential mark, witnessed – with the individual passive, listening, and then it pressed for a quick decision.
The new generation has reacted strongly to such a tactical approach, and those who jumped through the evangelism hoops of such encounters have often fallen away. That evangelism approach, if it ever worked, will certainly not work in this culture. It is a form of assault. It lacks respect for the dignity of the other person. It does not trust the Holy Spirit who witnesses with us, and better than us.
We are reminded that changing our methods does not mean changing our message though to some it may feel that way. The gospel is, as we have noted before, both love and truth. That’s the message – unconditional love and unbending truth. In the past, we have, as a method, led with truth. It might have seemed to some that such love was then conditioned on their positive response to truth. But God’s love is unconditional. In leading with love, we build a relational bridge on which we can carry the heavy cargo of truth. In leading with demonstrated love, we avoid combative exchanges that frontload the relationship with tension and create barriers to truth. Without an atmosphere of love, truth is misunderstood. The great truth is the love of God. The method has changed by leading with love, but the message has not changed.
To evangelize effectively today, we must not only offer good words, but be, ourselves, the evidence of good works – the work of God in us. Years ago, an African attending a USA evangelism conference was amazed, appalled, at the evangelism strategy being articulated. Some asked, “How do you do evangelism in Africa?” Her response was shocking, but simple. “We simply have a Christian family move into the village, and when the people see their lives, how they live, their joy and peace, everyone in the village wants to become a Christian.”