One way is to treat unbelievers like today’s vaccine hesitants. How can we persuade them to relinquish their prejudices against what we know to be beneficial? Too many have been satiated by our entertainment culture, to accept the soporific effect of the media spectacle, as Guy Debord called it, dulling all contrarian reflection.
The use of street arts is effective in invading the cityscape. Groups like YWAM, with dance and circus skills, present the gospel in a more professional way than the student street theatre, which we performed before tourists in York. Owing much to the “happenings of the 1960s counter culture, these brightly-coloured performances provide an element of transcendence and festival, in the midst of the grey urban quotidian. But something more is needed.
Hit-and-run guerrilla evangelism is justified, especially when our strength is low: we just need to remind people of the alternative reality. This is the secret to assymmetrical warfare. However, it needs to rooted also in a lived community of local people; not just a floating population of full-time, but transitory, international missionaries. As John Pairman Brown wrote in the 1960s, the church can constitute a “liberated zone”, where the contrast society of the Kingdom can be built, within the detritus of the old declining culture.
This is also suggested by Graham Tomlin’s book, “The Provocative Church”. For example, former missionary to Brazil, Stuart Christine, building on his strategy from there, recommended each church should have a social project, meeting needs in the local community: simultaneously building credibility and community contacts. In his case, he advocated pre-school centres, based on his Brazilian experience. But I don’t think it really matters, so long as we connect.
Social action thus provides a pre-evangelistic practical apologetics layer for our outreach. However, we need to beware instrumentalising faith. Such projects have value in themselves, as expression of the gospel, not just as a cynical tool for drawing people in to hear the message. Here we must address, therefore, what the “gospel” is. The gospel is the gospel of the Kingdom of God. This is the key concept: the new beginning, new age, new order, announced and inaugurated, by Jesus the Messiah.
This challenges the uniform emphasis of conservative evangelicals on Pauline themes of justification, atonement, etc. These are, properly, secondary on the primary theme. Jesus announced the Kingdom, as a new age of blessing, the Holy Spirit, and justice for the poor and marginalised. In this, the preferences of both conservative and progressive Christians are brought together. The former rightly stress the submission due to the King: what is a Kingdom without a King, that is Jesus?
This introduces the notion of sin and guilt, where we fall short of the kingdom demands – for which we actually need the atonement, the cross, faith and justification. On the other hand, we need to retain the content of Kingdom obedience. It’s strange that so many evangelicals miss the actual works enjoined by Jesus’ brother, James, writing in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, which substantiate, or evidence our faith: that is works of social justice.
Evangelism, announcing the good news, must therefore be a declaration of the Kingdom, albeit in terms translated into today’s culture; and that includes a preferential for the poor, BLM and racial justice, peace-making, and protection for the unborn – a seamless pro-life ethic, as Cardinal Bernardin called it.
Hence, there is no contradiction between what we call “evangelism” and “social action”. Indeed, they are two sides of the same thing. Social action IS evangelism. That is, we can distinguish between the (verbal) proclamation of the Kingdom, and the (practical) demonstration of the Kingdom. Mission is therefore reconceived now as “integral mission”, what we used to call “holistic mission”; uniting the two dimensions.
As well as challenging conservatives, to widen their understanding, however, we also need to challenge the social activists. Signs of the Kingdom must include the miraculous, healings and deliverance; these cannot be demythologised or sidelined. Then, there is the problem, that while we have been good at loving in the name of Jesus, many of our social projects have not been good at naming the name of Jesus; there is little evidence of “integration” which would produce consistent integral mission. Finally, there has often been selectivity, in their choice of causes: frequently leaving out the demands of sexual purity, and the massacre of the innocents in mass abortions (although conservatives are equally selective, from the other direction).
In Hackney, we undertook several actions on behalf of immigrants: a sanctuary for a family about to be deported, which lasted for over three years; practical relief for Kurdish refugees, and planting a Turkish-Kurdish Church; partnership in racial justice organisations. In Paddington, we set up a major community centre, meeting needs in the local neighbourhood, building partnerships with other community and religious groups, and which became the leading player in regeneration efforts.
The results are not always favourable, however. Interventions in society frequently entail taking sides, as Kenneth Leech pointed out. Where injustice is done, we must support the oppressed. And that is controversial. I remember, when I was a youth worker, being pinned against the wall by two church leaders, after I gave a presentation, who thought I was accusing them of racism (I was!). Another church I know, lost members, when homeless and prostitutes began attending, because they upset the composure of middle class attenders.
We also lost people, when we supported refugees, because some church members thought we should prioritise “our own”, not foreigners. And during the sanctuary for the Ogunwobi family, we were followed by unmarked cars through the streets, spied on in church services; and on one occasion, meant to celebrate our unemployment project, I had to confront the Government Minister, responsible for immigration, in public.
This is the cost of prophetic obedience. We cannot reduce mission to simple matter of means-and-ends. We are witnesses to the present reality of the Kingdom, while simultaneously anticipating its future realisation. Sometimes that will provoke opposition, spiritual warfare: to some we are sweet aroma of life, to others the stench of death.
This means we have to recover the peculiarity of being God’s “peculiar people”. Not just “odd”, as we sometimes are, as out-of-date wiredos, but like the Amish, incarnating a loyalty to a different Covenantal way of life; still regarded as outmoded, like the Rechabites, but representing a dissenting, deviant, lifestyle rooted in revelation. Here, we can recognise our debt to the English Nonconformist tradition.
Here though, we must acknowledge that we have lost a great deal of our distinctiveness, as we have been absorbed into late capitalist culture. This is partly unconscious, due to the power of the spectacle; but also partly conscious, as we have deliberately sought to update our churches, in order to supposedly attract new adherents. The latter, with our Contemporary Christian Music, which I love, has also led to a dumbing down of discipleship, as we tried to assimilate to society, albeit for missional reasons.
It is notable that, for example, pre-marital sex is about as common among evangelical Christians, as in the wider population. There is no sense that faith might have any implication for our relationships. This has led, in Laurence Singlehurst’s words, to an “enthusiastic dualism”, whereby people can be full-on believers, praising the Lord, praying and reading their Bibles daily, but cultivating all manner of immoral sexual relationships. Hence, our corporate gospel witness is undermined. There is, quite simply, nothing to be converted to.
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