For decades my dentists have been assuring me that we live in the age of painless dentistry.
At first I was sceptical. This may have been because my dentists over the years have all had such perfect looking teeth that it was hard to imagine a needle or drill had ever been in their mouth. What would they know about pain? How could they empathise with their patients?
One even made the disgustingly ‘too good to be true’ claim that he had never had a filling!
But I have come around. I believe in painless dentistry. Nowadays my dentist gets tired of telling me to wake up and open a little wider. So she just jambs in a contraption that keeps my mouth open while I snore away. It’s amazing. I wake up a happy man, even a little higher than happy, although I can’t feel my jaw move when I talk. And I’m told, very slowly and deliberately, not to drink anything hot for four hours.
A combination of engineering, technology and affluence has taken us to new levels of convenience, comfort and consumer expectation.
All the hard work has been taken out of driving, with power steering, electric windows, sensors and cameras so we don’t have to rubber-neck to park. We don’t even have to turn a key these days. About time! It was always such an energy-sapping chore.
All the discomfort has been taken out of summer humidity and chilly winters. Homes, cars and shopping malls are filled with artificial air.
I have no problem with this. I’m all for pain-free living!
But have we become so used to everything being painless, even effortless, that we expect evangelism to come with a similar feel-good, press a button, easiness?
This move to pain-free evangelism has come about in a number of ways.
Almost Evangelism
One way has been to invent different adjectives for evangelism, designed to make the task look less intimidating. Or we have invented different styles of evangelism (and found a proof text for each style) and then said that there’s a style that is tailor made for you.
So we have had adjectives and styles of evangelism pouring forth like marketing propaganda: relational, intellectual, testimonial, direct, gentle, soft, service, invitational, personal, loving, lifestyle, and of course for those social terrorist types we have ‘confrontational’ evangelism
I even read about a style of evangelism described as ‘sparkling evangelism’. I can’t wait for someone to come up with ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly evangelism’ and to see what proof text they marshal to justify it.
Redefined Evangelism
Another way has been to come up with a lot of definitions of evangelism that look a bit like evangelism, sound a bit like evangelism and call them evangelism even though they aren’t. “It looks a bit like evangelism, it sounds a bit like evangelism, it must be evangelism,” is a dangerous trap to fall into.
What do we make of the classic quotes?
• Evangelise all the time but use words only when you have to
• Some people are into verbal witnessing (smell the tautology?) but I witness by the way I live
Specialist Evangelists
Yet another was to develop a highly sophisticated category of the gift of the Evangelist. The gift is mentioned in Ephesians 4:11 along with apostles, prophets and pastors and teachers. Philip is said to have had the gift of one (Acts 21:8). Timothy was to do the work of one (2 Timothy 4:5) although there is no specific mention that he had the gift. Was Paul alluding to the urgency of the times so that it was all hands on deck?
I was at a church a few years ago and introduced to a man who was described to me as having ‘the gift’ of the Evangelist. For the next 20 minutes he rattled on, barely drawing breath, without for a moment pausing to learn anything about me. I could only begin to imagine the number of poor souls he subjected to his soliloquies.
Why was it no surprise to me back a decade or so that when I fiddled a little with gift analysis surveys while running seminars that hardly anybody had the ‘big E’ gift? It can’t have been because we were oversupplied. Nor could it have been because the task was almost complete with just a tit-bit of mopping up to do.
Another variation of this ‘specialist syndrome’ was the subtle shift about 20 years ago from evangelism training programs like Two Ways To Live and Evangelism Explosion, where every believer was encouraged to participate in a ‘hands-on’ coaching methodology to learn how to share the faith with others, to evangelistic courses where only a few specialists were needed to teach the gospel over a period of weeks.
It started with Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha in Britain and Michael Bennett’s Christianity Explained in Australia and before long a dozen or so other courses had spawned in a bid to purify both the theology and methodology of the earlier models.
I was, and am, all for the principle behind these courses. I have promoted some, and even helped to seed bankroll one. But I was saddened to see that the new methodology was seen as ‘instead of’ rather than ‘both and’ resulting in a loss of momentum in the training of every believer to grow in competence and confidence in, what is at times, the brutally hard work of sharing the gospel.
Evangelism is going to hurt, any which way you cut it. Yes, we must speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). And, yes, we must speak with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15)
But there is never a painless way to speak about sin and judgement, heaven and hell, guilt and grace, failure and the need to be rescued and forgiven, death and resurrection.
Just the mention of the Lord Jesus may put you in the category of nice but nutty, or a mildly menacing person, or a maleovent threat to the very civility of society.
Our task is evangelism. It will never be easy. And it may not be painless.
Feature photo: Clover 1
