Since 2002, the Sydney Anglican diocese in particular has been launching ambitious efforts and projects, designed to attract people to the gospel and seek to save the lost.
They've been designed by very godly and dedicated, servant-minded people who really love those who don't know Christ.
Individual church parishes have had local missions. Individual lay people have gone on missions to places outside Sydney in their holiday time, and the Anglican church at large has embarked upon Connect 09.
We're all trying to get 10 percent of Sydney won over to the gospel within a 10 year time frame. So many plans and dreams.
The heart of connection
But the question is, what impact will this have on the lives of those who are really lost?
Connection is a lovely thing to have in mind, but how exactly do we connect with non-Christians when very few of us ever invite or bring anyone to church even when the occasional evangelistic event is put on? How many of us feel guilty when we don't?
Undoubtedly our churches are good at being theologically correct. But sometimes I wonder if it's this very bent towards precision that gets in the way of us being able to communicate the gospel of love.
When I first became a Christian, it was seeing how much God loved me . As I struggled with my sexuality and how sinful I was, it was through seeing God's love and the incredible extent of it in sending Jesus into the world for me to identify with that brought me into fellowship with Him. At that time, I was very broken. As much as Two Ways to Live is a helpful tool, I doubt that it would have brought me any closer to that crucial moment of trusting Jesus or challenging Bible study questions. I needed simply to know that Jesus loved me. I still need to hear it after 12 years of being Christian.
I suspect that sometimes when we share the gospel with the world it comes across as cynical and holier-than-thou.
A cultural museum?
Often we decry the cultural excesses that we see in our nation, such as the individualism and hedonism that is life here in Sydney.
Sure, we get frustrated at seeing people living in ignorance of God's Son. But at the same time we try to reach the lost, they're not interested in the gospel. They think us irrelevant because we seem blinded to the real matters impacting their hearts. We see our friends getting drunk and sleeping around and assume that they're problems are alcohol and sex. We're so distracted by the symptoms that we miss the real problems and thereby the opportunities to minister to their brokenness with Jesus' love.
We're so familiar with communicating the gospel with argument and the classical artillery of modernism (by proving irrefutably that Jesus really was God's Son, that He was real, and that He is the only way) that we seem to have forgotten the art of expressing Jesus’ message of love.
A church without the gospel of grace is no more than a cultural museum.
The image of God's impending king in Isaiah 53 is that He was a man familiar with sorrow and grief, able to empathise with man's suffering and fear of death (Hebrews 2:14-15). Is this the Jesus we're selling? If not, perhaps we need to change tack.
Haydn is a Sydney-based writer who works in research. He lives with his wife and two daughters and enjoys reading the wisdom literature of the Scriptures along with a great work of fiction.
