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Home › Blog › Archive › 2009 › July › 13 › Safety nets or fishing nets (by Dave Male)

Safety nets or fishing nets (by Dave Male)

Posted by: Andrew Wooding - 13 July 2009

Dave MaleI feel I have to respond to Paul Roberts' Share blog of 27th April entitled, What is 'missional'?, Paul argues that a church he is involved in can be missional without 'a proven and primary capacity to bring unbelievers to faith and discipleship'. He adds that 'full-on intentional evangelism work is still on the back foot'.

Sorry Paul, but that's not missional! It may well be important and necessary work, but it's not missional. But I do think Paul highlights an important discussion concerning what we mean by 'missional'. The danger I find is that with many emerging churches, everything is missional but mention evangelism at your peril.

Yet David Bosch, whose work on the Missio Dei is at the heart of our missional language, writes: 'Evangelism is the core, heart or centre of mission. We do not believe that the central dimension of evangelism, as calling people to faith and new life can ever be relinquished. I have called evangelism the heart of mission. With evangelism cut out, mission dies: it ceases to be mission' (Evangelism: Theological Currents and Cross-Currents Today).

Now, I am not suggesting that evangelism and mission are synonymous, but I do believe that evangelism is at the very heart of mission. We do not help the fresh expression movement if we are not enabling unchurched people to become transformed and transforming disciples of Jesus. As I have written elsewhere, we have too many safety nets and not enough fishing nets.

With many emerging churches, everything is missional but mention evangelism at your peril

We also do evangelism a disservice when we divorce it from discipleship. As Graham Cray says in the June edition of the e-xpressions newsletter, we need both quantity and quality. It is about winning people to Christ, but it is also about the qualities of discipleship that we are seeing developed in new converts and their communities.

The danger is we reject evangelism because our present (or past) models are deficient for this age. But that's no reason to excuse ourselves from the work of evangelism. The need is great today and so we must to do the hard work of seeking out and developing good, faithful and relevant models of evangelism. (There is no one model!)

Scott McKnight, the American theologian, in a recent article in Christianity Magazine (April 2009) on the emerging church, put it most bluntly and starkly when he wrote, 'Any movement that is not evangelistic is failing the Lord.'

Dave Male is involved in training pioneers in two Anglican theological colleges in Cambridge and is planting a church to connect with sports people, called Relay. His blog is here.

If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Beth Keith.

 

Comments

integrated evangelism

Posted by Beth Keith on 15 July 09 - 08:27

Comment from Cliff Kay (Sheffield MSM)

The discussion regarding 'what is missional' does require us to revisit our traditional understandings of the 'process and mechanics' of evangelism'. I would suggest that one of the reasons the Church is becoming more missional is because the established methods of evangelism 'dont cut it anymore' in the culture we are now a part of. Being missional allows us to 'redefine' the process of evangelism, from the bottom up. Those of us in our 40's are familiar with the 'event' of evangelism, rather than the process of it. By being much more integrated into the 'communities' where we seek to be missional, we are better able to identify and engage in the 'mars hill' like issues that we need to come to terms with in order for the message of the gospel to have real opportunity to germinate in the lives of the unchurched. Evangelism has not left the scene, but it certainly needs to be within the context of thorough engagement with the issues of people's lives. We have good reason to expect that discipleship as a process will become more prominant in an integrated missional approach to evangelism, than the practice of historic propositional 'hit and run' events that allow for little more than 'the moment of decision'. This form of evangelism has proved to be less effective in sustaining strong discipleship during the latter generations, from the pre-post modernity era.

What is missional?

Posted by Ian Mobsby on 17 July 09 - 00:22

I think it would be helpful to use the language that Steve Croft used in his chapter in Ancient Faith Future Mission. Where I think we are understanding missional to be contextual mission, and specifically building ecclesial communities out of contextual mission. In this approach, discipleship and catechesis are a stage of a much longer approach to doing mission. It is about relational evangelism, post-foundational approaches to orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy. So Evangelism is not about filling people with facts about God, but more about enabling people to know God through experience and encounter. So this creates a challenge to definitions coming out of the more redemptive and evangelical tradition which is foundational and based on rational fact based approaches to knowing. This is not easy. So actually I think both you Dave and Paul may be right, depending on context and on where you are at with a potential project becoming church, and where we need a place for orthodoxy and orthopraxis, where context may require different approaches.

What good news?

Posted by Pam Smith on 17 July 09 - 15:47

I've seen people doing great work with baptism families without ever mentioning Jesus, on the model that 'belonging' leads to 'believing' and we don't want to scare people off! In fact I think the 'belonging before believing' model applied to its logical conclusion has created churches full of 'belongers' which are run like clubs. So I do sympathise with the point that we have to be upfront about our faith and what motivates us.

But............. what good news do we have to tell people unless our own discipleship journey has taken us to a point of understanding our faith? I firmly believe that we need to be equipping the saints for evangelism and witness, wherever they are, but we have mdae it a specialism so that the only thing we have to offer is an invitation to the next Alpha supper. the 'ordinary' Christian who gets asked at work 'You're a Christian, aren't you? Why do you think God allows someone to walk into a school and shoot children?' needs to be able to answer.