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Monday, March 24, 2008

Brown, Fred. Secular evangelism. London: S.C.M. Press, 1970. 

Unfortunately, many of us, indebted to the church and anxious to be faithful, spend too much time looking over our shoulders. Even if we venture a little on the merging boundaries of the church and the world, that seeming no man's-land in which crucial theological battles are fought, we quickly clamour for the security of familiar thought-forms and esoteric practices. We scurry down the funk holes of orthodoxy in the name of defending the faith, of being true to our spiritual forefathers. But all too often our motivation is fear; no, not fear, for that is honourable enough. It is cowardice, the spirit that mistakes bigotry for conviction, and shouts slogans to hide its paucity of thought. 12-13

We are in danger of being unfaithful to our spiritual forebears, but for reasons the opposite of the ones we imagine. We are allowing the fruits of their organizing skill to evolve into institutions which restrict rather than expand our evangelical enterprise. We are relegating God to a mausoleum, fearful that he will make the theological scene untidy by breaking free of our verbal embalming. We are giving our traditional way of doing things a divine mandate, and shouting futile protest at the rapidly changing ways of society. Our battle cry is safety first, whereas Jesus promised not safety, but security. No wonder we are afraid to take risks, to venture like Abraham into a far country of uncertainty and danger. pp13

Church accused of having 'big convictions about little things and little convictions about big things pp26

We should stop thinking of evangelism as a means of inflating our congregations. Since the days of which I am writing, a lot of troubled water has flowed under the bridge of evangelical debate, and now most of us are agreed that to treat people as pew fodder, and little else, is, considerations of effectiveness apart, a denial of everything central to Christianity. But it took a long time for some of us to perceive this elementary truth, and even now I come across frightening evidence that some Christian zealots are motivated in all their evangelical outreach by one obsession only - to fill pews and get people converted. On the surface, of course, nothing could seem more reasonable. People need the gospel. They are frustrated, ridden with guilt, plagued by anxiety, living at crosspurposes with themselves and God. He has the answer to their plight, an answer he revealed in Jesus Christ and committed to his church. Logically if conversion is what people need, then the church's preoccupation should be evangelism, getting people converted. What could be more natural, therefore, than that pewfilling should have top priority in the aims of all loyal churchmen, not to mention keen evangelicals. As I say, on the surface the argument makes sense. But beneath the surface it represents nothing less than devout blasphemy, a spirit that has done more harm to the cause of Christ's kingdom than multitudes of non-churchgoers. It is devout because its sincere aim is to serve God and further his cause. But it is blasphemy because it uses God's name to manipulate and condition other people. pp29

A few years ago the Salvation Army launched a nation-wide scheme to establish 'over-sixty' clubs. The need for such weekly gatherings, and the programme of social service that flowed out of them, was urgent. Many pensioners were lonely and bored. With time on their hands and nowhere to go, they gravitated, especially the men, to library reading rooms, betting shops, cafes and coffee bars; the women, with their fellowship meetings and sewing circles, were better placed, but many of them remained isolated and friendless. The Salvation Army's immediate aim was characteristically down-toearth - it was simply to provide the opportunity for a weekly get-together, a time for games, singing, talking and tea-drinking, not forgetting the inevitable formal religion at the end. Clubs sprang up all over the country and soon in some cities and towns were a major activity....One fiery evangelist, sincere, dedicated and industrious, summed up the attitude of a small minority when he refused to establish a club on the grounds that God had called him to build an army, not act as nursemaid to people with one foot in the grave. He was not callous or insensitive. His friends described him as a man with a 'passion for souls'. He was single-minded in seeking to fulfil his vocation, particularly in organizing events to fill his pews. But he turned from a ministry to human need in the name of building first the kingdom of God. He put converts before people. He thought more of saving souls than serving sinners.

The basic trouble was that, like the evangelical zealots who still think like him, he was not committed to people for their own intrinsic value. He was committed to them as a means to an end; the end was laudable enough, but when it made the means little more than an exercise in pious self-interest, there was something drastically wrong. pp30





The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to 'the beyond in our midst', to the Christ in the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the prisoner. Only if we are more likely to recognize him there after attending an act of worship is that worship Christian rather than a piece of religiosity in Christian dress. That is what is implied in Jesus' saying that 'the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath'. The whole of our religious observance and church~going must be prepared to submit to its test. John Robinson pp99 honest to god

Dre we say that WB was not worshipping when, incensed by the refusal of match-making factory employers to protect employees from the possibility of phossy Jaw... he startted his own factory 113

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Comments:
Secular Evangelism
by Fred Brown
SCM Press Ltd, 1970

To turn our back to the world is to turn away from God. Yet some of us, calling ourselves evangelicals, motivated by the noblest of intentions, are doing just this in the name of religion. We view secular and permissive society as our call to rearguard action, meaning separation from the world and fastidious adherence to traditional evangelical terminology. On a number if occasions, sharing with older Christians my bewilderment at not being able to communicate my faith in God to modern man, I have been advised to stick to proven ways and words. ‘Preach the old truths,’ they have urged. ‘Talk about Jesus and the people will come’ (meaning come to evangelical meetings). ‘Hold up the Cross; preach the Blood.’ ‘Call people to repent and be saved.’ When I have asked for evidence that this was being done effectually anywhere in Britain they have vaguely mentioned isolated churches of this denomination or that; and ignored the vast majority f churches and chapels where, despite the ministries of dedicated men and women, numbers are falling off and the general situation is one of chronic disappointment and bewilderment; or that they claimed that because this was not being done, the present malaise in the total church was inevitable, and proved their point.

Nevertheless, we evangelicals, or far too many of us, continue to prepare for operations as though stood still for fifty years. We engage in dialogues, teach-ins, conferences and endless talking by other names to improve existing forms of evangelism. Cleary we believe that once we have learned how to streamline our presentation, modernize our techniques of communication, people will listen to our message and respond. The assumption is often made, for instance, that our open-air meetings are largely ignored because the meetings themselves are not well enough conducted. The need is for more prayerful preparation and skilful leadership, for music that people know and enjoy, for a vocabulary related to everyday life, for efficiency, conciseness and topicality. Get these things right and – we are assured – the desired success will automatically follow.

It is my conviction that God is speaking to the church through the young people of this and other countries. I believe that their new-found freedom is of God the Holy Spirit. That freedom has not been given by their elders; the young people have taken it, sometimes inspired by the values that belong to God’s kingdom. Youth is on the march, not on the side of the big battalions, but often with the despised minority fighting for moral values. I believe that God is using the rebellious, truculent, lovable, stupid, exasperating, irrepressible, desperately caring, sincere young people of today to challenge the Christian church to release on an ever broader front the truth that is centred in Christ and that expresses, sometimes in surprising ways, the perspective that gives life cohesion and direction. Unfortunately, many of us, indebted to the church and anxious to be faithful, spend too much time looking over our shoulders. Even if we venture a little on the merging boundaries of the church and the world, that seeming no-man’s-land in which crucial theological battles are fought, we quickly clamour for the security of familiar thought-forms and esoteric practices. We scurry down the funk holes of orthodoxy in the name of defending the faith, of being true to our spiritual forefathers. But al too often our real motivation is fear; no, not fear, for that is honourable enough. It is cowardice, the spirit that mistakes bigotry for conviction, and shouts slogans to hide its paucity of thought.

We are in danger of being unfaithful to our spiritual forebears, but for reasons the opposite of the ones we imagine. We are allowing the fruits of their organizing skills to evolve into institutions which restrict rather than expand our evangelical enterprise. We are relegating God to a mausoleum, fearful that he will make the theological scene untidy by breaking free of verbal embalming. We are giving our traditional way of doing things a divine mandate, and shouting futile protest at the rapidly changing ways of society. Our battle cry is safety first, whereas Jesus promised not safety, but security. No wonder we are afraid to take risks, to venture like Abraham into a far country of uncertainty and danger.

The time has come – is long overdue – for us to face reality, life as it is and not as we should like it to be. In the situation that faced us in the heart of London we inescapably had to decide what to do, though in reality there was only one thing we could so. Theoretically, we could have condemned the people concerned for not listening to our traditional presentation of the gospel and withdrawn; or we could have continued in the same old way, we tried the latter for some considerable time, until driven to admit that not only was our message utterly unintelligible to our hearers, but because of the way we were saying it they were rapidly reaching the conclusion that the Christian gospel itself, which we claimed to represent, was obviously not for them. The only answer was to find some better means of communicating our faith to them.
 
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