Season 4 - Episode 37
To listen to an audio version of this post, visit www.covenantchurch.ca/podcasts/covenant-weekly.
For a time when I was growing up, my church had an “Evangelism Ministry.” It involved adults being assigned a partner and a neighbourhood each week - yes, it ran weekly - and together the team would go door to door attempting to prompt conversations about God and, if they followed the script properly, get people to pray “the sinner’s prayer.” This would ensure “the sinner” a place in heaven when they die and be a source of deep gratification for the one who helped that person escape the fires of hell. To my knowledge, this ministry venture didn’t bear the fruit of a single genuine convert, which is likely a part of why it eventually ceased to exist. This kind of ministry, and others like street preaching, debate-centred apologetics, and aggressive online proselytizing, have led many in the church to shy away from talking openly about their relationship with God through Jesus. We also live in a culture where religion and politics are still the two things we supposedly aren’t supposed to talk about while sitting at the bar. All this combined can lead to many of us having an innate aversion to our next Be In Christ Church of Canada value. We’re talking about Witnessing to the World in this Covenant Weekly for May 27, 2025
Witnessing to the World: We value an active and loving witness for Christ to all people.
An honest look at BIC history shows that this value was not a part of our tradition from the beginning. Anabaptists, for many centuries, emphasized discipleship and community over conversion and personal salvation. Within this context, they sought to live lives that were apart from the world, trusting that their uniqueness and godliness would do the talking for them.
That began to change in the 1800’s as the evangelical missionary movement began to influence this plain-clothed, set-apart people. And as BIC missionaries began to be sent overseas, an awareness also grew of the need to be willing to actively share the good news of Jesus with people in our contexts. During this time, we discerned that some of our practices did more to hinder communicating the way of Jesus than they did to help us grow in the way of Jesus. And if something like plain-dress didn’t help us become more Christlike and it hindered our ability to share the way of Jesus, we discerned that faithful disciples would reject it as a practice. And BIC began to change.
By the time our values were discerned in the 1980s, the BIC’s commitment to witnessing to the world was deeply established. But this value is not the same thing as the evangelism practices of my childhood.
Note first, that the word “evangelism” is not used. This value isn’t describing an effort to get someone to convert or pray a prayer. We are very aware that how one responds to the good news of Jesus is between them and God. Our job is not to convince or coerce someone. Our job is to witness to the grace and love of God that we’ve experienced, to affirm the lifegiving nature of scripture as read through the lens of Jesus, to embody worship as we faithfully follow Jesus within the context of a loving, gracious, and accepting community of faith. We bear witness to what we see, know, and experience.
When talking with some others about a Jesus-centred paradigm for church (see https://www.centeredsetchurch.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnW8hkAy3jM for information about this paradigm, which focuses on inviting people to orient towards Jesus), we discussed the metaphor that Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost use in their book The Shaping of Things to Come. They talk about ranches in Australia that are so vast, it is impossible to build and maintain fences to keep cattle in. They need the space to graze so they can’t just put them in smaller areas of land. But when fences are the only paradigm for keeping cattle close, what can those ranchers do? They need to figure something else out. The solution is they build wells. Because the animals need the life-giving water the well produces, they never stray too far from the well, and they always come back.
Translated to the church, the idea is that rather than constantly putting up fences in the church to discern or decide who is in or out, we centre on the well–who ultimately is Jesus. An essential question that came up in this conversation was, “If we aren’t focused on who is in and out, what happens with evangelism? What are we trying to convince them of?”
This value answers that question. We aren’t trying to convince them of anything. We bear witness to the well from which life-giving water is available. We witness to the life we have received from it and we ask if they would be interested in drinking from it too!
This is an active and loving witness for Christ. It honours the other on their journey. It doesn’t try to convince or coerce, but neither is it silent. The life-giving water of Jesus that we have experienced is so wonderful that we want to tell people about it, and we’d love to share it! We are active in that. But we are also loving. We don’t drown people by trying to force it down their throats.
And we believe that this water is available to and for all people. There is no one who is too far away from the well that they can’t hear and respond to the invitation to come and drink. We aren’t called to preselect people we think will or won’t respond.
When my best friend entered first-year university, he made a commitment to try to actively share about Jesus and invite someone to join him at church. (It wasn’t a centred-set context, and getting someone to church was probably even better than getting them to pray the sinner’s prayer.) He went to frosh week with his eyes open for someone who might be open to the version of the gospel we believed at the time. Among a group of guys he met early that week, he zoned in on one person. He told me about him and said that by the end of the week, he was going to invite him to church. On the last day of frosh week, he risked it and asked his new friend if he wanted to come to church. That friend graciously, but very quickly, declined and said it wasn’t for him. My best friend was dejected that his efforts were rebuffed when suddenly, a completely different person, one who had been dismissed as a potential church candidate, approached my friend and said, “I heard you invite that guy to church. Would it be okay if I came with you on Sunday?” He came to church virtually every week after that. He came to know and love Jesus. He eventually became a deacon at that church.
I share this story as a reminder that our best efforts to discern who the “right people” or “ready people” are to hear about Jesus are futile. Responses are beyond us, so let’s free ourselves of that responsibility. Our invitation is to actively and lovingly bear witness through our words and deeds, and leave the rest in God’s hands.