Hello everyone,

Consider this my first New Year’s Greeting. The holidays and early part of 2010 have brought my family and me much joy and sorrow. A baby was a born, a grandfather passed away, and a new semester began with the typical pressures one might expect. While all of these things obviously can create some degree of angst, I am encouraged about the future that the Lord, in his good providence, will lead us all into.

Concerning this blog, I owe my regular readers a lengthy apology for not having posted any new essays in a number of months (four to be approximate). I would ascribe this to the rigors of ministry, studies, and other unexpected happenings. I also hope this serves as a reminder to you all that I am committed to posting quality, well-conceived, well-researched essays on matters of theology, spirituality, and culture. This, along with my continued reticence toward  electronic media such as blogs to convey meaningful and serious content is why nothing new has been posted until this update.

I do want to inform you all that I am currently working on a big project that will entail many more stimulating (hopefully) essays on the same range of issues I have been addressing for the last couple of years on Truth and Faith. As soon as that project has launched, I will be sure to make you all aware of how you might participate in the conversation.

Thanks for your patronage.

-W. Jackson Watts

2/1/10

    There is no more basic task intrinsic to the Christian life than evangelism. It is the calling of every believer to spread abroad the message of Christ in the hedges and highways of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost. Simultaneously, evangelism is perhaps the most difficult and nerve-wrecking experience for most Christians. Call it mere bashfulness, or plain fear. Whatever label you give the moment of sheer anxiety that precedes an attempt at evangelism, it’s common to most of us. 

     It’s rather ironic that the very thing that opens our eyes to the truth – the Gospel of Christ being shared with us and the Holy Spirit opening our heart to receive it – is also the very same thing that so many of us have a difficult time being a part of once we’ve become Christians. Numerous books are out there telling us how to be the witnesses we often shirk from being. Probably one of the most familiar titles that summarizes this matter best is William Fay’s classic Share Jesus Without Fear.

      It’s not simply a problem of there not being enough literature on the matter. There have been practical works over the years written on this matter. However, there is one other factor that I think has perhaps gone overlooked in the literature on the subject. Once a person moves beyond their own fears and anxieties about the evangelistic encounter, they have to faithfully evangelize in a society whose very structure does not lend itself well to evangelism. Often we focus on the content of the message in a pluralistic society being a problem. And I would agree with this, and affirm that the Gospel has and will always be a stumbling block in every age. However, what about the shape of our lives that we are often ignorant of, which we create, and our society creates for us while we just embrace it unwittingly? The case I would make is that besides the typical fear of sharing, and the stumbling block of the Gospel itself, there are some factors that Christians are going to have to confront and deal with concerning the very social structure of this age in order to be faithful evangelists. Let me illustrate this issue anecdotally.

     A few months ago I made a trip to my local Bank of America. What was not so typical about this trip was that I did not have a deposit slip along with my check. Thus, instead of making my normal convenient trip through the drive-thru window I had to actually enter the bank, fill out a slip, and approach a counter. I was greeted by a lovely, middle-aged Asian-American woman named Sun Choe. I was pleasantly greeted by her as I handed my check and slip across the counter. As she processed my deposit she noticed I had a shirt bearing the University of South Carolina logo on it. She then informed me that she had a nephew who attended the school. This led to us discussing her family and places she had lived in the past, including her South Carolina associations. When the deposit was completed for a moment I felt a twinge of sadness that our conversation was to end. I thanked her, and left the bank.

     Standing in a line with people behind you in the bank is certainly not the best place to begin evangelizing. It is going to be difficult to get a hearing for someone about the meaning of their life, their views on God, and their need of eternal salvation when they are on the job in the midst of helping customers (though workplace evangelistic opportunities do exist).Nevertheless, it is the relational component that was present in this exchange. So much of our evangelism must entail having an authentic salty presence in the world and around particular people on a regular basis (Mt. 5.13-16). It demonstrates that we are real people who march to the beat of a different drum – the drum of Christ’s kingdom rule. Yet it is going to be difficult to be salt and light when the social and economic structures of our day includes things like drive-through windows, night deposits, and other such things that preclude face-to-face interaction.

     In addition to this, one’s ability to let their let shine is greatly diminished when the luxuries of the day get in the way. So let’s put aside for a moment the problem of opportunity since the same person won’t always be working at the bank when I swing by anyway. Let’s also set aside the issue of mere fear. When people are on airplanes another evangelistic obstacle kicks in: the selfish individualism that is built into most modern technologies. Sitting beside someone on a plane is one of the best opportunities to make conversation. You have a significant amount of time to engage someone who cannot run away from you. Even talking about life and death can be easy. After all, you’re on a plane that could go down at any moment! Yet so many cannot bypass the iPod ear-plugs long enough to at least catch the name of their travel companion. This sort of individualism on the part of Christians often goes unnoticed because it is so common. However, these sorts of things transpire in our lives all the time.

      Consider cell-phone use. It is not uncommon to gaze around a college campus, a public park, or a shopping mall and observe half of all the people who are present gabbing away on their phones. This is a bare social observation, but it really presents a challenge. How do you engage people in the public square that are otherwise engaged with people who aren’t even physically present? There is no easy solution to this, though I would offer one proposal to believers who want to take evangelism seriously. Is it conceivable that Christians could be the kinds of people who refuse to chat away while being at the drive-through at Burger King? Why aren’t the followers of Christ the ones who take their embodied existence seriously, so much that they would put forth the effort to be authentically present where they are instead of fiddling with their Blackberry? Why don’t Christians set the tone for the broader society and cultivate a culture of civility and manners where we give attention to the people who are moving and living in darkness all around us?

       I have only mentioned a few examples of things that make evangelism more difficult for Christians. These socio-economic factors include the constant presence of communication technologies, drive-through windows at places of commerce (banks, fast-food, etc.), self-checkouts at grocery stores, and a myriad of other things. These disconnect us from being present in the lives of those who need to be shown the light of Christ. So for the Christian who takes evangelism seriously in the modern world, he is going to have to work to create opportunities. He will have to unplug from devices in order to speak and build bridges by which God’s grace can be conveyed. The world we once knew is mostly gone. No longer are we on first name bases with our grocer, bank teller, and librarian. It has even become more difficult to forge lasting relationships with more intimate figures in our lives such as our dentist and barber.

       As I mentioned before, some of these obstacles are rooted in the way a society is ordered commercially, economically, and socially. Yet our own selfishness, individualism, and narcissism don’t help either. We are often more concerned with productivity and efficiency than authenticity and embodied presence in the world. Perhaps worst of all, our success at being efficient comes not only at the expense of those we ignore. This frenetic pace of life hurts us as well. As Dorothy Bass notes, “all these experiences leave us feeling not only exhausted but inadequate. We are perpetually behind, as things we have not had time to do pile up on our desks and kitchen counters, our dressers and workbenches. With never enough time, we see ourselves as incompetent underachievers” (Bass, Receiving the Day, 58). The clock, it seems, which once had human beings as its maker and master, has now mastered us (26).

      Christians, therefore, must lay aside earthly things, and break through the social conventions of their day in order to let their saltiness permeate the crust of the culture. Society is decaying day after day and will continue to do so until something stops the rot. At the same time countless souls are fumbling around in the darkness as we walk by on our cell phones on a call that could have easily waited until later. These need the light desperately. But a light under a basket does no one any good. Let’s just hope someone in the house gets the picture before the bridegroom arrives.

Selected Bibliography:

Coleman, Robert. The Master Plan of Evangelism

Dever, Mark. The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

Green, Michael. Evangelism and the Early Church.

     For people who want to understand the times in which they live, there is always the temptation to believe, consciously or not, that they are more uniquely situated than anyone else in history. Certainly Plato did not own a ballpoint pen, nor Augustine a typewriter, or Luther a laptop. No one would deny the political, technological, and cultural factors that separate a 21^st century American from, say, a 12^th century peasant living in the countryside of Gaul. However, there is an ever-present tendency for evangelicals to fall prey to a chronological pride regarding their own time and cultural situation.

     On the surface it may seem good to perceive the uniqueness of our own day. This sort of thinking might shake us from our complacency in maintaining the status quo. It can help us not to assume too much about what we are ministering to. However, the problem arises when we are snookered into thinking our day and circumstances are unlike any other. This can lead to a feeling of hopelessness and therefore we panic. On the other hand, one could grow prideful in his uniqueness, and thus approach life naïvely, though well-intentioned. It’s easy to justify reinventing the wheel if you think the roads you’re traveling have never been trod before.

     Pastors are especially prone to discouragement among other callings. While on Monday through Saturday they know their justification and sanctification is by grace through faith, on Sunday morning when they gaze into so many empty pews and blank faces they feel they have let God down. Though sometimes this sentiment is rooted in pride and desire for earthly aplomb, many fine ministers simply feel as if the problems they face are unprecedented, and they are left with no one with whom to commiserate.

     It is an encouragement for these church leaders to hear of other faithful soldiers dealing with, and in some cases overcoming these difficulties. However, even then thinking beyond our moment in history to past generations of servants can be equally profitable. When one opens the sermons for 4^th century preacher John “Golden Mouth” Chrysostom they encounter familiar pastoral woes, such as the laxity of people in their church attendance during the summer! In addition, Chrysostom boldly called Christians to repent of the fact that they knew the names and vital stats of the gladiatorial athletes of their day better than they knew the Scriptures. While in one sense this is sad, it is also a humorous encouragement to the 21^st century pastor who feels his frustrations are unique to his own ministry.

     However, it isn’t just discouragement that is a problem. This obsession with the apparent uniqueness of one’s own time is that it often leads to various forms of pride and conceit. In referring to this, the modern scientific aphorism “we now know that….” comes to mind. Entailed in this is the tacit belief that 1) Our own day, since it is most recent, is superior to the past because of the modern notion of human progress – “things are just getting better and better; 2) The myth that simply having more information makes us wiser.

    Os Guinness in his book Prophetic Untimeliness notes that in past centuries it was always the past that was perceived to be the best understood. The present was less clear because events were still transpiring all at once, and the future was very much a mystery, for it was in God’s hand. Today the story is very different. We feel the past is irrelevant, and the present is clear since we are bombarded with the latest facts, happenings, and details on a minute-by-minute basis. As a result of all this, we think we can see into the future so clearly as well.

     The Bible warns against this pride about our circumstances. We are warned to watch for Christ’s second return because we know not the hour of his return. The book of Proverbs is shot through with warnings to walk carefully. James brings this warning to bear on daily economic and social endeavors by telling us that we are a vapor and we ought not boast of our plans to go into the city tomorrow to make a great profit. In other words, presuming on the future just because we think we have a good enough handle on the present is risky business.

     The final problem of this supposed uniqueness is often the next logical step which results from our pride or our discouragement. We feel compelled to reinvent our way of doing things in order to accommodate changes. In many ways this is wise. Assumptions about what people know concerning God, the Bible, and Christianity need to be closely examined. For that matter, assumptions about what presuppositions people have, and especially the epistemological landscape (how people know what they know) is changing. These things must be weighed carefully. However, my concern is that sometimes when Christian leaders look at the pluralism and general paganism of their day, in their fear of irrelevancy they surrender their emphasis on wisdom, excellence, and biblical ideals.

     While no one would deny the increasing post-Christian mood in Western culture, this insight can prevent us from being aware of the simple fact that the challenge of pluralism is not new. In fact, the apostolic Christians had to deal with these things in a far greater way than we. Frankly, very few of us could conceive of walking past open idol worship and cult prostitutes on the way to church. While we want to discern and confront pluralism where it tries to invade Christian thought, we at the same time want to remember not to unnecessarily compromise and accommodate to the world in our ethics or aesthetics for the sake of reaching people because we think we have no other option. After all, the apostles didn’t operate this way.

     D.A. Carson summarizes it nicely. Though things are different today than the apostolic age, at least in terms of degree,

       “We are returning, through no virtue of our own, to the same thing analogous to the pluralistic world the earliest    Christians had to confront, and so in this sense the New Testament can be applied to us and our culture more directly than was possible fifty years ago. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the modern rush toward pluralism owes a great deal to the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past century and a half, while the church in the first century carried no such burden. Even so, we shall be less morbid and despairing if we read the Scriptures today and recognize that the challenges of pluralism are not new.” [2]

     In other words, a fresh look at history and even the Scripture itself is necessary for us to overcome this myopic understanding of the true nature of our times and the sort of ministry necessary to confront it.

       As Christians, we need to muster enough humility to admit our perennial need of God’s grace in being his peculiar, set-apart people in every generation. At the same time, we need the wisdom from above to discern our day and ask the probing questions which will uncover the way things really are. Indeed, part of being a mature Christian is simply being able to see things as they are once we’ve confessed our own blindness as fallen men (Jn. 9). Hopefully once we’ve done that we’ll see that it’s possible to be unique, yet ordinary at the same time.

 [1] Os Guinness, Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 15-16.

[2] D.A. Carson, “Christian Witness in an Age of Pluralism,” in God and Culture: Essays in Honor of Carl F.H. Henry, D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), 45.

Several years ago a friend in college used a phrase that I had never heard before, but has stuck with me to this day: “the mob mentality.” There was nothing exceptionally profound about it, but it was the context of the discussion that I still recall. He explained how easy it is to find yourself doing absurd and even violent things whenever you’re in a large group of people. Crowds tend to carry an aura of power and swagger. When the collective failures and flaws of individuals come together they are prone to certain behaviors that most of them would never fall prey to as individuals. But the temptation is to forget that this applies to believers as well as non-believers.

Completely blinded by sinful and selfish hearts (Jer. 17:9), people can easily travel paths that are not paved with wisdom, love, holiness, and truth. Maybe they’d never let a Christian friend talk them into something as adolescent as drinking and driving, but many other behaviors that are just as spiritually reckless become acceptable because they happen to be part of a group [read circle, crew, or clique] that doesn’t frown upon those things. Again, this isn’t an issue of simple commandment-keeping. This is about the robust doctrine of Christian wisdom that permeates Scripture. So why associate with people that can’t hear wisdom as she cries out in the streets (Prov. 1:20)?

Recently in reading 19th century philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard I was reminded of this concern. Kierkegaard often is marginalized and frowned upon today by evangelical theologians for his unfortunate “faith as a blind leap” theology. Yet as Francis Schaeffer and others have noted, his devotional writings are quite powerful. Listen to the words of Kierkegaard concerning being “against the crowd”:

      ”We warn young people against going to den of iniquity, even out of curiosity, because no one knows what might        happen. Still more terrible, however, is the danger of going along with the crowd. In truth, there is no place, not even one most disgustingly dedicated to lust and vice, where a human being is more easily corrupted – than in the crowd.”  (23)

His words are sobering and may seem harsh to many of us. Surely Kierkegaard is thinking more of the heathen than Christians. But the reality is because of sin’s taint and the power of depravity is pervasive in all people’s hearts, the ability of a crowd, albeit small or large, to cloud our judgment is still very much a threat to our character and reputation. I defer again to Kierkegaard:

      “Even though every individual possesses the truth [true Christians], when he gets together in a crowd, untruth will be present at once, for the crowd is untruth. It either produces impenitence and irresponsibility or it weakens the individual’s sense of responsibility by placing it in a fractional category…..imagine an individual walking up to Christ and spitting on him. No human being would ever have the courage or the audacity to do that. But as part of a crowd, well then they somehow have the ‘courage’ to do it – dreadful truth!” (23)

His words here are stunning. However, when we take a moment and survey the current landscape of society is this not obvious? A perusal of the dictatorial and fascist regimes of the twentieth century show us how facile some can be at manipulating the crowd. It becomes apparent that “to win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.”

The Psalter and the Proverbs alike are filled with warnings to the godly about the type of company they keep. These warnings come from men who generally were godly, David and Solomon. At the same time, if anyone knew about the long-term damage that can be done to your reputation, body, and soul by bad company it was these two men. Consider Solomon’s love for many foreign women who turned his heart toward foreign gods. Then consider David’s sin with Bathsheba and then the murder of her husband. It appears that others were involved in orchestrating these events without a word of rebuke to the king of his ungodliness until the prophet Nathan came forth. A picture of the kind of suffering and remorse believer’s should anticipate can be found clearly in Psalm 51.

The argument is not simply that a bigger group of depraved people are more ungodly than one depraved person (though I suppose in theory this is true). Rather, the company Christians keep must be those who will sharpen them, not dull them. Friendships should challenge us to a closer walk with Christ as we resist those that will turn a blind eye to our sin and immaturity. As socially comfortable as it may be, we ought to avoid dwelling among those who will only confirm our prejudices, and not those who will challenge them in good faith.

Any Christian would acknowledge that this counsel is in keeping with Scripture. However, the tendency is to avoid being intentional about the kinds of relationships we form. More often than not, the default setting for choosing friends is “whoever makes me feel good about myself, doesn’t challenge me, and allows me to behave however I like. Beyond that, if they share my taste in music, movies, and clothes, then that adds icing to the cake.”

Perhaps the real point of the matter is the fear of going against the grain. It is much easier to go with the flow of things instead of having the boldness to reject the things everyone else is embracing. As Vance Havner once said, any old fish can just go with the flow of the current, even a dead fish. It takes a fish with some heart to swim against the current. Kierkegaard refers to this courage when he says

      “I could weep, even want to die, when I think about how the public, with its daily press and anonymity, make things so crazy. That an anonymous person, by means of the press, day in and day out can say whatever he wants to say, what he perhaps would never have the courage to say face-to-face as an individual to another individual, and can get thousands to repeat it, is nothing less than a crime – and no one has responsibility! What untruth! Such is the way of the crowd. ” (24)

May the Holy Spirit convict us, and grant us the wisdom to more closely examine the crowd of which we are a part.                

 (All quotations come from Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard)