One of the questions that has tickled my brain for years now is how the church can effectively preach the gospel in the postmodern context. Lots of people have written about this, and I usually revert back to Lesslie Newbigin, who said presciently in the 1960s that "the best apologetic for the gospel is a community that believes it."
So in essence the first work of evangelism is actually the cultivation of a community that lives out the gospel. Not totally, of course, but there must be some sense of differentness about the people called church. This way the words of the gospel flow out of a praxis of the implications of the gospel, making the proclamation much more powerful.
Apparently others are fascinated by such questions, too. Halden quotes J.C. Hoekendijk, who claims that in contexts where there is no Christian memory, where there is no initial belief to call people back to, evangelism must look very different from the revival meeting tradition that most of Protestantism comes out of. Specifically we must think about our culture as a mission field and ourselves as missionaries, bringing the gospel to people who really don't know anything about it. Thus if we look to mission contexts to learn lessons, we find interesting results. Hoekendijk writes:
No-Man’s-Land shew remarkable similarity of structure. The pattern of
work of these new methods may be summarised as follows: to make clear
the meaning of the word of proclamation (kerygma) by means of a life lived in fellowship (koinonia) and finding its expression in simple service (diakonia)."
To me, that seems to get down to the fundamentals of preaching the gospel in a postmodern context: we make a clear pronouncement of the gospel, which is intricately bound up with a life lived in fellowship with others (the embodied witness of the church), but this life of fellowship is not a segregated society, but one that lives in and among the people they seek to impact with the gospel, living lives of simple service to people and their culture. Kerygma, koinonia, and diakonia sums it up very nicely.
Ben,
Great thoughts. I love Newbigin. I also like Yoder as well, especially when I bring Yoder in conversation with Newbigin.
Here are a couple rich quotes from them that speak to this issue well.
“The Christian gospel has sometimes been made the tool of an imperialism, and of that we have to repent. But at its heart is the denial of all imperialism, for at its center there is the cross where all imperialisms are humbled and we are invited to find the center of human unity in the One who was made nothing so that all might be one. The very heart of the biblical vision for the unity of humanity is that its center is not an imperial power but a slain Lamb.” – Newbigin
What is needed today is to have an apologetics of embodiment, one that gives real teeth to the life and teachings of Jesus, where we learn to follow the Liberator of those who have been oppressed by the system, the Lover of those who have been rejected by society, and the Deliverer of those who have been seduced by consumerism.
When proclaiming the kingdom, I like to help people remember that our story is not just a private one dealing with personal morality, but also a public one dealing with powers and principalities that need redemption. Our story is centered on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
I’m totally with you in how proclamation, embodied witness and service are “intricately bound up.” Hauerwas makes a great point when he says, “Just as scientific theories are partially judged by the fruitfulness of the activities they generate, so narratives can and should be judged b the richness of moral character and activity they generate.”
It seems to me, that to become a Christian is to become so much a part of God’s story as written in the holy text that we become living texts ourselves. Our story is a public one, a political one. It is a story that produces the fruit of the Spirit and builds a contrast-society as a witness to the world.
I will leave with Yoder’s description of this embodied witness, the kind of community that God is building through His Spirit, that no doubt includes service and proclamation: The political novelty that God brings into the world is a community of those who serve instead of ruling, who suffer instead of inflicting suffering, whose fellowship crosses lines instead of reinforcing them. This new Christian community in which the walls are broken down not by human idealism or democratic legalism but by the work of Christ is not only a vehicle of the gospel or only a fruit of the gospel; it is the good news. It is not merely the agent of mission or the constituency of a mission agency. This is the mission.” – Yoder