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CHAPTER 12

Incarnation and the Church’s Evangelistic Mission

Darrell L. Guder

In the ecumenical conversation about mission and evangelism in the last decade, there is frequent reference to “doing mission and evangelism in Jesus Christ’s way.” In 1989, the World Council of Churches (WCC) convened its conference on world mission and evangelism in San Antonio under the theme, “Your Will Be Done: Mission in Christ’s Way.”1 In 1987, an international grouping of ecumenical-evangelical missiologists and church leaders met in Stuttgart to consider the forthcoming San Antonio meeting. Their purpose was to think about the evangelistic mission of the church and to prepare a statement reflecting their insights for the 1989 conference. The result was a book entitled Proclaiming Christ in Christ’s Way: Studies in Integral Evangelism.2 In 1982, the WCC’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism presented its major statement, Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation.3 It contains a section entitled “Mission in Christ’s Way.” The reception of this language can be traced around the world. In 1991, for example, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) adopted a document on mission and evangelism entitled Turn to the Living God — A Call To Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way,4 which specifically refers to the WCC statement of 1982.5

This imagery, “doing mission and evangelism in Jesus Christ’s way,” indicates a broadening ecumenical consensus about the relationship between the Incarnation — the actual way in which the Word became flesh or the model of Jesus’ life — and the way in which the church goes about its mission. Such an “incarnational” approach (“incarnational” is apparently a twentieth-century neologism) raises a lot of questions, particularly at a time when, in some quarters, the Incarnation is itself the theme of heated debate. Therefore, it will be helpful to examine carefully what is occurring theologically when we talk about “mission in Jesus Christ’s way.”

When we go back before the appearance of the WCC 1982 document, Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation, we enter into a period of several decades in which most Western mainline Protestant traditions tended to de-emphasize evangelism as the verbal proclamation of the gospel with the intent to draw people to personal faith in Christ. The focus was generally more upon the church’s social witness and involvement with a broad agenda of justice and peace. Often evangelism was redefined as an expression of social witness, so that the word was used for almost anything a mainline denominational agency wanted to affirm. The American Presbyterian version of this process is called by Milton J. Coalter the “rethinking, retooling, and restructuring” of evangelism, which he dates from

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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about 1963 on.6 Throughout this period, however, thinking and writing about the mission of the church never completely disavowed the centrality of the church’s evangelistic mission, as awkward as that central tenet of our confessional tradition might have been for some. The emphasis upon incarnational evangelism emerged in various attempts to define the church’s witness in ways that sought to include both verbal proclamation and social witness. This approach has now established itself in the concept of “mission in Christ’s way.” It is a genuinely helpful way of thinking, which does not undermine the evangelistic ministry of the church, but rather strengthens it.

The emphatic use of this incarnational imagery in the 1982 WCC document Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation shows that such language had achieved a notable ecumenical currency. Such statements emerge from long and difficult processes of drafting and editing which draw together representatives across the full spectrum of churchly traditions and cultures. When they finally agree, then we have language that we can use in the multicultural, worldwide church with some hope that we all mean the same things when we say the same words. The publication of Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation in 1982 was a signal event for the theology and practice of mission. It represented a broad consensus of Christian thought on the church’s evangelistic mission.7 It strongly affirmed the centrality of evangelistic mission as well as defining how that mission was to be carried out. Thus, it certainly may be regarded as a corrective to American Presbyterianism’s attempts to “retool and restructure” evangelism in the preceding twenty to thirty years.

The incarnational thrust is already addressed in the document’s opening section on “The Call to Mission,” where John 20:21 is cited: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” As we find often in the contemporary documents on this theme, this “as” is interpreted with a double meaning. It refers both to the fact God has sent Christ, and also to the way in which God has sent Christ, as a human among humans, in the particularity of human experience.8 In the document’s next paragraph, the incarnational linkage between Christ and the church’s witness is expanded upon: “The early church witnessed to its Risen Lord in a variety of ways, most specially in the style of life of its members.”9 The wording to which later documents all would refer comes in a section entitled, “Mission in Christ’s Way.” It begins again with the reference to John 20:21. John’s mission mandate is linked with Paul’s kenotic or “self- emptying” emphasis in Philippians 2, when the document states, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.… The self-emptying of the servant who lived among the people, sharing in their hopes and sufferings, giving his life on the cross for all humanity — this was Christ’s way of proclaiming the good news, and as disciples we are summoned to follow the same way.”10

In 1988, the WCC sent out a preparatory booklet on the theme of the approaching San Antonio conference on world mission and evangelism. In this study booklet, the participants were asked to consider “Mission in Christ’s Way,” and were told that “we may trust the model of Jesus’ life for our engagement in God’s mission. While the good news that we proclaim as Christians is that God’s grace was in Jesus Christ, we cannot credibly proclaim

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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that by methods or actions that do not correspond to the model of Jesus’ life. The incarnation … is mission.… The incarnational mission of Christ is thus the only model of mission.”11

This emphatic language was subsequently developed by Emilio Castro, by then the general secretary of the WCC, in his address in San Antonio on the conference’s theme. He proposed that the proclamation of “God’s saving will,” which “has been perfectly fulfilled in Jesus Christ,” is to be guided by the “criterion” of Jesus Christ. This is what it means to “interpret [God’s] will in the present.” Not only do we pray “in Jesus’ name” to ensure that our prayer is “purified by the Spirit,” but “equally, in the other direction, when we seek to interpret God’s will in the real world of history, there too the ‘name’ — the criterion — of Jesus Christ has to be fundamental in controlling and determining our actions.”12

When we survey this procession of statements on the church’s doing evangelism in “Jesus Christ’s way,” then it becomes clear that the central issue is evangelistic methodology. In none of the documents is there any argument about the possibility of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ as God’s Son. Nor is there any reference to the ancient christological debates about the two natures. The deity and humanity of Jesus are assumed when we now ask, What does the Incarnation have to say about the way in which we go about the church’s mission?

The reason this question is arising, I believe, is the discomfort in the Western Christian traditions that emerges when we look objectively at the history of missions and evangelism in the last two to three centuries. From the perspective of global mission, we have every reason to rejoice at the spread of Christianity and the emergence of indigenous churches in virtually every nation on earth. Yet, at the same time, we are painfully aware of the legacy of Western cultural imperialism that accompanied that missionary movement. The Hocking Report of 1930, among many twentieth-century evaluations of Western mission, clearly indicts the Western churches for their “domination and cultural control” in the churches and cultures in which they have evangelized.13 Christopher Sugden of the Oxford Centre for Missions Studies has succinctly analyzed the theological problem. He explains that we in the West have looked upon the context of missionary evangelism as neutral. “All people are sinners so all contexts are the same in what matters; … the message to be proclaimed is universal, [and] there is one way to salvation.”14 This approach has meant, of course, that the Western view of all contexts for mission has been governed solely by Western perspectives. Thus, we often failed to do mission “in Jesus Christ’s way,” because we have assumed that our way was, in fact, synonymous with Jesus Christ’s way.

Similarly, in the history of American evangelistic activity, especially American revivalism, there are repeated examples of a separation of evangelism from the full dimensions of gospel obedience within our society. Faith has been reduced to a private and individual affair. There has been a persistent refusal to draw out the implications of Christ’s message of the kingdom of God to every dimension of creation. This too represents a failure to grasp the incarnational nature of mission. It becomes more compellingly obvious as we learn to read the gospels self- critically, testing our own cultural assumptions and filters rigorously.15

As Eugene Stockwell said in San Antonio, “Often the church has in the past, and in our

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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time, engaged in a mission that by no stretch of the imagination could seen to be ‘in Christ’s way.’” He illustrates this by referring to word proclamation separated from worship, deed, and life. He points to the cultural trappings that surround our witness so as to obscure Christ, and to the frequent emphasis upon numerical growth over spiritual depth.16 Another way to formulate this critique would be to say that the dominant value system of much of Western missions and evangelism has been success measured in terms of the marketplace’s value system. The emphasis upon doing mission “in Christ’s way” might then be compared to our Lord’s cleansing of the temple of evangelistic theory and practice in order to re-assert the biblical criterion for mission. This criterion, as was suggested by Emilio Castro, will be found in the human life and ministry of Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God. This is the energy behind the growing emphasis upon an “incarnational approach” to mission and evangelism.

A grammatical innovation is very significant in this discussion. A noun used to summarize a central fact of faith, incarnation, has spawned an adjective, incarnational. This is a recent development in English. The Oxford English Dictionary cannot find any use of the term before 1912. Perhaps a thorough search of the writings of the Anglican “incarnational theologians” of the late nineteenth century might turn up an earlier example, but only by a few years.17 The adjective “incarnational” cannot be formulated in German, which has led some German theologians to doubt whether the idea is even thinkable (a not unknown tendency of German theology).

I first came upon incarnational language with regard to evangelism in working with the American para-parochial youth ministry organization Young Life. The leadership of Young Life described their approach to youth ministry and evangelism as “incarnational.” What they were expressing with this term was that the communication of the gospel be appropriate to its content. The message, the messenger, and the communication of the message should be seen as a whole, based upon the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Their own usage of “incarnational” language arose from conversations with D. Campbell Wyckoff and John Mackay at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mackay described what Young Life attempted with young people as “incarnational witness.” This reference led me to look more closely at Mackay’s possible contribution to the discussion of the church’s mission in incarnational terms.

There is general agreement that Mackay was a major figure in the ecumenical history of the twentieth century. His importance was many-sided: he was one of the most significant missionary figures in the Latin American world; he was the president of Princeton Theological Seminary; he was a founding president of the WCC; and he was the initiator of the academic discipline of ecumenics.18 With regard to our theme, his insights were undoubtedly incisive for the future development of thought about the church’s mission done “in Jesus Christ’s way.”

He was perhaps the first English-speaking theologian to develop a theological concept of the “incarnational principle” for the church’s mission, at least in print. He expounds this theme in his major work, Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal, published in

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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1964.19 Building upon a classic and orthodox Christology, Mackay arrives at the key sentence: “Christ’s life in the world was of such a kind as to reveal to [humanity], by words and deeds, what God is like.”20 Thus it is essential for the church’s mission mandate to focus upon the humanity of Jesus. This has, as Mackay put it, “incalculable importance for our understanding of God’s pattern for living. It provides the image of what men and women should be who take seriously Jesus Christ and His mission to the world.”21

“The church’s mediation of the love of God in evangelical witness” is how Mackay defines the church’s mission.22 He endorses the Anglican definition of evangelism formulated in 1918 and affirmed by the Temple Commission in 1945: “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that [all people] shall come to put their trust in God through [Jesus Christ], to accept Him as their Savior, and serve Him as their King in the fellowship of His Church.”23

The crucial question, then, is “How to Present Jesus Christ.” To expound his view, Mackay introduces here the “incarnational principle.”24 Like the “as” in John 20:21, the “so” in the Anglican definition is the crux: “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus.” Mackay asks, “Taking it for granted that a faithful presentation of Jesus Christ … will not produce redemptive fruits except through the ‘power of the Holy Spirit,’ what features should mark the process whereby Christ is presented?”25 By using the term “incarnational” for his methodological argument, Mackay clearly intended to raise the question of evangelistic method to a theological level commensurate with the content of the gospel. The medium is not to be equated with the message. Instead, the medium is to be appropriate to the message.

Mackay defined the “incarnational principle” in this way: “The evangelical word must become indigenous flesh.”26 This means that the witness must identify oneself “in the closest possible manner” with one’s environment. “All mere foreignness in manner, speech, living, and sometimes dress must disappear.… [One] will be humble, sensitive to [people’s] needs, concerned about their interests.” The witness will be “in every respect a friend, [giving] concrete expression by word, act, and disposition to the reality of love, of Christian agape, mediating thereby the love of God in Christ Jesus.”27

Mackay sees this principle at work in every era of Christian history where there has been a “truly redemptive effort.” “People have responded to Christ and the church has been established and has grown, in the measure in which Christ’s representatives ceased to be mere outsiders in the life of a people, and became, not condescendingly, but joyously and empathically, involved in their common life and concerns.”28 Based on this principle. Mackay then roundly criticizes the cultural insensitivity of much of Western missions. It has usually entailed too narrow definitions of evangelism: “There is clear evidence that whenever a Christian mission from abroad devoted itself exclusively to evangelistic activity in a narrow, technical sense, without its component members identifying themselves closely with a community and its welfare, the work became sterile.”29 Here, the humanness of Jesus, and the example of his life, are seen as paradigmatic for the mission activity of the church. In effect,

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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the incarnational approach becomes an ethic of evangelism, based upon the humanity of Christ, whose life and actions are as much the norm of obedient Christian living as are his words.

The significance of this incarnational approach can be seen in its integrative function for our theology of the church’s mission. This integration occurs in two major dimensions. It provides a biblically informed, theologically coherent way of drawing what, in another context, I have described as the being, doing, and saying of incarnational witness.30 At the same time, this approach also integrates various dichotomies that are prevalent in both our thinking about and doing of mission. These dichotomies are manifestly harmful to the obedient carrying out of Christian mission.

First, the incarnational approach to the church’s evangelistic mission helps us to grapple with the unfortunate dichotomy often made between Christian faith and culture. The incarnational approach takes the particularity and variety of cultural settings with great seriousness. Rather than seeing a scandal or a problem in the particularity of Jesus’ own Incarnation as a Jew in Palestine in the first century, one can appreciate the biblical- theological validation of the importance of context. The indigenization and contextualization of Christian witness are then rightly seen as the necessary consequence of the Incarnation of Christ. As Vinay Samuel states, “The incarnation of God’s Son is the final affirmation of God’s identification with human culture.”31

A second dichotomy involves the divisions of the church. The incarnational approach to the church’s evangelistic mission can be ecumenically fruitful. It opens up avenues of discourse with ancient traditions that place great value upon the doctrine and the mystical significance of the Incarnation, particularly the Orthodox and Western monastic traditions. Contemporary Orthodox and Roman Catholic missiologists have argued that the Incarnation bears a missionary character. As the Catholic scholar Gregorius has suggested, the “church as the mystical Body of Christ is the continuation of the historical Christ and his work of redemption.”32 This might prove a helpful point of departure for the current dialogue in America with the Orthodox, who are having difficulties with their relationships with their Protestant sister churches. The incarnational approach might also assist in integrating more effectively the Catholic traditions of spiritual formation into the Protestant practice of evangelistic ministry.33

Another way in which the incarnational approach can be ecumenically integrative relates to the conservative groupings. These groupings are strongly committed to evangelism and yet struggle with issues of interpretation and authority of Scripture. The incarnational emphasis, understood as God’s way of entering into human history and culture, can help those who are burdened by rigid views of particular methods of inspiration. For some who honestly agonize over the meaning and application of Scripture when bound to such a docetic view of God’s revelation as represented by theories of inerrancy, it is a liberating insight to realize that God’s incarnational activity must by definition involve the ambiguity of human culture. Part of the wonder of God’s gracious sovereignty in revelation is his willingness to make himself

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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known in and through frail and ambiguous humans and their experience. That frailty and ambiguity is part of the biblical witness and actually helps us to encounter God in our own humanness.

God’s gracious willingness to enter into particular human experience is then grasped as good news for us. We begin to understated that, as Psalm 111 makes clear, the love and righteousness of God are made known through God’s actions in history. Those actions are carried out in and through fallible human beings, portrayed with all the candor of the biblical witness. The God who has always acted incarnationally for the sake of the healing of God’s rebellious creation is the God who continues to enter into our ambiguous reality as the Holy Spirit empowers our incarnational witness. Such an incarnational approach becomes a highly stimulating way to probe further the realism of the “internal testimony of the Holy Spirit” in our experience today. Critical studies of the Bible enhance our experience of God’s self- disclosure as the Spirit confirms that God was at work in the revelatory events, in every stage of their witnessing and preserving, and in our hearing and obeying today.

A third type of dichotomy we find in the church’s practice of evangelism and mission has to do with the separation of the means from the end in gospel proclamation. This tendency, particularly in Western evangelistic methodologies, defines a very narrow view of the end of evangelism, for example, the salvation of one’s soul, and then develops whatever means will lead to that desired end. This approach produces abuses and distortions, especially in the so- called “electronic church.”34 The incarnational model, doing evangelism in “Jesus Christ’s way,” forces us to take the issue of congruence between what and how we proclaim with utmost seriousness. It is patently absurd to proclaim the good news that God the Creator is God the Redeemer, that the Judge is compassionate and merciful in carrying out justice, in ways which are unloving, manipulative, insensitive, or even violent. It is equally impossible to talk about God’s love for the poor, the outcast, and the marginal, and not to incarnate that love in the ways that demonstrate that God’s kingdom is, in fact, coming now. One cannot communicate a gospel of love without letting that love become the dominant agenda of one’s own life and the life of the community. This conviction seems to me to pervade the writings of Paul. He is constantly concerned that the quality of the community’s life, whether it be in Corinth, Rome, Thessalonica, or Ephesus, will be the first evidence that the good news of the love of God in Jesus can be heard and responded to. The life of the Christian witness, in all its imperfection, is intended to incarnate the present love of God. Thus Paul can write to the Thessalonians that his ministry emerged out of his deep care for them. This resulted in his determination to share with them “not only the gospel of God but also our own selves.…”(1 Thess. 2:8). Such a statement leads us to recognize in Paul a profoundly incarnational approach to ministry. It also raises serious questions about another dichotomy alleged by some biblical scholars, that is, the division between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Paul. After all, it was Paul who said that the apostle was “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10).

To use contemporary language, the incarnational principle cannot tolerate a separation between “our walk” and “our talk.” The Stuttgart Statement on Evangelism provides one of

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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the best summaries of incarnational witness:

It has to be emphasized that we can only communicate the gospel to people if we open ourselves to them and enable them to open themselves to us. This means that listening to them is crucial in the sharing of the gospel with them; we cannot share the gospel without sharing ourselves. We live by the gospel of an incarnate Lord; this implies that the gospel has to become incarnated in ourselves, the “evangelists.” This is not to suggest that, in our evangelism, we proclaim ourselves, but that those whom we wish to invite to faith in Christ will invariably look for signs of that faith in us. And what will happen if they do not find these? Does not the credibility of our evangelism, to some extent at least, depend on the authenticity of our own lives? Can we evangelize others without becoming vulnerable ourselves?35

A fourth dichotomy addressed by the incarnational approach is the distinction made between doing evangelism and doing justice. This is kin to a longstanding distinction debated in German diaconic circles between “word-proclamation” and “deed-proclamation.” The incarnational approach toward gospel witness36 must lead American Presbyterians, for example, to think through again the current definition of their church’s goals. They have placed “doing evangelism” and “doing justice” next to each other, which creates the impression that they are somehow mutually distinctive. This is a friendly critique. There is no question about the fact that this definition represents a significant and risk-laden commitment of this church. Furthermore, it fairly reflects where it has come in these last decades: it has moved out of a period in which evangelism was not taken very seriously or was so redefined as not to be anything recognizably evangelistic.37

But we must ask what understanding of the gospel it is that separates evangelism from justice? What kind of justice are we talking about if it is not inherently linked to the mercy of God revealed in the gospel? Does not the gospel necessarily define all that we do in response to it as witness? Must not that witness include both the doing and the saying of good news, which reveals both the love and righteousness of God? The theological task in the Presbyterian Church, I would suggest, is to continue along the lines proposed by the document, Turn to the Living God. It must seek theological definitions that will overcome this artificial division.

Many churches and theologians have been struggling with this issue for many years, of course. We are constantly producing documents which state that it is essential to keep gospel proclamation and the witness to God’s justice together.38 It is very hard for us to do this and really believe that we have done it. We show that in the way we continue to sort each other out as being in one camp or the other. This continuing debate demonstrates how much hard theological work remains to be done and how much we need to listen to and learn from one another.39

The fifth and final dichotomy that the incarnational approach would overcome would be any interpretation of the Incarnation that would separate it from the atonement. This is certainly too complex a matter theologically to pursue in this essay, but it should be noted that there is a certain hesitancy in many parts of contemporary Protestantism when it comes to addressing the meaning of the cross. In Turn to the Living God, for instance, there is no direct reference to the cross or the work of atonement, although it is clearly implied in the

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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document’s argumentation. I can point to the space between two sentences in the section entitled, “Turn and Be Reconciled,” where the atoning work of Jesus must take place, or else the argumentation does not really follow.40 I cite this as only an example of the widespread difficulty that we sense when we turn to the theme of the cross. We are reacting for understandable reasons to the overly emotional and manipulative kind of proclamation that abuses the mysterious and awe-inspiring power of the work of the atonement. We know that the work of the cross is central. We know that the Incarnation is good news because “God so loved the world that God gave the only begotten Son.…” But when we stress the Incarnation in our evangelism and divorce it from the cross, then that incarnational emphasis becomes unduly moralistic and ultimately not good news at all. The humanity of Jesus is looked upon as the model or pattern for human behavior along the lines of the ethical liberalism of the nineteenth century. The problem of the human sinful condition is never really addressed, and the dimensions of God’s grace and love are never fully expounded.

When we talk about doing evangelism in Jesus Christ’s way, we are setting out for ourselves no trivial theological agenda for our continuing work on the church’s evangelistic mission. By defining that agenda in terms of the Incarnation, however, we are discovering biblical and theological resources for our work that are not only corrective of our inadequacies in both understanding and doing evangelism. This approach is also stimulating the church to move beyond our present definitions and theories to new and more inclusive theological constructions. To use Avery Dulles’s language, the incarnational model for evangelism and mission is both explanatory and exploratory.41 It can lead us into challenging insights into our mission, in terms of both the message and the way its witness is to be carried out. Like all good theology, the work on the incarnational understanding of mission and evangelism should be done modestly, critically, and rigorously. But let it also be done joyfully, with the expectation that we will discover more of what the gospel means, that good news which, as Peter Stuhlmacher constantly reminds us, “is always before us.”

1. Frederick R. Wilson, ed., The San Antonio Report: Your Will Be Done: Mission in Christ’s Way (Geneva: WCC, 1989); hereinafter referred to as Your Will Be Done (1989).

2. Vinay Samuel and Albrecht Hauser, eds., Proclaiming Christ in Christ’s Way: Studies in Integral Evangelism: Essays Presented to Walter Arnold on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday (Oxford: Regnum, 1989); hereinafter referred to as Stuttgart Statement.

3. World Council of Churches, Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation (Geneva: WCC, 1983), published with a Study Guide for Congregations by the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism and the Division of Overseas Ministries, National Councils of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., New York, 1983; hereinafter referred to as Mission and Evangelism.

4. Presbyterian Church (USA), Turn to the Living God: A Call to Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way: A Resolution adopted by the 203rd General Assembly (1991) for study and implementation (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 1991); hereinafter referred to as Turn to the Living God.

5. Turn to the Living God, p. 11. 6. Milton J. Coalter, “Presbyterian Evangelism: A Case of Parallel Allegiances Diverging,” in The Diversity of Discipleship:

Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, ed. M. J. Coalter, J. M. Mulder, and L. B. Weeks (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), pp. 33-54, especially pp. 46ff.

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7. Even the broad consensus of evangelical thinking on mission, represented by the Lausanne Covenant of 1974, can be said to be reflected in the 1982 World Council Statement, since there is a general agreement that the World Council process was at least in part a response to Lausanne.

8. Mission and Evangelism, pp. 9-10, ¶3. 9. Mission and Evangelism, p. 10, ¶4. 10. Mission and Evangelism, 29, ¶28. 11. Commission on World Evangelism and Evangelism, World Council of Churches, Your Will Be Done: Mission in

Christ’s Way: Study Material and Biblical Reflection (Geneva: WCC, 1988). The first of the Bible studies in the booklet was on John 1:1-14, and by this very choice the centrality of the incarnation to one’s theology of mission was brought out.

12. Your Will Be Done, pp. 134-35. 13. John R. Fitzmeier and Randall Balmer, “A Poultice for the Bite of the Cobra: The Hocking Report and Presbyterian

Missions in the Middle Decades of the Twentieth Century,” in The Diversity of Discipleship, pp. 105-9. 14. Christopher Sugden, “Evangelicals and Wholistic Evangelism,” chap. 3, in Stuttgart Statement, pp. 30-31. See also

David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), pp. 1-8, for a summary of the “crisis” in missions.

15. See Ronald C. White and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976).

16. Eugene Stockwell, “Mission Issues for Today and Tomorrow,” in Your Will Be Done, p. 117. See also John Mackay, Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 175-77, for a trenchant critique of Western missions.

17. See Robert Paul, The Atonement and the Sacraments: The Relation of the Atonement to the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (New York: Abingdon, 1960), pp. 216-27; Brian Hebblethwaite, “The Propriety of the Doctrine of the Incarnation as a Way of Interpreting Christ,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 33, no. 3 (1980): 201-12; also in B. Hebblethwaite, The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 53ff.

18. Richard Shaull, describing John Mackay as “one of the outstanding leaders of the world Church today,” said that he was “the missionary statesman whose insights and actions in relation to the mission of the church are constantly keeping things moving in many different areas of the Church’s life,” Richard Shaull, “[John Mackay] as Missionary Statesman,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 52, no. 4 (May 1959): 24.

19. Mackay, Ecumenics. 20. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 63 (italics his). 21. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 65. 22. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 162. 23. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 169, quoting Towards the Conversion of England (London: The Press and Publications of the

Church Assembly, 1945), p. 1. 24. Mackay, Ecumenics, pp. 172ff. 25. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 172. 26. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 173. 27. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 173. 28. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 173. 29. Mackay, Ecumenics, p. 177. 30. D. L. Guder, Be My Witnesses: The Church’s Mission, Message, and Messengers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995),

passim. 31. Vinay Samuel, “Gospel and Culture,” chap. 5 in Stuttgart Statement, pp. 75-76. See also John Mackay on

“incarnational identification with the world,” Ecumenics, pp. 141, 163-74, 176-78; Stuttgart Statement, pp. 214, 217 (especially 10, 11), and 218 (15); World Council of Churches, Minutes and Reports of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, December 31, 1972 and January 9-12, 1973, Bangkok Assembly 1973 (Geneva: WCC, 1973), pp. 57ff., 72-73. This sensitivity for and openness to all human cultural expressions embraces the human religious experience in other faiths as well, so that we find in repeated discussions of Christian relationships with other faiths an emphasis upon respect for the “beliefs and devotion of others,” upon listening as well as telling, upon recognizing the work of the Spirit in all cultures. But this open and nonjudgmental openness to interaction with other faiths is not to be construed as a restriction upon Christian witness, but rather as a way of defining how that witness is to be carried out. The prevalent usage of the idea of

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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“incarnational” evangelism does not imply that we are not to present Christ to those of other faiths, but rather defines the way in which we are to do it, modeled upon the way in which Jesus interacted with people during his life. On the insistence that openness to dialogue with and respect for other religions does not imply that the gospel is not to be proclaimed to all peoples in all cultures, see Stuttgart Statement, p. 222 (24 & 25); “Witness among People of Living Faiths,” nos. 14-45, Mission and Evangelism (1983), pp. 47-48; “People of Many Religions,” Turn to the Living God, pp. 18-19, and often elsewhere; see also Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), passim, but especially “The Gospel and the Religions,” pp. 171ff.

32. P. Gregorius, O.F.M. Cap., “Der Missionsgedanke und die Menschwerdung Jesu Christi,” Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft, 37, no. 4 (1953): 267.

33. It is intriguing to note that the American Presbyterian professor of evangelism Ben Campbell Johnson has published a book entitled Speaking of God: Evangelism and Initial Spiritual Guidance (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991).

34. For an “incarnational critique” of evangelistic proclamation in the electronic media, see Stuttgart Statement, p. 214; Your Will Be Done, pp. 33-34; Guder, Be My Witnesses, pp. 157-59.

35. Stuttgart Statement, p. 214. 36. I have suggested in my book Be My Witnesses that the New Testament word family marturia/marturos/marturein is

the more comprehensive term for mission, encompassing verbal proclamation (kerygma), community (koinonia), and service (diakonia).

37. See Coalter, “Presbyterian Evangelism,” pp. 45ff. 38. For an early example, see Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, UPCUSA, An Advisory Study (New

York: United Presbyterian Church [USA], 1962), pp. 45ff. 39. Perhaps we can be instructed in this struggle by the ecumenical-evangelical missiologists who produced the Stuttgart

Statement on Evangelism in 1987. They proposed to resolve this dichotomy with the concept of “integral evangelism.” Their term is intended to address any and every attempt to detach the church’s evangelistic ministry from everything else it is called to do. Their language is strong: “If the Church chooses to remain silent in the face of injustice and oppression, both in society at large and in the Church itself, it jeopardizes its entire evangelistic ministry. These concerns … are inseparably related to evangelism and every effort to drive a wedge between these is to be rejected as the proclamation of a spurious gospel.” Christians, they say, are doing integral evangelism when they “challenge unjust structures,” and “struggle for justice and peace.” It is the study of Scripture that leads to such actions, and these actions are powerfully evangelistic. The Stuttgart theologians expressly call this “incarnational evangelism,” which integrates kerygma and diakonia.

40. Turn to the Living God, p. 7; the space is between the two sentences in the penultimate paragraph. 41. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City, N.J.: Image Books [Doubleday], 1978), pp. 28ff.

Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Created from amridge on 2022-09-28 03:30:29.

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