BLOG: 11.08.12. “EVANGELIZING THOSE ALREADY BAPTIZED”
Comments heard in the recent presidential campaign having to do with the church, and the Christian faith, and the constituents thereof, often left me puzzled, and reminded me of the ostensible quote from the late and short-lived Pope John-Paul I (circa 1978), to the effect that: “the primary task of the church today is evangelizing those already baptized.”
The confusion of New Testament Christianity with “American values” underscores this point.
This phenomenon also reminds me of Annie Dillard’s wonderment: “Why do these people in churches seem like brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? Churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. … It is madness … we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares …” (Teaching A Stone to Talk, 1988, p. 40).
A generation ago, another significant author, Madeline L’Engle wrote that her literary colleagues hesitated to get engaged with her in any approach to the Christian faith because: “Christianity is too wild and free for the timid.” O yes!
Maybe I’m just too influenced by writers who are aware of the “sort of power,” and of what kind of trouble it can get Christians into as a counter-cultural community formed by the radical claims of the gospel of the Kingdom, and by the Sermon on the Mount. I commend, for example, Walsh and Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed (InterVarsity Press) as a case in point, or maybe Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or (if you can find a copy) Radical Discipleship by Christopher Sugden. Then toss in a bit of the novelist Anne Lamont to spice it up a bit.
So what we tend to do is to create a subverted and emasculated version of the church, and we “devotionalize” (spiritualize?) the Sermon on the Mount, and are content to be faithful, but (I would suspect) un-evangelized church members, who never enter into the “wild and free” life that God intends for his new creation folk, … and are content with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes as: “religious Christianity,” which is comfortably conformed to the culture.
The demands of the gospel are as much a part of the gospel as the promises!
So what do I/we do with this? As a starting point, we must be quite certain that our own faith in Jesus Christ, and our love for Jesus Christ, and our obedience to Jesus Christ is well-informed, robust, and contagious as we then engage in conversation with our colleagues in church communities.
The church’s restoration nearly always begins by such underside pockets of Christian authenticity.
Peace!
[You might consider commending this Blog site to your friends who might appreciate it. Ask them to subscribe and join, what is now, a considerable company. They can even respond.]
