By Mike Glenn
When I was growing up in my southern evangelical church, we were constantly encouraged to share the gospel with our lost friends and neighbors. We were trained to ask a series of questions that would lead our targeted friend to come to the conclusion they should accept Christ as their Lord and Savior and follow Christ in baptism. I was awful at evangelism. I could never get my friends and neighbors to ask the questions in the right order. I could talk about my faith, but it was always out of order according to our evangelism plan.
Photo by Alexandra Golovac on Unsplash
Anyway, the goal of our evangelistic efforts was baptism. Our gospel sharing efforts were successful when somebody got baptized. Once someone had been baptized, we dropped them off at the church and we went to find someone else to baptize. Everything was about baptism. It was all we talked about. Have you been baptized? Were you immersed or just sprinkled? Are you talking to anyone who’s going to be baptized? How many people has our church baptized this year? Is that more than last year?
Baptism, while important, isn’t the end of our life with Christ, but the beginning. Baptism is our celebration of being born into our new life in Christ. Once born again, of course, should mean that we begin to grow again. Tragically, this isn’t the case for most evangelicals. They believe, in fact, most are told, that our baptism is a sign that our name is now written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and now all we have to do is wait until Jesus comes back and we’ll go to heaven to live with Jesus.
Discipleship, the deepening and strengthening of our faith in Christ, is reserved for “super saints’ and those called to full time ministry. For everyone else, routine church attendance is enough. This creates all kinds of problems for the new Christian trying to live faithfully. Without a growing faith, life soon becomes too difficult for the newborn’s faith. A twenty-five year old’s life problems are too difficult for a seven year old understanding of God. As real as they first faith may have been, that young faith hasn’t been developed enough to handle the complexities of life.
This creates a crisis of belief. The new Christian begins to doubt if they were truly saved at all and in an emotional moment, they decide they need to recommit their life to Christ and get baptized all over again and again and again. Every new birth of faith is never nurtured into mature belief. This sad story is repeated again and again. Some churches have members who are all wrinkled up because they’ve been in the water so much.
The church of my young adulthood finally got serious about discipleship and all of us started working through intensive training manuals requiring us to memorize Bible verses and keep detailed journals of our thought life. We studied the spiritual gifts and graded ourselves against the demands of the spiritual fruit Paul listed in Galatians. We became authorities of Jesus trivia. We were all in training for Jesus Jeopardy (Alex, I’ll take books of the Bible for 500).
For all our good intentions, we left out the critical step in the school of Jesus – doing something. Look at how Jesus trained His disciples. He pulled them away for an extended period of time. He taught them about the Kingdom of God and then, He sent them out. When they returned, He pulled them away again to talk about what they had experienced.
Think about it. When was the last time we were challenged in a sermon to actually go out and do something. When Jesus talks about the final judgement in Matthew 25, He tells us we’ll be judged by what we have done (feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, caring for the sick, etc.). In fact, those who protested about having all the right beliefs were told that Jesus had never known them.
Church is more than attendance. It’s more than a place we sometimes go to talk about God. The church is God’s redemptive agent in the world. We live in a broken world. The church is sent into that broken world to join God in His redemptive work to save that broken world. The church is called and empowered to fix what’s wrong in our world. In our history, the church was at its best when it was taken on the real problems around them. Sunday School was started to educate the children of the working underclass in the slums of our cities. Hospitals were started when the church began to work with victims of the plague in Europe. From homes for orphans to prison reform – the church has been the tip of the spear in all of this and much more. Alcohol Anonymous was started in a church.
This lack of action has two devastating impacts. First, the world doesn’t take the church seriously because they don’t see the world doing anything that really matters. Second, most of those who attend church are bored. We’re never challenged to believe the same Jesus who fed 5,000 people with a little boy’s lunch could take our meager talents and do something far more than we could ever imagine to heal our broken communities.
Our discipleship begins in baptism, and it ends in action. Jesus said:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” (Lk 4:18–19, NASB).
Jesus was called to preach, but He was also called to act. Effective evangelism contains the whole enchilada of the gospel – from belief to baptism, from baptism to faith and faith to action. Evangelism that doesn’t end with action is half-baked at best.
Every one of us is gifted. Every one of us knows of a situation that breaks our hearts. Where your calling overlaps the broken places in our world is where God is waiting for you. He’s waiting at these broken places to show us in action the truth of what we’ve learned in our studies. To know and not do is to not know. The good news of the gospel is supposed to do more than just change us. The gospel is intended to change the whole world.
I find it interesting that our practices over time end up placing limits on biblical words. Why would the word salvation be limited to just the decision to follow Jesus and the steps to meet those requirements when we really need to be constantly (delivered) from those things that haunt us? Why is it that belief has been limited to just getting the facts right instead of challenging all of our beliefs (and the actions that follow them) realizing how much we have lived under a false beliefs that have made a mess of our lives and others. To be discipled is to be immersed into the trinitarian life not only thru water baptism, but in a life reoriented and lived out. Father help us embrace the “ALL” you have for us.
Thank you Mike