A friend asked me once whether I have any means of explaining or connecting evangelism, discipleship and development. I realized that I’ve been thinking about these issues for over 20 years, and wrote out the following rough set of thoughts.

The first thing is that I’ve never seen the split as real, so it’s never actually been a problem for me, although this disjunction is where most Western Christians seem to be coming from. Fundamentally, my thinking is rooted in the concept of God’s heart, or God’s passion, for His creation. Although, as a student of Philosophy and theology, I completely recognize the need for “good” theological thinking, I have never been able to escape the balancing need for a passion that is from God and which comes from our allowing Him to break our hearts for His creation.

Whenever I examine Genesis 1 and 2, this passion is inescapable to me. When God had finished creating the world, and people, He looked at it all and was very pleased. For me, this fact and His desire to create us at all is central to understanding the rest of Scripture. Yes, the creation is fallen (that is, “broken”, “marred”, “twisted”) because of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, but who is going to send their son to die for garbage? Doesn’t all of Scripture clearly place a pretty high value on humankind as the crown of creation? Especially when it says that we were created in God’s image?

Also, when I read Scripture, I get the distinct impression that we as His children are also to be about redeeming creation out of its bondage, participating in God’s creative effort out of our own creative nature which is like His. Is this not also what Isaiah 58 and 61 are about? Perhaps even most, or all, of the Old Testament? God is continually – and creatively – reaching out to His creation, seeking to bring it back into relationship with Himself. It is only through Christ’s death and resurrection, however, that it could actually be done, once for all.

O.K. So let’s grant that creation and humankind, being made in God’s image and originally “very good,” are perhaps even worth dying for. For me, the next question is, what does all this say about the nature of man? That is, our being made body, soul and spirit. And what does this say about how we are to live?

First, as I read Scripture, when God made man he didn’t exalt one part of us over another. Instead, He intended from the beginning that we be fully integrated beings. Otherwise, why should Christ have said and done what he did throughout his ministry — e.g. Matt. 6:25ff – healing and feeding people much of the time? Why not just ignore the physical and embrace a Gnostic or Manichean form of Christianity, if we are correct to exalt only the intellect or the spirit? We should have a lot in common with Buddhists and some others.

But NO.

God is concerned about every aspect of us, His creatures, because he intended that we be integrated wholes. So, therefore, as His children, we must also be similarly concerned about our fellows. This answers the second question about how we should live. But I need to insert a side note here. Read John 10:10 where Christ says, “I am come that you might have life and that you might have it abundantly.” Is he only talking about after we die?? Does that make any sense at all? Or do the many passages in the Old Testament make no sense either, where God states, for example, that “you shall never see the children of the righteous begging for bread”?

Why is any of that stuff in the Bible at all, if it’s not also important to God? Nevertheless, true life does not consist in amassing a multiplicity of stuff – but it matters. In fact, when I read Matthew 6, what I believe that Christ is really saying is, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Be like kids. Let me take care of the stuff you need every day – and I know that you need it – you focus on what I’ve made you for, which is relationship and service to me.”

So how does any of this connect to evangelism? Well, what is evangelism? But even before that, I think we have to ask ourselves what really is the good news?

Is the “good news” just that Christ died for our sins? That he fulfilled some arcane legal obligation of God? Or is it that God, our heavenly Father, loves us so much that He sent his only Son to become one of us, experience this life as a human, and die a completely undeserved and horrendous death – all so that we might have a relationship again with Him? Isn’t that what God desired with Adam and Eve, at the very beginning?!? And isn’t that what He wishes to restore?

Yes. We cannot minimize the holiness of God and the seriousness of sin – which must be seen as an attitude of rebellion, not as a list of transgressed laws – and other religions recognize these realities in similar ways. So what is the essence of Christianity that differentiates it from all other religions? What is the Good News? Is it not that God desires relationship with His creatures, and that He cares so passionately for them that He was willing to allow His Son to die a cruel, unjust and completely undeserved death, just so He could regain that relationship? That is, He took the first step, realizing we can in fact do nothing of ourselves.

What does this say about the passages where it says He pities His children, because they are as frail as dust? Is there no analogy between that and the pity we feel for our own children? Ought we not ask Him to give us the same heart for our fellow creatures that He has towards them – and towards us?
If we face facts, we cannot separate our bodies from who we are any more than we can separate ourselves from time or growing old. And the consequence of all this is that our physical wellbeing is intimately tied into our psychological and spiritual wellbeing, and vice versa. So we are called to accept this, just as God does, and to deal with others in a way that recognizes this reality, treats them as a whole, and strives to help bring them back to the whole-ness God originally intended for them.

Well, if that is the good news, now perhaps we can ask, what is evangelism? Isn’t it showing people who God is – in His entirety? Isn’t that what Jesus’ life was about? After all, he said, how many times, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” What did people see? Why focus on just one aspect of God’s nature, or just one way of communicating it? Weren’t the Israelites put on earth to show the nations who God is, and to be God’s means of blessing everyone else? Aren’t we now grafted in to that same tree?

So how do we live out that heritage? Is the good news only to be communicated verbally? Or is it only to be communicated through living out God’s love? No. It has to be both, and then some, for we are creatures who incorporate all those means of understanding within ourselves. And yet, there would appear to be a primacy in all of us which would want to emphasize the seeing and touching. Or, at least, the conjoining of the two, with the living out coming first to indicate that the verbiage is true. For isn’t it always much easier to say something, but far more difficult to live it out in the face of reality?

That ability to actually live out one’s espoused values is also something that differentiates Christianity from other religions. I’ve met a few extremely devout adherents of other religions who put most any Christian I’ve known to shame, including myself. (Sometimes I think we take the Bill Gothard statement as a cop-out.) But it’s obviously themselves who have done it, and it doesn’t lead to peace, for it’s actually based on fear, or shame or legalism. On the other hand, with the truly devout Christians I’ve known, it’s always clear that it can only be the Holy Spirit who does it through them.
As Cardinal Suhard wrote,

“To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”

But even that’s not all. What makes genuine Christianity attractive is that there’s also a peace and joy the others don’t have.

So, what am I trying to say in all of this? Basically that people have value because we are made in God’s image – every bit of us. And it’s not just our brains, or our spirits, but all of us that God pronounced “very good.” And that this is sufficient to warrant a lifestyle that ought to mirror God’s concern about whether we have enough to eat or wear, as well as whether we know His Son.

So there must also be passion involved in our dealings with God’s creation, for from all indications in Scripture God is very passionate about us. But it needs to be His passion. For then there can be only one explanation for our lives, which is that He really does exist, and that people truly can change. Across my own life, the only way I’ve found this truth effectively communicated to me, or have found it effectively communicated to others, has been through a little talking (planting seeds) and a lot of living. In this way, evangelism, discipleship and development are simply different aspects of the same thing.

I hope this might engender some dialogue from fellow travelers.

Philip Sawyer
April, 1999

(This was posted for a while on the website of World Christians.)

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