Models of Evangelism by Priscilla Pope-Levison

Author:Priscilla Pope-Levison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Evangelism;Evangelistic work;REL030000
ISBN: 9781493427383
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Appraisal

The church growth model of evangelism is a paradigm of practicality. With its penchant for statistical analysis, it peels off layers of alibis and excuses in order to calculate whether a church is growing, then analyzes why or why not. Its reproducible principles for the stimulation of growth—create new ports of entry, develop homogeneous units, engage in E-1 evangelism, cultivate bridge people for negotiating E-2 and E-3 evangelism, and disciple receptive peoples—have been well researched and well tested for decades in contexts around the globe. Vital to these numbers, statistics, and strategies is that they serve a single vision of bringing the gospel to all unreached peoples by establishing a “living church of Jesus Christ in every segment of society.”35

What can easily be overlooked in a preoccupation with numbers is the kind of growth that takes place. British pastor Ian Stackhouse offers a trenchant critique along these lines: “What is absent in church planting literature, and, more generally, in the whole gamut of methods deployed by churches in their desire to realise growth is an appreciation of the need for ongoing Christian nurture—nurture that is the basis upon which missionary congregations, so-called, can be sustained in the long-term.” 36 This statement can be framed in terms of several probing questions: Is church growth figured quantitatively in increasing conversion statistics, bigger budget dollars, and a collection of spin-off churches? Are these the only indicators of growth to measure? When does perfecting, the second stage of church growth (the qualitative measure), enter the equation? Certainly, an emphasis on making disciples and planting churches can overwhelm church leaders and cause them to overlook the need for perfecting disciples by reaching down into the riches of Scripture and tradition.

Is It Valid to Separate Discipling and Perfecting?

The impact of the separation of discipling and perfecting, according to critics, is the following: without an emphasis on the ethical and transformational component of the good news, which McGavran relegates to a later phase of perfecting, evangelism inspires a shallow, unreflective, and impoverished faith. Critics contend that evangelism is more than winning the lost or getting someone saved; it must inculcate—from the start—a conviction that one’s lifestyle and actions matter. Anything less, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s phrase, is “cheap grace”: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. . . . Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”37 Perfecting, if left to an indeterminate later phase, may seem ancillary or optional, if it happens at all.

Stackhouse again weighs in on the dichotomy McGavran championed, when he writes, “When growth replaces qualitative Christian nurture as the rationale of the church, traditional notions of initiation into the gospel are sacrificed on the altar of expediency, and pastoral care of the saints, in the somewhat ambiguous and messy business of real life, is set in opposition, unnecessarily and unbiblically, to the call to evangelise.”38

Equally challenging to this dichotomy is the question of whether McGavran has read it into rather than out of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18–20.

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