Living Witness and Extending Welcome

I not only grew up knowing that evangelism was the primary task of Christians, I was a poster child for this idea. My most vivid memory of this emphasis in my own church context (other than going to the mall during conferences to share my faith with complete strangers) was signing up for the I Found It campaign in 1976. As a young teen, I remember the anxiety of talking to people on the phone about Jesus (again, people I didn’t know). I also remember praying with one woman as she responded to my invitation to receive Jesus.

Fast-forward a few decades. This week I finished teaching an elective course on Luke. In chapter 24, the risen Jesus speaks to his disciples. “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:46-48, NIV). The image of Jesus’ followers as witnesses is introduced here and picked up in thematic ways in Acts.

The juxtaposition of these different ways of understanding evangelism is a powerful one for me. The first seemed to me more like the offering of a commodity. It was even framed this way linguistically: I Found IT. And it was a commodity that I was taught to understand was something I had that others lacked. In other words, there was an exclusive sense of ownership of the truth. We (a very small group) had the truth, had Jesus; everyone else didn’t. So we shared our faith to convert others to the faith—to what already belonged to us. I realize this may be somewhat a caricature, but it pretty closely reflects what I understood about evangelism in my youth.

Luke’s call to be witnesses to Jesus strikes me as a helpful corrective to what I’ve described as an ownership mentality about faith in Christ. A witness points to truth or reality as they have seen it and experienced it (similar to John’s refrain, “Come and see”). Jesus’ words from Luke exhort disciples to witness to the story of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection that brings God’s forgiveness and restoration to Israel and to the nations. I doubt Luke imagines the gospel—or Jesus, for that matter—as a commodity to be owned and offered as Christians “do evangelism.” Witness is not a task on our to-do list but a way of life flowing from the experience of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. 

This difference of emphasis seems a fruitful way forward for evangelicals as we embark on interreligious dialogue. And I believe interreligious dialogue is essential in a world that is increasingly pluralistic. There is no upside to hiding in our churches and refusing to engage other faiths. Dialogue across faiths is essential for moving away from stereotyping and typecasting on either or both sides. Yet this is a minimalist (though initially important) reason for engaging in interreligious dialogue. Beyond this, we might engage people of other faiths in conversation for mutual understanding. They have something to offer us in terms of perspective on the good, the holy, and even the divine. We can affirm this truth especially since we don’t own Jesus. Rather, Jesus claims his ownership (Lordship) of us. And, yes, we engage people of other faiths in conversation with the hopes of introducing them to the Jesus we’ve come to know as Messiah and Lord.

If we are going to engage the Other, especially the religious Other, there are some practical considerations to attend to. First, we would do well to consider the power dynamics of conversations across difference, including those across religious lines. We can get at some of these power differentials by asking the questions, Who’s at the center and who’s at the margins? Or, Who gets to set the parameters of the conversation?

One of my frustrations as a teacher of the New Testament is the assumption by some American evangelicals that they—or even Christians more broadly—are a religious minority in our country. And my frustration particularly gets hooked when this rhetorical stance is drawn from the New Testament itself. We do a disservice to the text when we ignore the context of difference between ourselves and the first Christians. The early Christians were numerically and socially a minority in the first-century Greco-Roman world. They truly had little or no power in the face of the Roman political and military systems, especially as their identity as part of Judaism began to be questioned (and so they were no longer under its protection as a religion of antiquity vis-à-vis Rome).

The situation of Christians in the United States in the twenty-first century is quite different from this one. By fairly conservative estimates, about 30% of Americans consider themselves evangelicals and “about 8 in 10 Americans at least nominally adhere to a Christian faith of one sort or another” (Gallup site, 2005; Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, 2012). Until we as Christians (and evangelicals) admit to the power we have, politically and socially, I believe we will be poor conversation partners with people of other religious faiths. We will take a minority stance (possibly even a victim stance) that will ring inauthentic to cultural realities and inhibit trust for the dialogue (see Schlosser).

A second practical consideration arises from one of the questions for this month’s discussion: What should the ground-rules of interreligious dialogue be? My gut reaction to this question is to wonder about the wisdom of “setting rules” for conversation. I mean, what if before my daughters could have a conversation with me they were required to follow certain rules? I imagine this would rather quickly close down rather than open up conversation. Now I don’t want to be naïve about the difficulties of engaging significant differences that exist between, for example, Christians and Buddhists, Muslims and atheists. Yet I would suggest it might be most helpful to simply enter the conversation. And, if by ground rules we mean that we’ll need to set up careful parameters so we maintain power differentials, then no, let’s not set up ground rules (see Sandage and Brown for a caution against ground rules for interdisciplinary conversations that do just that).

But if by ground rules we mean that there are certain dispositions that will help interreligious dialogue begin and proceed effectively (especially because they attend to power differentials), then ground rules are apt. And I would commend the following dispositions for the conversation: respect, curiosity, conviction, and humility. Generally, we’ll be better conversation partners if we’ve cultivated the competence of differentiation of self, by which we are able to share our own perspectives and convictions while paying attention to our anxieties that get hooked as we experience those who are quite different from us.

I am intrigued to imagine what it would it look like for evangelicals to be gracious participants in interreligious dialogue… curious, not fearful, trusting in Christ and loving others well (1 John 4:18). What might it mean to hold as equally important the values of witness and welcome?

Works Cited:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/20242/Another-Look-Evangelicals-America-Today.aspx

http://www.wheaton.edu/ISAE/Defining-Evangelicalism/How-Many-Are-There

Sandage, Steven J. and Jeannine K. Brown. “Monarchy or Democracy in Relation Integration? A Reply to Porter.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 29 (2010) 20-26.

Schlosser, Lewis Z. “Christian Privilege: Breaking a Sacred Taboo.” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 31 (2003) 44-51.