Stan Guthrie writes about the church’s missing evangelism in “A Hole in Our Holism”:
“Today, it’s great to see how much easier it is to draw crowds by organizing a conference dealing with race, anti-Semitism, abortion, Darfur, homosexual marriage, sex trafficking, AIDS, or environmental stewardship. Loving our neighbor via these issues is right and good…But it seems harder for us to get excited about evangelism. Our holistic mission has a hole in it—not enough evangelism. For instance, while the American population continues growing, our own evangelical numbers barely tread water…This isn’t surprising. Evangelism—calling sinful people to repent and follow Jesus—is always a tougher sell than giving a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name. As the apostle Paul said, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing.” Does our heightened social consciousness—from the Left and the Right—actually drain our evangelistic zeal? It shouldn’t, because we are called to do both. But maybe our preference for social activism reveals a more basic problem: that we don’t really believe our neighbor’s deepest need is to be forgiven by and reconciled to God. We seem to think that if only he or she is fed, or lives in a society brimming with Christian principles, or sees our battles against the world’s many injustices, then we will have discharged our responsibility to Christ.”
It’s time to fill the hole.
