The power of the Gospel is not that we no longer suffer or struggle, but that we no longer do so alone.
We need to seek a true understanding of what it means to evangelize, and that requires we come to a truer understanding of ourselves as evangelizers. Pope Francis has said, “Evangelization does not consist in proselytizing, but … in humbly drawing near to those who feel distant from God and the Church, those who are fearful or indifferent, and saying to them: ‘The Lord, with great respect and love, is also calling you to be a part of his people’ (Evangelii Gaudium, 113).”6 Evangelism is finding Christ already present in the world, and inviting the other into the loving belonging of the inclusive family of God.
If my testimony of the gospel revolves around a plotline of, “I used to struggle with this, but God gave me the victory and now I’m free/healed/saved/fill in the blank,” I have immediately distanced myself from the listener of my testimony by implying that I have arrived in a place where they are not. No doubt we do find freedom, healing, and salvation in Christ — and want that for others, too — but the reality continues to be that we ourselves are also in process. The power of the gospel is not that we no longer suffer or struggle, but that we no longer do so alone.
The Second Person of the Trinity stepped in to recorded history to relate intimately with humankind, so that in his willingness to share our lived experience he might gain our trust. This has to be the pattern of our efforts at evangelization and of any ministry we undertake. Can another person really trust us if we are not willing to bare our own weaknesses while prying into theirs? Are we, in our efforts of evangelization, asking something of the other that we ourselves are not ready to extend first?
Of course, many of us do not recognize that our hearts are in this place when we’re trying to minister or evangelize. We certainly don’t want them to be. But if we’re willing to look closely, most of us have an “us and them” mentality, whether conscious or not.7 This is marked by a discomfort with, avoidance of, or desire to change anyone who is not a part of the particular culture in which we are most comfortable. By “culture,” I mean not only one’s place of origin, but also things less often associated with the term, such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexuality, and religious affiliation or lack thereof.
As a nondenominational church-planting missionary in Indonesia, I had the best of intentions and a deep concern for the people around me, as did all the folks I knew who held similar roles. But in my nearly four years of training and serving, it was consistently communicated to me that my ultimate responsibility to every person I met was to try to lead them to a conversion experience with Christ. Such a worldview may seem harmless and even good, depending on your particular spirituality, but a closer look reveals the necessity of a line drawn in the sand. This mentality leads to the inadvertent creation of a “club,” where one is either in or out.
In my experience, the approach seemed to be that cultivating deep friendships with non-Christians was valuable only if the individual seemed likely to convert. Sharing in their sufferings (and being vulnerable with them about my own) was lauded but, at the end of the day, not the ultimate goal, and thus not critically important.
In the stream of Christianity in which my husband and I belonged, the idea of relational evangelism was looked down upon. “You don’t have to earn the right to share the gospel,” a leader once told us. “Jesus already did that for you.” Which — translated into its most honest but abrasive form — means you have the right to push your beliefs upon strangers without taking time to know them as human beings.
It could be argued that this is a tragic consequence of the “once saved, always saved” theology that undergirds many Protestant beliefs. Indeed, my world was turned upside down the day a gentle Anglican priest friend introduced the idea of salvation being a journey we are all walking on rather than a line in the sand that we have either crossed or not, and I came to find that my soul deeply resonated with the Catholic teaching of a continual salvation. But the truth is we Catholics have our own dragons to slay that don’t look much different than those of our evangelical brothers and sisters.
We know the Incarnation mysteriously unites all of humankind to God and one another, but so often the lines of Christianity feel like they do nothing but divide us.
Evangelicals focus on leading people to make a singular, eternal, life-altering decision. We Catholics don’t have the same focus in our evangelizing efforts, but the same outcome-based mentality still plagues us, and we tend to operate within the same “us and them” paradigm. Aside from our efforts to spread the gospel, this also plays itself out in our ministry. We, along with many of our Protestant counterparts, undertake the works of mercy to meet people’s physical needs, but the work is only temporary. We make no long-term emotional investment, which means there’s very little at stake for us when we perform these works. We want our hearts to be conformed to Christ, but we also want the service project done on time so that we can keep our dinner date. It’s important to ask ourselves honestly: How often do I perform acts of service to check them off a list, or because my faith says I have to, or because I like the pious feeling I get when I perform them?8
Regardless of where we fall on the theological spectrum, in the depths of our spirits we know our faith is meant to be more than a one-time prayer that will save a sinner’s soul, and more than meeting people’s physical needs without fully engaging their hearts. This might be why so many Christians are frustrated and disillusioned with the Faith. We know the Incarnation mysteriously unites all of humankind to God and one another, but so often the lines of Christianity feel like they do nothing but divide us.
At the same time, we are each waging our own internal war against the weaknesses of our human condition, but we’re too proud or too ashamed to admit them to anyone else — or, sometimes, even to ourselves. These two problems seem unrelated, but perhaps they couldn’t be more intricately tied. Perhaps the very thing that is meant to unite us to the world around us has actually distanced us from it — and we don’t know how to come back.
I walked the narrow alley back to our house, sandals shuffling dust underfoot, arms loaded with canvas bags filled with eggs and bread, oil and bananas. “Mau pulang?” The elderly woman a few doors down inquired with the polite warmth of a culture that prides itself on manners. “Are you going home now?”
I smiled, responded in the affirmative, and stopped to make small talk, reminding myself to be thankful for the spontaneous opportunity to practice my fledgling language skills. We had been in the kampung for eight months, and our Javanese neighbors were beginning to get used to the glowing white couple and our odd ways. Whether they were as happy to have us there as they seemed or the politeness of their culture had an iron will, we couldn’t tell: The best we could do was hope for the former. This particular neighbor had struck me as the kampung gossip, and I always wondered what foreign words she used for me when her tongue ran away with her. Was there an Indonesian word for snob? Surely so, but I didn’t yet know it. Perhaps if I did I would have kept an ear out.
When we moved into our little house in the kampung, we were thrilled to participate in the close-knit community life of a low-income Javanese neighborhood. At first, people came out of the woodwork to help move in the furniture we had bought in town or to bring us a hot meal. Eric and I had learned to adjust to life without hot water or a Western-style toilet or shower. Ignoring the cicaks (lizards) that constantly roamed our walls thanks to the permanently opened windows became second nature. I’m an animal lover, and geckos pose no threat. It was all going well, yet as the weeks ticked by, relationships had begun to lag. The language barrier was a problem, of course, but those things are overcome every day. This was something more.
The pressure to evangelize every person I met, the mission of converting hearts and minds, the lack of room for any true depth of mutuality in relationship, all felt like a suffocating weight I couldn’t bear. Any effort to get to know someone was haunted by the underlying mandate that I fix what was