As I write this, I am preparing to attend the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina. Aside from the anticipated bickering over the presidency and predicted controversy over resolutions, messengers are sure to hear a challenge from current president Bobby Welch to continue the quest for a million baptisms this church year. Once again, I affirm his efforts. Surely all Baptists, regardless of the letters of the alphabet they are known by, can agree on the priority of evangelism.
Tragically, however, no Baptist group seems to be evangelizing with great effectiveness. Perhaps it's time to evaluate our methods of evangelism. Take for example, the bumper sticker method.
Jim White
I don't know who started the bumper sticker war or when, but I think Christians fired the first shot. It may have been in the '70s with the appearance of “Honk if you love Jesus,” with the related “Tithe if you love Jesus, anybody can honk” appearing later in the decade. About the same era, little ICHTHUS inside a fish shape began to swim their way onto the backs of Christians' cars. The war escalated in the '80s with “In case of the rapture this vehicle will be driverless” and it exploded from there.
By the '90s the enemy was firing salvos of their own with their little legged Darwin fish riding trunk decks and tailgates. Recently other counter-evangelical messages have begun to appear on bumpers and in the back windows of SUVs. “You keep on believing and we'll keep on evolving” fires one, while another echoes “I was born OK the first time.”
Does anyone really think bumper-sticker evangelism works?
I must admit, there is something really appealing about witnessing from the bumper of a moving vehicle. For starters, you don't have to listen to another's point of view. Second, it requires no courage. Just slap on a bold statement and let them read the message for themselves. We can tell them, as lovingly as a bumper sticker can say it, that they can either repent or go to hell. Compassion? Not required! The message is the important thing.
Obviously, I'm going a bit overboard. But I have noticed how tempting it is to witness from a distance. The truth be told, that's the way it's done from a pulpit. Preaching from a pulpit has always been a kind of witnessing “safe zone.” Nobody gets to ask questions or to raise an objection during the course of a sermon. The preacher gets to tell his point of view with no dialogue and no debate.
I am not suggesting that we should change Sunday morning sermon times, but I am saying that real honest-to-goodness Christ-sharing has to happen at times other than Sunday morning and in ways other than from the bumpers of highway heralds.
Real witnessing takes cultivation. It requires dialogical give and take. It has to be caring enough to listen and honest enough to admit it doesn't have all the answers.
Can we Baptists—all of us together—baptize a million people this year? We're not off to a good start, but it's not too late. What will it take? First, we've got to be open a radical approach. Oh, I don't mean that we're not winning anyone, but most of our growth is biological. We are baptizing our own children. We are not apt to reach the unchurched from the pulpit—nor are we likely to impress them by pontificating from our Pontiacs.
Sadly, many of the people we are trying to reach have been repulsed by a faith that seems fake. They have been shot at by too many Christian broadsides and they are firing back. “I was born OK the first time” has an edge to it. Baptists have the option of reloading for the next bumper sticker campaign or changing our strategy.
What if we did something really different? We could start by getting serious about loving each other. John the Apostle said it: “If you can't love your brother who you have seen, how can you love God who you haven't seen?”
After we figure out that loving each other is a major part of evangelism, we can focus on becoming courageous. In my opinion, for the most part American Christians—Baptists included—are rather timid when it comes to sharing their faith. Will we become courageous enough to risk being rejected along with the good news we seek to share? Time will tell.
Finally, we need to become contagious. May I be honest? Why would anyone want the kind of Christianity the typical church displays? Is our joy infectious? Is our happiness catching? Is our peace beyond understanding? A peek at the congregation from the choir loft (and vice versa) on Sunday morning often reveals a kind of joyless worship—a kind the New Testament church wouldn't recognize.
We can all decide that witnessing is every Christian's job, or we can keep trading pithy remarks from the safety of our SUVs. Bobby Welch is right in saying “Everyone Can!” But until everyone does, we'll keep getting the same old results.