We had an interesting intersection this week between our two “Jesus Centered” challenges:
a. Our red letter challenge came from Mark 16:15, “Preach the Gospel”
b. Our “Together with Jesus” challenge involved reading Mark 15 and 16
If you listened to the podcast, you got an earful about how Mark 16:9-20 brings up some questions for a lot of scholars and has led many translators of the Bible to post mild warnings that “the earliest manuscripts do not contain verses 9-20“.
And while that is true, there is some good stuff in Mark 16:9-20, things like “whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” and “go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel”.
But maybe we would prefer to brush Mark 16:9-20 aside because it does definitively say “go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel.” Wouldn’t it be easier if Christianity didn’t come with that evangelistic expectation? There are plenty of world religions that do not expect their adherents to evangelize. Much of the time I get the feeling that some Christians would prefer it if we didn’t have that mandate from Christ.
We complain that it feels awkward, perhaps even offensive to tell other people about our faith. But maybe that has more to do with how we think evangelism is “supposed to be done” and less with evangelism itself. Maybe Christians have indeed made evangelism feel gross and icky, but maybe the fault isn’t evangelism’s fault, but Christians doing things poorly. We are pretty good at doing things that we want to repent of later, after all.
After all, there are plenty of examples of Christians that have figured out how to be evangelistic without being creepy or weird. Look up people like Michael Frost or Alan Hirsch or Dave Runyon or the Five Two LCMS group, or Glocal Missions. But instead of doing that, we just throw up our hands and “proclaim” that “evangelism just isn’t for me,” or “that doesn’t feel like me.” In so doing we act as if we’re cutting out a part of the Scriptures so that it suits us better.
I’m not going to give you five steps to do this kind of work, to make it easy for you, or to give you a silver bullet. It’s not meant to necessarily be easy. In fact that’s the problem with most of the creepy evangelism, it’s too easy. Instead, I’m going to remind you what your Savior told you: “go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel.”
Not easy, but doable. Different from salvation. Salvation is simply not doable for us. We can’t save ourselves or other people. Try as hard as we might, there’s no getting that done. No amount of creative thinking will make it happen. Christ had to come give us salvation because it wasn’t possible for us to do ourselves. But evangelism? proclaiming the Gospel? Jesus has told us that He has made that possible for us. Think of what might happen if we actually believed Him.