Evangelism & The Christian Witness
God is missional. The Father sent the Son. The Son sent the Spirit. The Father, Son, and Spirit send the church. Mission should be the very marrow of a church—not just one of its many elements. Every member of a church body became part of the church because of the success of God's mission in their life, so the church by definition is a people who are swept up in a mission. All of us who have received God’s grace are now called to be part of God’s mission.
It is true that wrapped up within God's mission is the Christian witness- how we use our words and live our lives in such a way that points people to encounter the truth embodied in Christ. The first image we should see when we picture the church participating in God's mission should be the people of God drawing others to Christ by living out the truth of the gospel in their daily actions.
Historically, the incredible growth of the early church was simply a response to the way Christians worked, in contrast to their culture, to promote the dignity of women, or how during the plagues of the Roman Empire, pagans saw Christians sacrificing their lives to care for others, or, during the period of mass infanticide in early Rome, how Christians started showing up to rescue these abandoned children. It was not just that early Christians refused to engage in the killing of unwanted babies, but rather they began going out to the sites where infants were left to die and rescuing them. These are all examples of Christian life on mission.
It is stories like these that led to the oft-cited quote, "Preach the gospel at all times, and use words if necessary."
You can live out a gospel-changed life without words, but you cannot preach the gospel to others without words. What can never be excluded in the Christian witness is the act of evangelism, which is the explicit communication of the content of the gospel. So yes, in order to truly communicate the gospel, first we must know it and experience it and live it out. But most certainly, the end result is that we share it with our mouths.
The mission of God is not merely to improve conditions for people. It is to ransom a people for himself and to bring all things under the rule and reign of Christ for His glory and the good of his people. It is not about making life better, it is ultimately about bringing dead men into perfect, everlasting life with God. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit achieved through the explicit spread of the gospel.
Romans 1:8-16 "...I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God's will I may now at last succeed in coming to you... So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
The church must never reduce itself to a series of social improvement ministries-- instead, these ministries need to be an outflowing of the church's central mission: to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that Christ commanded.
