That which is descriptively true need not be prescriptive.
Take the spread of Christianity. Just because it has continually grown as a faith across the globe doesn’t necessarily mean it should or must.
Here’s my basic thesis: faith in Christ spread in the early church as a word of promise and hope to many kinds of beleaguered communities. However, when the church heedlessly interprets the natural spread of “good news” as a prescription, as command or demand, it corrupts the very message it found so naturally missional.
Consider an analogy: when Taylor Swift tickets went on sale this past week, the news of the opportunity to see her in concert spread incredibly quickly. There’s a kind of natural spread of certain kinds of news based on their appeal. If you like something (like the new Taylor Swift album) you tell your friends about it, especially if you think they’ll get joy out of her music also.
But imagine if the fan-base turned what is descriptively true (that they love to listen to and share her music) into command (we must listen to her music and get others to listen to it also). That would be a problem, right? Like, if all Taylor Swift fans suddenly felt that anyone who didn’t listen to Taylor Swift was lost, lacking hope of real life, etc. that would be… bad.
And yet this is precisely how many Christians have approached mission and evangelism, as if the news they carry isn’t good news they share purely for the delight of it, because they are required to spread it by the direct commands of Jesus and if they don’t spread it those who haven’t heard it yet will be damned, live hopeless lives, etc.
In this understanding of evangelism/mission, good news becomes law. In this understanding of the good news, it takes on a supremacist tone that brooks no rivals: Christianity becomes totalitarian. If you are a Christian you have to spread it to others: if you haven’t become a Christian yet you have to accept it or be irredeemably lost.
What a bunch of crap.
So let’s try to think Christian mission/evangelism in a different way, less totalitarian, less hegemonic, less legalistic, more free and mutual. What might that entail?
Let’s start with the posture of Jesus himself. When we look at the life of Jesus, we see how relaxed he was in terms of “global mission.” Although he was clearly committed to his mission (he was willing to die for it) what he didn’t do was used his divinity or any other powers or strategies to “reach” the whole world or “demand” fealty. In fact, to a considerable degree he did the opposite of these two things. He stayed pretty close to home and only reluctantly went down to Jerusalem at the right time, and understood his work to be especially related to bring a message of wholeness and healing to his own people, always in a sense being open to sharing that message “accidentally” with those outside Israel he encountered on the way.
It would be an entire analysis to walk, moment by moment, through the entire ministry of Christ, but it doesn’t take long reviewing his life to note how gently evangelical and non-colonial it was. He rarely if ever challenged or called into question the beliefs or culture of those outside of Israel; his biggest theological challenges he made were to those already part of the religious system.
Of course there is that one verse at the end of the gospel of Matthew, on which the evangelical impulse of Christianity has placed such heavy emphasis—the Great Commission. But it’s pretty notable how distinct those verses are from the rest of Matthew and the gospels more generally.
We can also take as further example some religious traditions who are quite neighborly with Christianity but far less evangelical. I think here of Buddhist traditions, as well as many other non-Christian faiths. These neighbors of ours are willing to share their insights, philosophies, traditions with others but with a lot less of the anxiety inherent in the anxious posture of Christian mission. It’s almost as if their sense of self-identity is less wrapped up in securing their identity by getting everyone else to be like them.
Finally, we can consider those forms of Christian mission that are more closely connected to Christ himself… that is to say, Christological understandings of mission/evangelism.
My favorite centering concept here is a term that originates in the work of Bonhoeffer and von Balthasar, that of stellvertretung. Sometimes this is translated as “representation,” but can also be translated as “place-sharing.” The classic notion common in Christian circles is that Christ “takes our place” as regards the punishment for sin. But more generally speaking, the emphasis is on God in Christ becoming fully human so that we might share in God’s place. That is to say, Christ becomes human so that humans might become divine.
If this place-sharing (stellvertretung) is a model for Christian mission/evangelism, it offers an entirely different posture for the Christian’s way of sharing “good news” in the world. It inspires us to enter into the space of the neighbor, to imagine ourselves in the neighbor’s place, with a mutual invitation for our neighbors to imagine themselves into our place.
This is why interfaith hospitality, openness to sharing with one another across religious traditions, is ultimately a more faithful form of mission than a posture of demanded evangelism and expected conversion. In the same way that God saw enough value in becoming human to become fully human, you might say that the Christian is invited to become fully their neighbor, without remainder.
Rather than anxiously hoping that our neighbors might become like us, we love our neighbors enough to become more like them. A Christian may become more Christian by deepening their understanding of and connection to the religions of others (even the non-religious, the atheists). In such a relationship, a Christian can still of course share why it is Christ’s place-sharing with them has been so profoundly influential in their lives, but they do so freely, without demand or expectation.
What this can inspire in progressive Christians is a radical new oppenness to faith-sharing. Many progressive Christians have attended to post-colonial thinking and the dangers of totalitarianism. We are rightly reluctant to repeat the harm of Christian mission of the colonial sort. However, if faith-sharing has to do with place-sharing, it then replaces “converting the other” with “we grow in mutual inter-relationship with the other,” each side taking responsibility for what that growth looks like.
On a practical level, it is this kind of posture that allows our congregation to share in real friendship with interfaith communities. Over time, when the Islamic Center or the synagogue or the Buddhist community sees that our Christian community is genuinely interested in mutuality, partnerships, interfaith learning, then their worries about being evangelized (something very common in the South with the dominance of Southern Baptist evangelism practices), there is a kind of relaxed shared mission that can arise. The results of these kinds of interfaith connections can be remarkable and glorious.
And they cannot happen, ever, if the Christian starts from the posture of "these people of another religious tradition lack something we have and it’s our job to give it to them.”
It can happen when we begin from the posture of “we can each grow in our own traditions by deepening our understand of and friendship with those of other traditions.”
excellent