Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

lesslie newbigin

A Both/And Approach to Sharing the Gospel

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I remember walking through my college cafeteria with the Four Spiritual Laws in hand looking for people who might be interested in having a spiritual conversation with me.

Sometimes I’d open up the conversation with, “If you were to die tonight, do you know where you would go?” Or I’d ask, “On a scale of 1–10, how interested are you in spiritual conversations?”

I was often rejected…

Other times, I was met with skepticism. And on the odd occasion, I was actually able to share the gospel and see that individual discover a new life in Christ.

While evangelism strategies that rely solely on the verbal proclamation of the gospel still have their place, they are definitely waning in influence.

The solution is not necessarily to swing the pendulum the other way and just live out the gospel and love people to conversion, either.

Tim Keller frames it well,

If the gospel were primarily about what we must do to be saved, it could be communicated as well by actions (to be imitated) as by words. But if the gospel is primarily about what God has done to save us, and how we can receive it through faith, it can only be expressed through words. Faith cannot come without hearing.[1]

Since the gospel is more about what God has done than what we can do, it needs to be proclaimed through words.

But since crusades, street preaching, and spontaneous evangelism are waning in their effectiveness and influence in many parts of the West, we need to figure out different ways to invite non-Christians into the types of environments where they can hear the gospel proclaimed to them.

This is why we need a both/and approach to sharing the gospel!

There needs to be something different about the way Christians live that forces non-Christians to ask questions. If a non-Christian looks at your life and sees the same fruit, or lack thereof, as theirs, they will see your faith as mere empty religious behavior. Isn’t that why Peter urges us to live as “foreigners and exiles” and “to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11)?

We need to live as outsiders and be distinctly different from society. We need to “live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Pet. 2:12)!

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Four Church Planting Tips with Lesslie Newbigin

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lesslienewbigin

 

Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), while being best known for his work in missiology and ecclesiology, actually has a lot of advice for church planters. In fact, each of them is an extension of his quote in the picture above, or of my paraphrase below:

The church – a healthy church – is the hermeneutic of the gospel. It’s the way that the gospel comes to life. It’s the way that people can taste and smell the gospel.

When planting a church, it’s easy to go the way of the herd and get so caught up with the details, that you forget the values or the underlying ecclesiology that you’re trying to develop in the life of your church. After all, without those details getting done, you wouldn’t be able to plant a church. But what if, for a moment, you put those details aside and re-examined the type of ecclesiology that you’re developing in light of these four church planting tips that were inspired by Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society?

After all, Jesus did not write a book, but formed a community – Lesslie Newbigin

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1. Cultivate gratitude, not entitlement.

Newbigin suggests that churches need to be communities of praise and thanksgiving and that this, perhaps, is the church’s most distinctive character. So how are you cultivating a culture of praise and thanksgiving in your church? Are you being intentional with your preaching/teaching and the rest of your ministries? If you cultivate that culture of praise and thanksgiving in your church, you’ll actually see that translate into a heart of gratitude – and with gratitude, you’ll be slaying the idol of entitlement. If that happens, you’ll see your church’s “me” culture translate into a “we” culture, where the focus will be less on personal comfort and wellbeing, and more towards the wellbeing of your city and the salvation of those who are far from God.

2. Share truth, not gossip.

The fuel that drives pop culture seems to be gossip and scandals. This isn’t just true for entertainment shows, late night shows and sitcoms, but this pervades the news as well. If this is the MO (mode of operation) of our culture, this will naturally seep into the life of your church. So instead of calling your church to reject pop culture outrightly and burn all their “secular” CDs and DVDs, what if you cultivated a sense of skepticism towards it? After all, this skepticism would enable your congregation to, in the words of Newbigin, “take part in the life of society without being bemused and deluded by its own beliefs about itself.” This sense of skepticism would allow your church to be aware of pop culture, so that they could speak truth into it by being an alternate community of truth apart from it.

3. Be for your community, not just in your community.

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An Old Insight on Theological Education that is Gaining Traction

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I’ve been thinking and wrestling with the usefulness of theological education for a while now, and came across this older insight from one of the greatest theological thinkers out there – the late Lesslie Newbigin.

“It seems clear that ministerial training as currently conceived is still far too much training for the pastoral care of the existing congregation, and far too little oriented toward the missionary calling to claim the whole of public life for Christ and his kingdom.” – The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

He wrote this in 1989 and so many still haven’t realized this and made the necessary changes!

Book Review: The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission – Lesslie Newbigin

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The following is an analytical review on Lesslie Newbigin’s The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission Revised Edition.

Leslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was a theological missiologist/missionary and a missiological theologian. There are over six decades worth of his writings on mission theology and practice. Thus, he is considered to have had one of the greatest influences on the theology of mission in the twentieth century. Furthermore, Newbigin was a scholar practitioner since his works were always rooted in his living relationship with Jesus Christ; after all, he modeled what he wrote. He was also a Western missionary to India from 1936-1974, and upon returning to Great Britain, his missionary focus turned to the West (Shenk 1998).

The thesis of this book is that Christian mission is an open secret. It is open in the sense that the gospel is proclaimed to all without any boundaries, but it is a secret in that “it is manifest only to the eyes of faith” (Location 2556). As a result, mission cannot be relegated as a side task of the church, but it is the central calling and purpose of the church, yet the church does not own the mission, the mission is God’s (Location 256). Newbigin’s prophetic call to the church is for it to reemphasize its missionary character “to bring all things to their true end in the glory of the triune God” (Location 2556).

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