Evangelism is not a practice of professional clergy, but of the people of God. And these people of God -- scholars, architects, philosophers, poets, chemists, politicians, etc. -- exist in tension with the world. I hope to examine the work of John Yoder and draw out the implications for evangelism as social ethics, as opposed to evangelism as proclamation, apologetics, or church growth alone. First, it will be important to examine the other theories of evangelism. Second, I plan to bring to the foreground the implicit, modern assumptions which undergird these particular theories of evangelism. Third, the Yoderian corrective will be applied to contemporary models of evangelism. I hope to show that Yoder is a beacon guiding us away from the rocky crags of evangelism as apologetics, church growth, or proclamation. Instead, evangelism is the people of The Way living faithfully in a fragmented, violent world. Yoder offers insight for Christian mission which assimilates enough of the world’s culture to communicate and live the message, and is distinct enough to maintain allegiance to the kingdom of God. Christian witness must not accommodate to contemporary culture and must not retreat from engagement with that culture.

Just as evangelism cannot be reduced to proclamation, likewise it must not be reduced to church growth. Certainly it is honorable and good not only to study how and why people convert to Christianity; it is crucial to utilize such knowledge. But there remain two main problems with the church growth model of evangelism. First, the church growth model is too concerned with the external signs of church membership. Evangelism is a complex process and church growth pays little attention to the crucial steps in evangelism of discipleship and spiritual formation. Evangelism is not just getting people inside the doors of the churches and into the pews. It is a call into an alternate reality requiring an alternate lifestyle. We may liken the church growth model to an elementary school. Their model -- happy case -- succeeds if a student has perfect attendance and there are large numbers of students in the class. But if the student learns nothing then it is all for not. Church growth wants the numbers and does little to promote first-order learning and discipleship. Second, this particular model is susceptible to ignoring social ills due to its homogenous unit principle. In its pragmatic attempt to produce numerical growth, it undermines the legitimate threat of the gospel to the status quo. And not only does it bend to the status quo, at times unreservedly, but it creates an upper echelon of ministry, in which evangelism is the most important practice of the church. William Abraham correctly points out that evangelism is initiation into God’s kingdom. Evangelism forwards the purpose of the kingdom of God, as do the church practices of pastoral care, baptism, and confession of sin.

As the warrants of the Renaissance were laid waste modernity captured a move to the universal, general, and timeless. Modern thought emerged from the medieval as philosophers and mathematicians like Descartes initiated a ‘turn to the subject’ and to epistemological justification. Two central assumptions uphold the modern system of belief: 1) epistemological foundationalism, and 2) individualism.

Foundationalism concerns itself with the justification of claims. Justification of a claim is enacted by showing a claim’s relation to other claims of belief. For a foundationalist, reason must not be circular or result in infinite regress. Justification must rest on a certain belief, either self-evidently true or experientially so. Such a claim -- one which is universal or certain -- functions as the ‘building’ block for the rest of the following claims, and thus the term “foundation.” Modern philosophical and Christian ethics strive to find the universal indubitable beliefs which can act as such a foundation, be they universal human experience or scripture. Evangelism, under such a system, is relegated to the place of proclamation of universal claims -- modern apologetics.

Individualism is the second assumption of modernity. Modernity attributed to individuals ‘ontological’ priority. Individuals are ‘real’ and societies are nothing more than the sum of their parts. Moreover, in the rampant individualism of Descartes we have a hint of solipsism whereupon one’s reflections on ideas are limited to sensory data which reach the mind where the subject is contained. Not only are communities made up of individuals, but an individual is merely a self-evaluating, mental being.

The Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20) stands as the prime biblical text on which to develop an ethic of evangelism. If we heed Jesus’ words, evangelism appears as a practice of the church to go forth into the world proclaiming God’s authority, inviting those in the world to participate in the church via discipleship, initiated through baptism, and being grounded in the faith through proper teaching. The words of Jesus in v.20 are poignant, “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Christ’s life and ministry are constant memories for the church, and God promises to be present as the church grows and follows faithfully. Evangelism is the people of God living in the presence of the promises of God which are ever more coming to completion.

When we practice evangelism, then, it is imperative that our first attempts are not to seek first principles from which we convince our hearers. Apologetic evangelism is nothing more than a remnant of the defunct Enlightenment project. What Yoder offers in its stead is a vision of a community viably engaging the secular, offering the countercultural presence of the God movement, in hopes of presenting the good news to those willing to listen. The shift that has occurred here is one away from methodology towards presence. Any methodological attempt at starting ‘from scratch’ is an exercise in futility. If it were possible, it would be little more than a drastic power move over the other. Evangelism, to be evangelism, must be less of a universal claim, and more of a way of life visible to the watching world. Our moral discourse and our evangelistic practices “must follow function in the sense that if the function in question is the continuing accountable common life of a people, whose members call one another to renewed faithfulness to the call of the God who has entered human affairs to save, then the forms of that community’s discourse must be no narrower than the story itself.” Allegiance to the God of the story is more important than allegiance to methods and principles deriving from seventeenth century Europe. Christian witness bears the burden of being faithful to the story. It is a story which, by its nature, seeks to be shared.

The “story God has chosen to have us tell is the story of some people more than others, Abraham and Jesus.” It is the normative place of Jesus for the people of the way which establishes our convictions and practices. Evangelism, then, is being faithful to that story. The story provides a “thick” history from which to draw. When the people of God live faithfully and proclaim the good news, it is not a word “from scratch” to be blindly accepted, but “what we proclaim is not that Christianity as a religion is 'better' than other faiths, an intrinsically, unprovable and therefore meaningless claim when taken in the abstract, but that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Christian witness -- evangelism -- is a testimony to the lordship of Jesus Christ; a lordship which extends far beyond the Christian community, but extends over all creation. What is done in Christ is the creation of a whole new people. Evangelism is not an individual effort, but it is a faithfulness which requires a community effort. It is the presence of that community itself.

A recovery of the corporate counters modernity’s priority of individualism. Individuals can only exist as members of a community and are therefore not prior to the community. Likewise, individuals are not cogs in the mechanism of society fulfilling no particular need or place. Rather, individuals, having found their existence in a community, bring a complementary role or skill to community life. This is one of the key areas in developing a viable ethics of evangelism. If evangelism is initiation into the Kingdom of God, it represents a new communal reality and is not simply a matter of individual will. The shape of this new reality is both public and political, and our evangelistic practice ought to be up to this task. Being this new reality is, itself, this evangelistic practice. For the actions of the community cannot be separated from the proclamation. What God has done in Jesus Christ is to bring a new social reality into existence. This new reality publicly proclaims the work of God to the world. In other words, “How God is doing it is not distinguishable from what God is doing, and how the world can know about it is again the same thing.” The Christian people have a distinct identity, and as such, have good reason to want to share that reality with the world. Because Christ is lord, what has been given to the church is also what is offered to the world. The believing community is the eschatological presence of the still to come fulfillment of God’s kingdom.

This new public reality offers a new political vision for the world. The good news is a politics of revolution. The good news is not simply a religious or personal message, but bears connotations of political uprising. The euangelion is news of redemption from the oppressor, the deliverance from one’s enemies. What God has done and is to do is good news for the oppressed, the poor, the widow, and slave. What God has done in the new people is to create a social reality where there are new economic practices (breaking bread), cultural barriers have been broken down (baptism), and where reconciliation and forgiveness (fraternal admonition) exhibit a life of servant-leadership. These are all practices for the watching world, common enough for them to learn from, and hopefully follow. At the same time, this new political reality must avoid taking charge of the world, be it through political channels, or intellectual trump cards -- universal truth claims. The new peoplehood is a servant-people who offer such a life to the world.

In conclusion, evangelism is something the Church does in order to be Church. Evangelism has at its core a biblical mandate to proclaim and live a new kingdom reality. This alternate way of living rests on a larger narrative in which the people of God now view themselves as the same people of God written about in scripture. This is similar McClendon’s hermeneutic of “this is that.” The new people of God live under the guidance of Israel and Jesus, while exhibiting the present power of a still future reality. Obviously, evangelism is concerned with presenting the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world and offering the chance for the world to rechoose its narrative. In so doing, the world becomes Church, and lives a new reality.

The believing community does not exist unto itself. This community lives with both kingdom and world blood coursing through its veins. Amidst this tension “the confessing community will raise up signs of the kingdoms. In none of them is the kingdom near enough to realization that those signs can be simple, unambiguous, unbroken.”