There is a question floating in the air. It is hard to even ask the question, because the words seem to spoil the beauty of the question. The question starts as a mediation, "If I look at the values, methods, goals, and results of my church, they don't seem to be in harmony with one another." From this meditation often arises the question, which sounds something like this: "If I give up the language and goals of the church, which have traditionally been focused on convincing people to turn their life over to Jesus, what do I replace them with?"

We've been grappling with this question in the church for a while. There are experiments, and books get written, and we have "new paradigms" for evangelism, friendship evangelism, power evangelism, servant evangelism, lifestyle evangelism, and so on and so forth. Each of these "new" paradigms is really a rediscovery or reemphasis of an old paradigm or truth that somehow got lost the last time we all switched to a new paradigm.

I am not going to slam the four spiritual laws, because that would be a continuation of the "old paradigm/new paradigm" nonsense that washes like waves on the shores of the Christian faith. However, they are an example of the view of evangelism that is considered orthodox in the protestant church. Do we all remember them?

1. God LOVES you, and offers a wonderful PLAN for your life.
2. Man is SINFUL and SEPARATED from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God's love and plan for his life.
3. Jesus Christ is God's ONLY provision for Man's sin. Through Him you can know and experience God's love and plan for your life
4. We must individually RECEIVE Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God's love and plan for our lives.

I think the intuitive difficulty some have in reading these laws comes from the sense that in this day and age, it is a double conversion. The first three laws try to convert someone to a worldview where the fourth law is the answer to all hope.

The first Christians had this same problem. They felt that in order to communicate the joy of the good news that Messiah had come, they needed to teach people to be Jewish, so that they would understand about Messiah. The message of hope contained in Jewish faith could not be constrained by it, and as the gospel hit the Gentile world, it changed. This change in the presentation of the gospel was not a dilution of truth; it was the opposite. By examining the gospel is it crossed cultures, the Jews learned something very deep that they had known only dimly before. We need to be ready for that same type of reexamination of the gospel.

In theology, the task of processing the text of the bible is often described in two steps. The first is exegesis, trying to determine what the passage meant to the first reader. The second step, hermeneutics, is trying to determine what a faithful rendering of that original intent would be for a modern day reader. For example, the most conservative reader of the bible will admit that many of the commands God gave the Israelites in the desert are not to be interpreted literally today, yet most Christians believe that understanding the presence of these commands in the bible will bring us a piece of the puzzle what it means to be alive in God's universe.

Our problem with evangelism is not in our exegesis. There are people all over the world who are dying because they dared to share their faith. Those people are not wasting their lives because evangelism is now a waste of time. Our problem is in hermeneutics. Our hermeneutics can be faithful to the original intent, and be different that those of missionaries in India, different than the apostle Paul, different than those of the American church ten years ago, and even the church on the other side of town, because the hearer of the word is part of the equation, and the hearer of the word is a moving target.

The original message, "The Kingdom is here, Messiah is here" meant that the long wait was over; the time to celebrate was now. Justice, peace, the long yearning, the day hoped for was finally here. Maybe the important part of this message is not that Messiah had come, but that hope had come.

If the gospel is the message of hope, then the four spiritual laws can still be effective communicators of the gospel, for those who hope for redemption and reconciliation with a distant god.

The problem for those who are struggling to faithfully communicate this hope is that it seems like the entire vocabulary of the Christian faith has been appropriated by the holders of the sin/separation/salvation message, leaving us with nothing to say that doesn't end up sounding like we are saying the same thing. But if we try and use new language, we suspect even ourselves because we have no way of thinking about the Christian faith that isn't somehow tied to the sin/separation/salvation message.

This is where we can learn something from an outside observer. Here is what one observer wrote about the result of American missionary activity in the Philippines:

"The churches... differentiate themselves from the rest of the human community. The Christian life and the forms of church life have been built upon the presupposition of conversion. The Protestant is essentially a convert; his life is structured negatively by his separation from the world and positively by the ethical resources of his newly found faith. His face is turned toward God and his back toward the world. The measure of his unworldliness is the measure of his godliness. He cultivates inner piety, personal peace, and family devotions, undisturbed by the storms and stresses of sociopolitical realities, enduring the sufferings of temporal existence until his soul is released from his body in death and returns home to heaven where it will enjoy the good things it was deprived of during its pilgrimage on earth" [ Nacpil, Emerito "A Gospel for the New Filipino" in Asian Voices in Christian Theology. ]

While Nacpil's description can be read as a general indictment of Western Christianity, I don't see it that way. What we are seeing instead is a view of the mismatch between the context the churches were planted in, and the one they came from. What is interesting is that Nacpil sees this divergence stemming from the church's emphasis on conversion.

I propose we are also evolving into a culture where the message and mission of conversion is beginning to feel like a hollow shell. And so our message needs to evolve also, as a faithful rendering of the original, biblical, message of hope. This proposal is not new or unique to me; it is everywhere.

There is so much life and power, if we can avoid dividing the world into "pre-converts" and "converts." The "sanctification vs. justification" dualism is the root of the "sacred vs. secular" split that keeps Christ out of most of our lives, and causes us to treat pre-converts differently.

David Andrews, in his book "Christi-Anarchy" proposes that this dualistic view of the world is so deeply ingrained in Christian thought, that the only remedy is to leave "Christianity" behind, and to find a new Christ-centered faith. While I feel that may be an extreme reaction, the problems, which caused the reaction, are very real.

Todd Hunter has a statement that ties all this together. He says "I evangelize everyone." When I first heard that, it was an epiphany. We all need Christ. I need to know Jesus in such a way that I am just as eager to let him live through me outside the walls of the church as I am inside. I need to drop the goofy way I talk inside church, drop the different goofy way I talk outside the church, and find the authentic message that I can carry to anyone I meet.

If we try to imagine a church without the four spiritual laws, our results-oriented minds recoil in horror. We extrapolate to a world full of people who like to hang out in church but have no commitment to Christ. In doing this we reveal our limited faith in the power of Christ to change hearts, and think somehow we need to help the process along.

"Conversions" will happen, because it is Christ in us who is moving and speaking, but just as we don't need to remind people to breathe, we won't need to remind people to "convert", it will be as natural as breathing once they have seen Christ. An emphasis on the conversion ends up interfering with our understanding and processing the truth that Christ costs our whole lives.

This proposed church, full of people who are attracted by Christ, but who haven't prayed the "sinners prayer" may end up being a scary and intense place, because instead of accepting a man made ritual as a substitute for death, we would all feel Jesus drawing us to true death and new life in Him.

Neither I, nor anybody with impressive credentials and experience, can tell you exactly what a faithful rendering of the command to "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation .." [Mark 16:15a ] should look like. To search for the correct answer, and write it down in a book (with questions at the end of each chapter, so it is suitable for use in small groups), fails to learn anything from the erosion of the power of our last best understanding of what that verse meant.

The challenge of this time, in this culture, is not postmodernism, but the pace of change. Our response is not to quickly find a relevant message and method of communicating the gospel to a postmodern world, but rather to let go of the idea that we can learn only once what the message is and spend our lives delivering it. We are in an era where hermeneutic distance appears in years and not centuries. We therefore need to have a lifestyle of humbly listening to how what we say is heard by the current culture.

The church has striven in the past to let the world know that the answers to all of life's questions are known, and fulfilled in the person of Jesus. The church in the now and future time must instead be a place which admits that it doesn't have answers, but that there exists a community where the questions are asked and the answers are sought from the One who does fulfill.

Where a person formerly was valued only as a possible receptacle of the gospel truth we possessed, we now start all conversations as equals, both parties bringing value and wisdom to the relationship. We are just as interested in listening as we are in speaking.

In this way we will maintain our position, and fulfill our calling, as bearers of Christ, "preaching the good news." My experience with this among the people I am learning to love has been very freeing, as I no longer need to have a notebook full of "correct" answers to questions about the faith, My faith is no longer a barrier to relationship with "pre-converts," but an essential part of it.

My closing question, for use in small group discussions, is this, "Who are you living with, and what are they hoping for?"