Proclaiming the Gospel, Part I: Merging from the Roman Road onto the Interstate Highway System of Full-Octane Gospel Proclamation

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Pastor Foley

On the one hand, it seems like the depths of the topic of proclaiming the gospel ought to be fully plumbed now that we’re 2,000 years into this enterprise called Christianity.

On the other hand, of all of the Works of Mercy, this may be the one that has undergone—and, praise God, is continuing to undergo—the most significant transformation (reformation, really) among evangelicals in our time.

The challenge is, this reformation in evangelical thought hasn’t, uh, quite caught up with evangelical practice. The result is that even though evangelicals’ understanding of proclaiming the gospel has really matured in the last thirty years, by and large we are still doing evangelism the same way evangelicals have been doing it since the 19th century.

There’s not a lot of difference, in other words, between the evangelistic practices of evangelists from the 1800’s like Charles Finney and D.L. Moody, folks from the mid- to late-1900’s like Billy Graham and Campus Crusade, and the evangelists who are sharing the gospel today.

You could summarize this way of evangelism as variations on a Roman Road strategy, which takes its name from how the strategy strings together a series of verses from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. A typical formulation goes like this:

  • God created everything good, but…
  • Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”Romans 6:23a: “…The wages of sin is death…”
  • Romans 6:23b: “…But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
  • Romans 5:8: “God demonstrates His own love for us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”
  • Romans 10:9: “…If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, you shall be saved.”

The climax of this way of proclaiming the gospel is when the evangelist calls for a personal decision for Christ on the part of the hearer, maybe through an altar call or one of those “every eye closed, every head bowed, raise your hands if you’re sure” moments. Respondents are then led to pray what is usually called the Sinner’s Prayer, which according to the folks at www.sinner-prayer.com goes a little something like this:

“Father, I know that I have broken your laws and my sins have separated me from you. I am truly sorry, and now I want to turn away from my past sinful life toward you. Please forgive me, and help me avoid sinning again. I believe that your son, Jesus Christ died for my sins, was resurrected from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus to become the Lord of my life, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send your Holy Spirit to help me obey You, and to do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.”

Now there’s most certainly nothing untrue about this formulation, but evangelicals from the 1950s on have increasingly recognized that the Roman Road approach to proclaiming the gospel is more a reflection of the individualism and self-centeredness of modern times than it is a comprehensive and accurate depiction of what the Scripture actually teaches–and emphasizes–about the gospel.

Scripturally, proclamation of the gospel runs along an interstate highway system designed to cover a lot more distance than the Roman Road. There are, after all, 66 books in the Bible, and the Roman Road approach draws from parts of just one. And even the man who wrote Romans—the Apostle Paul—is never recorded in Scripture as having used the Roman Road approach to proclaim the gospel.

What evangelicals of all stripes are agreeing today is that the gospel is far broader, richer, and deeper than the stream of tears resulting from an evangelist’s reminder of our personal sin and how our decisions about it relate to our destination in the afterlife.

And as we’ll see over the next few weeks, “broader, richer, and deeper” is not shorthand for “let’s sully the purity of individual repentance with the mud of social justice.” Sadly, some evangelicals today are indeed veering off the Roman Road onto that particular dead end instead of heading up the onramp to a more comprehensive, integrated, and accurate Scriptural formulation .

In the evangelical world for the most part, though, when it comes to proclaiming the gospel there’s a recognition that we’ve been looking in the wrong end of the telescope for the last two hundred years. The telescope is pointed at the right subject—Jesus—but by looking through the wrong end, we’ve shrunk the gospel down to a merely personal transaction between us and God. Religion has become primarily a private matter—a matter of the heart—and evangelism has become an invitation to accept Jesus as a personal savior.

As in, “I think religion–oops, I mean spirituality, because I am a deeply spiritual person even though I am not religious–is a really personal thing.”

By focusing so intently on the things of greatest concern to the self-focused individual—namely, their own lives, their insecurities and anxieties, and their eternal destiny—we’ve lost focus on the totality of what God did and is doing in Christ, which is the true focus of the gospel. A focus on “making a personal decision for Christ, your very own personal savior” may be of more native interest to we self-centered moderns, but it has led many to think of Christianity like making a will: You better get one, but in terms of how it impacts your day to day life, there’s not a lot more to do than to be thankful you have one.

So things like discipleship and growth to full maturity in Christ have been de-emphasized by the evangelical church to a jaw-droppingly astonishing degree in the last century and change. And this is probably why we haven’t changed the way we do evangelism even though we know better in our thinking:

Because it’s too hard to bother the general public (and even self-professed Christians–oops, “Christ followers”) with much else other than assuring them that they don’t need to be bothered by too much else other than settling their eternal affairs and feeling really glad they did.

So let’s merge onto the onramp of Scripture–the whole 66 book canon–as for the next few weeks we motor into the Work of Mercy of proclaiming the gospel:

  • what it means
  • how Christ performed it on us
  • how he intends for us to mirror his performance to others.

You can catch my whole message on Proclaiming the Gospel via the free .W weekly podcast.  Or, see a video clip from this series at DOTW.TV.


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Before Leaving for the Field, Should Missionaries Do Support Raising…or Support Emptying?

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Pastor Foley

David Fitch just did a post that has me thinking.

The post, entitled STOP FUNDING CHURCH PLANTS and Start Funding Missionaries: A Plea to Denominations, is fairly self-explanatory and certainly worth a read in its own right. But one particular paragraph captured my attention (and the attention of more than a few of the responders in the comments section of the post). Fitch writes:

Fund these leader/leader couples for two years instead of three. Fund them only with health insurance (in the States) and a reasonable stipend for housing. This gives them space to get a job on the ground floor of a company, at the bottom of the pay scale, learning a skill, proving themselves. They can do this because they have certain benefits and a place to live for two years.

The goal here is NOT (I REPEAT NOT) to have self-sustaining church organization in three years. It is to have three to four leader/leader couples working together with jobs each that can offer 15 hours of labor to work together to organize and form a gospel expression way in their context.  They will be self sustaining in that they all have jobs. They will be committed to this context/neighborhood for ten years.

These leaders will have time and space to then a.) get to know and listen to the neighborhood and the neighbors b.) establish rhythms of life together which include worship, prayer, community, discipleship and presence among the neighbors, c.) discern God working in and among the neighbors and neighborhood, d.)bring the gospel to these places wherever God is working. This includes reconciliation, peace, forgiveness, healing, righteousness, and new creation. D.) develop a way of bringing those coming into faith in Christ into a way of growth and discipleship.

I believe that you put three or more quality leaders together in one place for ten years you will have a new expression of the gospel i.e. a church in each context. Gospel as a way of life will take root. Many will brought into the Kingdom. Imagine what could happen if we funded 100’s of such teams.

If you scan down through the comments on the page in response to the post, you’ll see a respondent named Bob launched a vigorous discussion with the following comment:

I don’t understand this at all. The things you describe these funded missionaries doing is *exactly* what EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the church congregation should already be doing.

The people who are sitting in the seats every Sunday are already living in the context of their jobs and neighborhoods.

I really don’t get this idea of people needing to be paid to “free up the time” to live as Christian salt and light. But I guess our tendency is to pay someone else for something we know how to do (as if we can’t learn) or don’t want to do (as if that is an option God extends).

Bob talks about each Christian seeing his or her present life setting as a mission field–fair comment. And yet as I was teaching Luke 10 to our North Korean Underground University students this past weekend, we couldn’t help but note together that Jesus called Christian missionaries to do something even more radical than Bob suggests. Before leaving for the field, Jesus coached his missionaries to do support emptying rather than support raising:

3Go your way; behold, I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals, and greet no one on the road.

Lest this seem like a one-off oddity (modern readers are invariably quick to conclude that “times have changed and circumstances are different today”), it’s interesting to note that Jesus gives similar advice to a certain rich young ruler who was contemplating his own role and standing in the Kingdom of God:

“You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

Never one to dispense advice that he hasn’t already lived and embodied himself, Jesus’ own preparation for missionary service is worth considering:

5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself…

David Fitch suggests that missionaries get a job but receive free housing and insurance. Commentator Bob counters that missionaries should pay for their own housing and insurance. But Lord and Savior Jesus suggests something even more extreme, which is that we prepare for missionary service by self-emptying: selling everything we have, but not to raise support for our missionary journey–the proceeds from the garage sale are to be given to the poor, he says–but rather to put ourselves in a position of absolute dependence upon those to whom he sends us.

“But surely there is a support baseline below which a missionary preparing to head to the field should not fall, and if the missionary fails to reach that threshold, he or she should not be released to the field.”

Jesus suggests a support baseline that a missionary should not rise above rather than fall below. And he seems to see real value in being placed in a position of dependence upon those to whom one ministers.

So imagine someone declaring for missionary service and entering a support emptying phase rather than a support raising one. Instead of traveling around to churches to raise support, the missionary travels around to churches divesting himself or herself of all earthly possessions. One is declared field ready when the bank account balance hits zero.

So my vote for the most radical and Jesus-like missionary post is not the one from David Fitch (though I liked the piece and the thought behind it), nor the comment on Fitch’s post from Commentator Bob. The one I like the best is a post from 1981 from Tom and Elizabeth Brewster challenging missionaries to hit the field without knowing a word of the language of the people to whom they’re being sent. Why?

In order to be completely dependent to learn the language from the people, of course.

The self-sufficient independence of North Americans is of little help for the one who would communicate positively, have an incarnational ministry, or learn the language. Far more is communicated by being in a state of dependency upon the people. A principle here (as pointed out by Dwight Gradin) is that people help people who are in need. As a Learner, then, one must be willing to demonstrate dependency. Jesus Himself (who, of course, could have been more independent than even the most well healed among us) modeled dependency for us. In childhood He was dependent on a poor family, and in adulthood He conducted His ministry as One who could say He had no place to call His own where He could lay His head (Luke 9:58).

The disciples, too, experienced dependency. Bonnie Miedema says it well:

When Jesus sent out the Twelve to preach and heal the sick, He instructed them, “Take nothing for the journey – no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic” (Luke 9:3). I’m finally beginning to understand why Jesus said that. He wanted the disciples to experience the hospitality of the local people and to be dependent upon them. He knew that identifying with the people and staying in their homes would open doors for their ministry.

Unfortunately, we have a cultural perception that causes us to believe that dependence and vulnerability are weaknesses. On the contrary, the one who authenticates his life-message is the one whose strength lies in his willingness to be vulnerable. (Vulnerability is the willingness to put oneself in a position where one could be taken advantage of by others, or where one’s shortcomings and weaknesses may be exposed.)

In conclusion, it’s worth noting that at least one of the books of the Bible owes its existence to a certain apostle’s lack of health insurance:

13You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first, 14and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. 15What then has become of the blessing you felt? For I testify to you that, if possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me.

When it comes to serving as a missionary, there’s no substitute for being genuinely–and acutely–in need of others. Such a one might even describe themselves quite accurately as a debtor to Greeks and Barbarians…

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Missionary Support Fundraising: A Transformational Giving Testimony

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s been a while since we posted a testimony regarding how Transformational Giving (TG) is changing the way missionaries and church interact with regard to the mission task. Check out this update from Carrie and Joe Schmit of World Gospel Mission on how TG transformed the way they raised support to serve in Honduras:

After we read the book Coach Your Champions by Eric Foley and had our first CMS [Champion Migration Strategy] training I was a bit unsure how all of this “champion migration” stuff would work for us and the team we had yet to build.  It all sounded good in theory but sometimes my mind tries too hard to put a formula to things and I didn’t see how Joe and I could put this formula into action.

After CMS training we came home and tried to utilize our “white board” as Eric did.  We mapped out what we thought would be our plan for migrating champions.  We had our web of contacts, participants, those engaged and potential owners.  It wasn’t much but it was a start.

The Lord was working His plan right before our eyes and we didn’t even see it.   We hit what we thought was a very unproductive slow time of HMA [Home Missionary Assignment].  We were very discouraged, feeling as though we hit a brick wall.  During this slow time the Lord reconnected me with a high school friend.  While we were pulling our hair out trying to find places to go so that we could share our calling and raise support the Lord was bringing them to us…it just wasn’t what we thought it would look like.  We were excited for this connection that was made but we didn’t want to focus on “one at a time”.  We wanted churches…the bigger the better!

Instead He brought me Emily.

Emily and I quickly reconnected and Joe and her husband John became friends as well.  John and Emily have a heart for missions and have adopted their son from Guatemala.   Our common interest in reaching the children in need was no coincidence and as we spent more time together Emily told me that she had been planning to have an orphan walk/run to help spread awareness and motivate people to take time to really look to God for what their part might be.  Her passion is with orphans yet she made it very clear that the need for building God’s kingdom goes beyond the walls of an orphanage or the child without a home.  She is a Champion.  And with her came more champions!

She came to me one day to tell me that she felt as if the Lord was wanting her to use this orphan walk to not only raise awareness for the orphan but also to raise awareness of the mission involvement that is taking place already right here in our community.   And she added, “this includes your family and your plans to serve the Lord in Honduras.”

She spoke about this walk with pretty much anyone who’d listen and before long she had a steering committee to help her with the plans.  Six different churches in our community ended up being represented with the steering committee alone!  They also decided that 100% of the proceeds would go to our ministry account.

As they began having planning meetings and started the work that was needed to pull this off we felt like we needed to be involved too.  In those two months God ended up developing some mighty champions for us from this steering committee and some lifelong friendships.  Their excitement spread into their churches, into business’s and even into the schools!

It ended up being a silent 2 mile barefoot walk because the logo was “Walk A Mile In My Shoes, Walk a Mile For Jesus,” and the shoes of an orphan are typically “no shoes.”  There was a flip flop sprint relay race and a kids fun run.  There was even entertainment with the Two Eight Band!  Everything that was needed for the event was donated, the water, the shirts, the printing materials and the local radio station donated air time for interviews about the event the whole week prior.

The newspaper wrote two front page articles (with the journalist having to stand firm for what she knew God wanted said and she refused to back down and allow the editing process to remove God’s name and His glory!)  The band that performed donated their performance and sold all of their worship cd’s and gave all of the money to our account.  The Junior Highschool donated tents and tarps because of the storm that was in the forecast (which by the way parted for Indiana and came back together after it passed Indiana and we had beautiful weather!)  The children from the Christian Academy and homeschool  group made signs with statistics on orphans and poverty weaved with signs of scriptures with hope to line the path.  A slew of Cookies were made and donated by many grandmas from the churches and I love to tell how God used all the extra cookies for a special treat for those living in the local homeless shelter.  Approximately 250 people (counting children) came and they raised approximately $6500+ for our ministry account!  I put the plus sign on there because the ripples of this event are still affecting our ministry account.   Our PEO list has grown dramatically and we’ve had churches and individuals calling us to come and share with them, asking us how they can do their part and help get us to Honduras!

This steering committee for the walk has turned into some definite Champions for this ministry and they are saying that they are not done yet! What we have learned from this is that with God the possibilities are endless!

Not only are the possibilities endless, but Christians in six more churches are actively participating in and owning the Schmits’ ministry in Honduras rather than just funding it.

Now that’s transformational!

Great job, Carrie and Joe. I’m honored to hear that the Coach Your Champions book could be of assistance. Keep in touch as you and your champions write the sequel to the book in your own ongoing ministry!

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