Where Everybody's Crazy

Someone back at WEC UK asked for my views on Internet evangelism. I wrote back a long response which was less than favourable, so pretty much killed the conversation, but here it is for posterity...

See, I'm not sold on Internet evangelism because, as we know, the web is largely (although not exclusively) a pull medium and evangelism is a push medium, so I just don't believe they can fit well together. In other words, in evangelism you want to be going out to reach people, but in constructing web sites you're waiting for people to come to you. Developing material is fantastic but bringing people into contact with it is the tricky part.

Yes, I've read the "bridge strategy" stuff but all the strategies there still feel completely churchy to me. I honestly don't believe that people search the web to find articles about the meaning of life. "Who is Jesus Really?" is, I'm sure, a brilliant site, for people who are already interested in the answer to that question. But that's not the question that most Japanese are starting from. (This can also be understood as a criticism of Alpha in Japan.) Looking over the search keywords people use to stumble on my site in Japanese backs me up here; there are one or two people looking for things like "how to love myself" (self-image is a big issue here) but the vast majority are obviously already Christian, searching for Biblical characters and so on. So if you're going to do this, I reckon that the emphasis really needs to be on constructing communities that people will find and join, or more likely presenting apologetics in existing forums, which is what I tend to do a bit in Usenet, IRC and the like...

I've never seen a satisfactory answer to the question "how are you going to build your audience?" in the web evangelism field. I have seen people throw around terms ("social networking!") as if they were magic cure-alls, instead of means to connect people in the usual way that people connect to people. It's got to come down to going out into the highways and byways, and that takes effort and building personal relationships, the usual missionary grunt work; simply throwing content at the web and hoping it finds its intended audience isn't going to cut it for me.

So at the moment I'm more interested in mobilizing the Internet for serving the existing church community than primarily for evangelism. Social networking for accountability and prayer partnerships, that kind of thing. Mitsuo Fukuda is doing this with his businessmen's groups via SMS; Masaru Aoki of the Diaspora Network Japan runs online Bible studies for Japanese overseas and returnee Christians, and follows them up with Skype discussion and prayer. This is more the kind of thing which I like, since you already have a natural community that you're serving.

This isn't to say don't do it. That's not what I mean. We should try absolutely everything, and maybe save some. I'm sure it does save some. Just saying why it doesn't turn me on much.

The wonderful David Bosch says in "Transforming Mission" that we need to realise that different religions are "worlds unto themselves". What he means is that it is impossible to enter into dialogue with someone with a different religious commitment to you and assume that your viewpoints are going to be the same; different religions either come from or give rise to different worldviews, which are incommensurable. When a Christian talks about God incarnating himself amongst his creation, he's saying something good; but someone with a Buddhist background is hearing something bad, and someone with an Islamic background is hearing something impossible. I remember Dave Burnett taking apart John 3:16 and showing how it meant to a Buddhist listener the opposite of what it means to a Christian listener. God loving the world? What an unGodlike thing to do! Eternal life? That's what I'm trying to get away from!

I've noticed this a lot listening to young evangelists. Having already dismissed the worldviews of other religious positions, ("Why study about Islam? What can that teach us about the truth?") their apologetics takes place from a Christian perspective. Which is fantastic if you're trying to convince Christians about the truth of Christianity; but generally, you're not. Although sometimes, the net result of this sort of thing is that they end up sounding like they're trying to convince themselves of the coherence of their own position. And maybe they are.

It seems to be a trademark of younger evangelists, and particularly conservative evangelicals, who, on the whole, receive the Gospel as a coherent set of propositions about the nature of the world and are highly committed to the absolute truth value of these propositions. And I'm trying not to be judgmental here because there is absolutely nothing wrong with that; indeed, the fact that these guys are so committed to the accuracy and superiority of their position makes them the most fervent and active evangelists, certainly more so than us grouchy liberal guys. (I'm not really that liberal, but it's all relative.)

But as my tutor at college said, "to be a good evangelist, you need to be a good atheist." You need to start from where the other guy is. So you don't start, for instance, talking about "what the Bible says" just because you accept the primacy of the Bible; the other guy doesn't. I get honestly ashamed when I hear evangelists quoting chapter and verse to bolster their own position when it's clear that the person they're talking to doesn't operate from that starting point. I get ashamed because it shows they aren't taking the other person seriously; they are more interested in their own doctrinal correctness than in showing love, and you show love by understanding the other person and taking their commitment seriously. (If you think I'm being unbiblical at this point, look at how Paul in Athens dives right into the middle of people's religious commitments, accepts them as valid, and works out how to speak about his own commitment from within that system. It's beautiful, and we've all been way too scared of syncretism to do anything like it since.)

Another telltale sign is the jargon and the symbolics. Telling people that they need a saving sacrifice is meaningless outside of a Christian worldview. And yet I've heard people come out with it, cold. Or let's take, say, "sin" as an example. The seriousness of sin and the need for a remedy is pretty much the basis of the Christian worldview. I am not doubting that. But it is not the basis of the atheistic worldview, strangely enough.

And so I hear, on countless occasions, statements like "people can't appreciate the good news until they know how bad the bad news really is." Basically the implication is, convert them to the Christian worldview first, and from then on, Christianity is pretty much the logical conclusion of that worldview. This, again, is not exactly how Paul did it. The end result is that evangelism becomes a battle for the superior worldview - which is, I suspect, one reason why it's so damned unpleasant to be on the receiving end of. Or on either end of, to be honest. Worldviews are worlds unto themselves.

I'm beginning to realise that this principle has wider application.

Churches are worlds unto themselves. Jim Stamoolis has said that even though the Orthodox Church and the WCC have taken part in dialogue, they haven't really had any dialogue because they have used the same terms to mean different things.

Denominations are worlds unto themselves. I'm reminded of this every time I go to Henrietta's church (and maybe when she goes to mine) - I don't know the big names I'm supposed to know or the latest doctrinal or spiritual fad that the churches (all over the world!) are involved in. I only have a fuzzy concept of what Willow Creek is. (I keep confusing Willow Creek with the Willowbank Report, which is roughly what this whole blog post is about: "Many of us evangelical Christians have in the past been too negative towards culture.")

And now, switching topics somewhat, I'm realising that political viewpoints are worlds unto themselves. They're incommensurable. Hell, the American Senate just got rid of rights to representation (949b.c in sec 3), evidence admissibility rules, (949a.b in sec 3) Geneva Convention rights (sec 6b.1), and judicial review on all of the above (sec 5) for anyone that Rumsfeld or Bush decides has committed a "hostile act"; but try telling a Republican that all this Gleichschaltung is a bad thing if he doesn't want to hear you. The truth is that he can't hear you - and you can't hear him - as long as you're operating in different worlds. They will sound to you as though they're in denial of the truth; you will sound to them as though you're a paranoid raving lunatic. (Thankfully, the Enabling Act could never happen to us here in the UK. Nobody ever thinks it can happen to them.)

Real evangelism - religious or political - has to begin with taking the other person's commitment seriously, however insane or misguided we think it is, and pointing the way forward on their own terms, not on ours. Being content with being in the right is easy, comfortable, and saves you from the bother of engaging seriously with how the other person thinks. Working from within another's worldview is difficult, and puts you in a position of weakness - and people don't like to appear weak on positions of religious or political commitment. We much prefer working from a position of strength; but look at the Bible, and look how people like Paul operated - not with clever or persuasive arguments, but in the understanding that in the worldviews of his listeners, his message was foolishness and a stumbling block. He understood how he was being heard, and he knew that he was, in the minds of his hearers, backing a loser.

We're hypnotised by this idea of strength, of having the upper hand, of being in the right. We should be hypnotised by the ideas of self-denial, of understanding, of love. Of weakness. I've had other Christians pray sincerely and lovingly for me to get over my "doubts" simply because I've refused to deal with non-Christians on Christian terms. Thanks, but that wasn't doubt; it was love. Weakness - even ideological weakness - is not a dirty word. It is, after all, where God's power is made perfect.