Last month my church ran an evangelism course in the Sunday evening meetings called Just Walk Across the Room. For the most part, the course and accompanying book contains useful advice on getting to know people, discovering their stories and sharing your faith with them naturally.

It does have some weaknesses though. For one thing, the style is very American, which can seem very cheesy when transplanted to this side of the Atlantic! But more seriously, it has all the theological depth of a paddling pool, and one of the resulting big weaknesses is that it’s very individualistic.

Part Three is entitled The Power of Story, but focuses almost entirely on discovering other people’s stories and sharing your own individual testimony about how you became a Christian. Which is all very well up to a point, and individual salvation is vitally important. But God’s plan isn’t just to save individuals, but to save a people for himself, and ultimately to restore the whole of creation.

The Bible’s Big Story of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration is ignored in favour of explanations like the Bridge Illustration, which is fine as far as it goes, but is woefully incomplete by itself. Worse, the book makes out that our ultimate destiny is “going to heaven” in the sense of disappearing to a spiritual dimension somewhere, rather than heaven and earth being united and renewed in the new creation. It doesn’t just leave out the Bible’s big story, it gets the ending wrong.

Part Four is titled Grander Vision Living, which is ironic given the truncated vision it actually gives. The book says since only people go to heaven, then people are all that matters, which is just a nicer-sounding way of saying that evangelism is the only thing that really matters ultimately.

N T Wright talks about the problems of this view in his book Surprised by Hope:

As long as we see salvation in terms of going to Heaven when we die, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for that future. But when we see salvation, as the New Testament sees it, in terms of God’s promised new heavens and new earth and of our promised resurrection to share in that new and gloriously embodied reality—what I have called life after life after death—then the main work of the church here and now demands to be rethought in consequence.

If our ultimate destiny is to live in a resurrected creation, then that means that although the world will be drastically changed and transformed, it’s still the same world! There is continuity as well as change, and so the resurrection means that what we do in this world has inherent worth and value even into eternity. Or as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15:58, because of the resurrection, “Your labour is not in vain”.

N T Wright again:

When we turn to Paul, the verse that has always struck me in this connection is 1 Corinthians 15:58. Paul, we remind ourselves, has just written the longest and densest chapter in any of his letters, discussing the future resurrection of the body in great and complex detail. How might we expect him to finish such a chapter? By saying, “Therefore, since you have such a great hope, sit back and relax because you know God’s got a great future in store for you”? No. Instead, he says, Therefore, my beloved ones, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.”

What does he mean? How does believing in the future resurrection lead to getting on with the work in the present? Quite straightforwardly. The point of the resurrection, as Paul has been arguing throughout the letter, is that the present bodily life is not valueless because it will die. God will raise it to new life. What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it. And if this applies to ethics, as in 1 Corinthians 6, it certainly also applies to the various vocations to which God’s people are called. What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as
yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it, “Until the day when all the blest to endless rest are called away”). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.

We need to always hold to the entire gospel, which both saves individuals and transforms the world. Individual salvation is an irreducible part of the Gospel, as David Couchman commented on his blog Challenging Times recently, and there is a tendency in some circles to go to the opposite extreme of Just Walk Across the Room, and think of the gospel solely in terms of social improvement in the here-and-now, without dealing with the root issue of each individual’s sinfulness before a holy God. Like so many things in the Christian faith, it’s both/and rather than either/or.

This has big implications for my thoughts on Christianity and politics. If our faith isn’t just about getting souls to heaven after they die, but is about proclaiming Christ’s kingdom, which he established in his death and resurrection, then that means firstly, that politics isn’t just a distraction, because what we do in the here and now really matters, and secondly, that Christians need to engage with the problems and politics of the world on a radically different basis, since we know the answer is found ultimately in Jesus and the power of his resurrection. More on this later…

David Field has written up a couple of lectures he wrote on the subject entitled Not the least lash lost, in reference to a line in a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins about the least eyelash not being lost. I’ve only had a skim through so far, but I hope to read it properly soon.