Becoming an Evangelical, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘Fearless’
Luke 4:16-21
Febraury 11, 2007
Kathryn Ray

            For several years now, I have asked myself off and on whether or not I’m an evangelical.  As a youth, I thought evangelicals were the preachers on TV and at Christian rock concerts who talked about Christianity and Christ in terms of a one- time acceptance of Jesus into your heart as the one way of avoiding eternal damnation and hellfire.  They showed at best pity and at worst contempt for anyone who disagreed with them. As someone who’d been raised in the church and had grown into faith rather than converting to it, this presentation of Christ was completely foreign to me, and it didn’t seem loving.  If this was spreading the gospel, then I couldn’t buy into it.  I just didn’t feel the need to cajole other people into thinking the way I think.

When I got to college, I came in contact with the writings of man named Jim Wallis, who spoke out against the war, the government’s environmental policy, and corrupt government.  More than many Christians I know, he unabashedly cited the Spirit of Christ as the force that drove him to speak.  In Atlanta, I met more people who followed this model, including my cousin Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who spoke out against the church’s exclusion of homosexuals and people with AIDS after his son was fired from his church position and turned out of every church he subsequently visited because his wife had gotten AIDS from a blood transfusion.  These people speak wisely and audaciously, while embodying the loving spirit which I had found lacking in the evangelicals I encountered as a youth.  And yet they also called themselves evangelicals.  I thought if they were evangelicals, then maybe that’s what I wanted to be, too.  But first, I had to know for myself what it means to evangelize.

            That question, at first, was easy.  To me, evangelizing is preaching the gospel (And Dictionary.com agrees with me).  The hard part was figuring out what the gospel is, and how exactly one goes about preaching it.  Last month, the lectionary reading was from Luke 4, the Scripture you just heard.  You may not remember this part of it because I think Steve’s sermon was more about throwing Jesus over a cliff.  Anyway, I realized that this passage, which cites the prophet Isaiah, contains the gospel in a nutshell.  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God  has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”  That’s what Jesus did.  In two sentences and fifty-three words, this is the good news of Jesus’ ministry and resurrection.  When I decided that, the question of whether I am an evangelical or not resolved itself.  Good news to the poor, freedom to the captives and the oppressed- this is a piece of good news, a lifestyle, a demand, and a mission that I already hoped to spread, because it needs to be spread.  I called David Reese on the phone one night, and I said to him “David, I think I’m becoming an evangelical.”  He replied, “Oh, I’m totally already there.”

            As many of you may know, Oberlin’s public image recently got a makeover from a bunch of advertising types, and part of that makeover was to change Oberlin’s motto to Oberlin: Fearless.  As probably would have happened with any motto they would have thought up, this attempt to characterize an entire school in one word was met with no small amount of disgruntledness.  When I left the doors of the airport and stepped out into Atlanta, my first thought was “I’m definitely NOT fearless!”  My first thought when going to volunteer at Hagar’s House, an ecumenical non-profit organization that offered temporary shelter to single women with children who’d been recently evicted, was “Definitely, DEFINITELY not fearless!”  But over the course of the three weeks, God’s answer to that slowly came to me:  “Well that’s too freaking bad.”  In Atlanta, I realized that perhaps the most fundamental, most often repeated call for one who is a minister- and in the Baptist tradition, that means every Christian- is the call “Do not be afraid.”  And even though I may never be completely fearless, that is what I have to strive for if I’m going to preach the gospel.  This fearlessness is in part the chutzpah I saw in the Rev. Joseph Roberts when he preached at Ebenezer Baptist against the war and militarization while behind him sat the entire US Naval Academy Gospel Choir.  But it also goes beyond that.

            I have to be fearless because preaching good news to the poor and release to the captives is a very demanding task.  The thing about the gospel is that if you preach it without doing anything, it’s just crazy talk.  Idle foolishness.  In order to preach the gospel, I have to live the gospel.  And to do something about poverty and injustice generally involves a lot of risks.  Not the least of these are the risk of failure and the risk of being hated.   

Oakhurst Baptist Church put out a collection of stories, and one of those stories written by an ordained woman named Amy Greene begins like this: “Our tradition at Oakhurst of ‘sounding the call’ for a new mission is a fine one.  The three basic requirements are solid: The idea must be incredibly good news, it must be almost impossible to accomplish, and there must be a good chance that it will fail.”  She goes on to tell the story of a chapel that Oakhurst created in downtown Atlanta for the people who lived in the streets in that area.  The chapel failed to survive its infancy.  She related the shame she failed, and how it had taken her years before she was willing to tell the story.  It was relieving for me to read, because until then there was a part of me deep down that found the prospect of failure to succeed in a mission very unsettling.  A woman preaching to a congregation of Divinity students at Candler Theological School named my fear.  I, like many of those students in that sanctuary, feared that if we failed, it means we’re not called by God.  When your call is being assessed by denominational figures looking at whether or not to give you a job, this fear is very real. 

But I think there’s some wisdom in the Oakhurst criteria for a mission:  there are very few missions worth taking on that don’t come with a large possibility for failure.  I have a drawing hanging on my dorm room wall that was made and given to me by a man in the Oakhurst Recovery Program for men recovering from alcohol and drug addiction.  He failed out of the program the day before I left.  I realized then that most of the men that I had met in the program would most likely follow his example.  And yet the program is counted among Oakhurst’s most successful missions.  And it has changed lives, and not just those of the men who live there.  It changed mine.  I now understand that failure is not only a risk of evangelical outreach, but an inevitable part of it.  “Do not be afraid”, in part, means “Do not be afraid to fail.”

Another risk of evangelism is unforeseen personal sacrifice.  I used to think that the whole notion of “bearing the cross” was a pretty melodramatic way to describe following Christ.  But I’m coming to understand that reaching out to poor people, physically and mentally ill people, criminals, and drug addicts, even to the church with the most liberal and inclusive covenant, can be uncomfortable to the point of being painful.  At Oakhurst, I learned that even the best of us can get mean if we’re being pushed to do something extremely uncomfortable or put up our money for something that might fail.  Back in the 1960s, the neighborhood in which Oakhurst is located became an area of white flight.  The pastors at that time refused to allow a vote on whether or not to integrate, because they said that if a church does not include everyone it ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ.  Oakhurst went from 1,700 members to fewer than 200.  When  I met with the chair of the Board of Deacons at Oakhurst to talk about how they do the Deacon thing, I mentioned how impressed I was with the number of potentially risky endeavors Oakhurst had taken on.  He replied that he believed the church had become satisfied with its level of inclusiveness and had stopped seeking new ways to reach out.  He was grateful for the pastor, Lanny Peters, who continued to push the church to not become self-satisfied, but look for new frontiers in outreach.  For Lanny, that new frontier was bolstering interfaith dialogue and action. 

The lure of self-satisfaction is a recurring threat at every church, even “progressive” ones.  I remember David once saying in one of his Hurlbut sermons that part of being Christian is being uncomfortable.  This is because of the nature of the gospel that we preach.  If one is being called to assume a prophetic role, which I suspect happens more often than you might think, “Do not be afraid” means “Do not be afraid to be contradicted, or even attacked.”              

Perhaps the most frightening of all aspects of evangelism is also the most vital: unconditional love.  A key part of evangelism is a deep awareness of the ones to whom I am reaching out.  One pastor that I spoke to explained developing this awareness of the other as earning the right to preach the gospel to that person.  He said that earning the right to preach the gospel to someone takes time.  It generally cannot be accomplished on someone’s doorstep.  I would disagree with him only in that I think developing trusting, accepting relationships is not a prerequisite to, but rather a part of sharing the gospel. 

Since my Modern Religious Thought professor, who sponsored this project, is going to be reading this reflection, I’m now going to drop the name of a philosopher that has a lot to say on the subject of deep involvement in other people: Martin Buber.  Buber talks about what it means to meet another human being through grace.  In this meeting, I come to the other person open to receiving them as they are, without judging them or breaking them down into categories of race, gender, or class.  This is unconditional love.  I don’t believe analyzing someone as a potential convert is truly loving. 

I learned about this completely open and unconditionally loving evangelism in a public hospital in Atlanta.  I met with Robin Booth, the director of chaplaincy at Grady Public Hospital, who introduced me to the work of hospital chaplains.  Robin had attended New Orleans Seminary, a famously fundamentalist school, after which he had gone and done mission work in Venezuela, including door to door evangelism.  He told me that that work wasn’t real evangelism.  This work of sitting with people whose lives have been turned upside down and who are going through incredible pain and loss, standing with them as they tried to reconcile their experience with what they had previously believed about God, that was real evangelism.  This form of evangelism is based on seeing the other with a divine gaze and holding all of their fears and their pains in divine love free of any selfish agenda, including conversion.

By striving for this openness to the other in my work in Atlanta, I learned that another important call to fearlessness is “Do not be afraid to be evangelized yourself while you evangelize.”  I met several  people who told me their faith stories in terms of “getting saved” and the change it made in their lives.  One of these people was a recovering drug addict participating in the Oakhurst Recovery Program, a nonprofit organization that housed and provided counseling for men recovering from drug and alcohol addictions.  He told me that accepting Christ had transformed his life, and studying the Bible had led him to become clean and fix his act.  He said that he tried to adhere to how Paul advises husbands to relate to their wives, and his relationship with his wife got better.  Now little red flags that said something like “WARNING: PATRIARCHY!” immediately went up in my head when I heard that.  But when I thought about it, it occurred to me that the model for husbands in the writings of Paul, while not egalitarian in the modern sense, isn’t really that terrible. 

This man challenged me.  He had had an incredibly difficult life, and through it found his hope and the possibility for change in a theology that tends to put me on my guard.  If this theology sustained him, who was I to say that it was invalid?  In him, I saw Christ “preaching good news to the poor” and freedom to the addict, and I was hearing the good news back to me using words that I normally associate with loveless evangelism.  You could say God was speaking to me using the language of my adversaries.  This was an incredibly uncomfortable gospel that I was receiving, but it was gospel nonetheless.    

            “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God  has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”  That’s either foolish, or mind-numbingly terrifying, and quite possibly both.  But then we have a constant biblical reminder “Do not be afraid.”  If the Spirit of the Lord is really upon me, I think the leap into that dark abyss of striving for social justice is no longer something I can choose, but something I desperately need.  That’s the only way I can explain how my life in the past three years has slowly reformed itself around this bizarre new urge to empower the disempowered.  I am only now coming to appreciate the challenges and the risks that involves.  But I have also learned that it is somewhere mid-air, after taking that leap, that I meet Jesus.  The very last pastor story I received before coming back to Oberlin came from a pastor in Madison named Andy Davison.  It is a story of meeting Jesus in mid-air, so I’m going to end with it.

            Back in the 1970s, Madison, WI was a much more violent place then it is today.  There was a lot of unrest about the war in Vietnam, among other issues.  On campus, Sellery Hall, which housed the Army Recruitment Center, was bombed, and this resulted in a pervasive and jumpy police presence in the downtown area.  One of the especially violent areas of town was Mifflin St., home to a lot of young adults with unstable incomes.  The war protests became so frequent that there were police cars constantly patrolling the area.  This increased the amount of violence, as residents began turning over police cars.  The police would respond with tear gas.  This became so common that there were persistent traces of tear gas in the air.

            At this time, Andy Davison was the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Madison.  He joined with a bunch of other professional types, including doctors, lawyers, and professors from the town, and they held a meeting with the mayor.   They asked him to call the police out of the area, because their presence was only increasing the violence.  The mayor agreed, and they in return agreed to patrol the area themselves.  Every night, all night, a group of thirty people or so would walk Mifflin St. wearing white armbands.  They carried big yellow pads of paper, and if they ran into anyone they would strike up a conversation and write down that person’s complaints, whether about the war, the price of food, or anything else. 

            It was the middle of the night, and Andy was getting hungry so he went into the Mifflin St. Co-op to try to find some food.  It was dark, because it was past normal operating hours, and quiet.  As Andy looked around for food, a large man came out of the shadows.  He was shirtless, with long black hair, and he carried a loaf of French bread.  It was a somewhat unnerving encounter, but Andy had agreed to talk to whomever he ran into so he said to the man “How’s the price of bread?”  The man looked him over and responded, “Man, you look tired.”  Then he broke the bread in half, and said, “Here, have some bread.”