False Dilemma: Urgency vs Faithfulness

Every church and every disciple of Jesus Christ bears the privilege and responsibility of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to our neighbors and the nations. This task of proclamation is known as "evangelism." Among the many qualities that should characterize Christian evangelism, in practice, two often stand in tension with one another: urgency and faithfulness.

On the one hand, evangelism should be done urgently. As believers we have been taught (or should be taught) to look eagerly for our Savior's appearing (Titus 2:11–14). This urgency is expressed succinctly in the prayer "Maranatha!" which means "Come quickly, Lord Jesus!" (Rev 22:20). The entirety of the Christian life including evangelism must be done in light of this expectation. Jesus is coming again to judge the living and the dead. People need to be prepared for his coming and should be urged to respond in repentance of their sins against God and in faith that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the world (John 14:6).

On the other hand, evangelism should be done faithfully, that is in faithfulness to the content of the Gospel message. The Gospel has a definite content (cf. 1 Cor 15:1–9); the Scriptures define this content, not the evangelists and not the recipients. As we share Christ we must be faithful to proclaim the person and work of Jesus Christ as they are revealed in the Scriptures. 

Unfortunately, the two qualities of urgency and faithfulness may be pitted against one another in our daily practice. Sometimes urgency trumps faithfulness, leading to incomplete presentations of the Gospel in all its fundamental elements. Sometimes faithfulness trumps urgency, leading us to neglect evangelism unless (a) conditions are absolutely perfect for a robust Gospel presentation or (b) we have confidence that we will be able to disciple the person indefinitely. Recently, I read a quote by Francis Schaeffer that put the first half of this tension in a helpful light.

Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) was an outspoken evangelical pastor, missionary, philosopher, and apologist. He authored numerous books, including Escape from Reason (1968), God Who Is There (1968), and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972).  In a short pamphlet, 2 Contents, 2 Realities (1974), Schaffer argues that the content of the Christian message is a system of doctrine. He is careful to clarify that it is more than a system, but he maintains that it is not less. Schaeffer identifies several core doctrinal minimums of the content of Christian evangelism:

“[I]t is a system in that the person who accepts Christ as his Savior must do so in the midst of the understanding that prior to the creation of the world a personal God on the high level of trinity existed. And if they ‘accept Christ as their Savior’ and do not understand that God exists as an infinite-personal God and do not understand that man has been made in the image of God and has value, and do not understand that man’s dilemma is not metaphysical because he is small but moral because man revolted against God in a space-time Fall, in all probability they are not saved” (9–10; emphasis added).

Evangelism devoid of its proper doctrinal content, argues Schaffer, risks hardening the heart of the hearer. In the end, the aim is not comprehensive knowledge and understanding, but rather it is the communication of the content of the Gospel: “Not everybody must know everything—nobody knows everything; if we waited to be saved until we knew everything, nobody would ever be saved—but that is a very different thing from deliberately or thoughtlessly diminishing the content.”

Schaeffer’s words offer a helpful corrective to evangelistic practices that emphasize the urgency of the task to the exclusion of faithfulness to the content of the Gospel. We must, however, hold these twin characteristics together, avoiding the temptation to resolve the tension in one direction or the other.  May God give us grace to share the Gospel with both the urgency and faithfulness to which we've been called and our glorious, risen Lord deserves.

J