NEWS FEATURE: Evangelicals Debate Boundaries of Evangelism

c. 2000 Religion News Service APEX, N.C. _ When Mormons held an open house to celebrate their new temple in this suburb of Raleigh, a group of Southern Baptists stood at the exit ramp and passed out pamphlets titled “Are Mormon Temples Christian?” The answer, according to these Baptists, was no. And they were not […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

APEX, N.C. _ When Mormons held an open house to celebrate their new temple in this suburb of Raleigh, a group of Southern Baptists stood at the exit ramp and passed out pamphlets titled “Are Mormon Temples Christian?”

The answer, according to these Baptists, was no. And they were not shy about saying so.


To many North Carolinians, it was just another example of Baptist evangelism, much like the prayer guides the Southern Baptist Convention distributed for its members last fall _ one aimed at Hindus and one at Jews.

“Pray that Hindus who celebrate the festival of lights would become aware of the darkness in their hearts that no lamp can dispel,” said the pamphlet targeting Hindus during Divali, a Hindu holiday.

In both instances, Baptists were hit by a flood of criticism. The United States is more religiously diverse than at any time in history, and Christians and non-Christians alike were outraged by what they see as one group’s aggressive efforts to target other faiths and convert its followers.

But even like-minded evangelicals who share the Baptist beliefs in the exclusive truth of Jesus’ message are wondering whether the old way of making converts works. In this day of interfaith understanding, evangelicals are caught in a bind: How do you tell non-Christians their faith is misguided without offending them?

Although Protestants are still a majority in the United States, the past 35 years have seen a huge influx of religions that once existed only abroad.

Muslim student clubs can be found in many high schools, Hindu temples crop up in suburban subdivisions, and Buddhist leaders, such as the Dalai Lama, draw thousands of Americans to large arenas.

“We have to recognize we’re all in glass houses these days,” said Winfried Courdan, a professor of religion and philosophy at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., and a member of the Evangelical Theological Society’s interfaith study group. “We live in a society that’s heavily pluralistic, with people of different faiths and persuasions. You don’t publicly distribute literature that says, `You’re sinful and live in darkness.”’


That point of view is increasingly shared by a number of prominent evangelicals who say sharing the faith with nonbelievers must be preceded by a sincere attempt to listen to and respect the other person’s point of view.

These evangelicals say their civic duty may precede their religious obligation to find converts to Christianity.

But Paige Patterson, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, remains unmoved. Interfaith dialogue, he says, has only so much value, “beyond which you can’t go.”

“It comes down to a question of truth,” Patterson said. “Every false religious expression is a religion of darkness. That doesn’t mean there are no good things in that faith. It’s not an effort to fail to notice the value of these things. But if Jesus is to be taken seriously when he says `No one comes to the Father but through me,’ every other proposal is one of darkness.”

Ever since the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity on his deathbed in 337, the faith has enjoyed a position of power. During the Crusades, Christians waged wars to free Jerusalem from the infidels, by which they meant Muslims and Jews. Throughout the first and second millenniums, Christians raped and killed the Jewish minority living in its midst. And Christian missionaries often forcibly converted Aztec Indians and Native Americans up and down the American continent.

The modern missionary movement _ a kinder and gentler approach _ was born in the 1780s when William Carey, a Baptist minister, left England for India where he hoped to convert Hindus to Christianity. Thirty years later, Baptists in the United States founded the Triennial Convention to support three Americans it sent out as missionaries to Burma.


Although they used words such as “heathens” to describe those they wanted to convert, they tried to set an example of Christianity by leading holy lives. They translated the Bible into native languages and set up schools to teach people to read and hospitals to heal them.

“We’re waking up to the realization that we’ve come to know missions in an imperialistic way _ by conquering the world,” said Loren Mead of Washington, D.C., a church consultant, author and founder of the Alban Institute. “In the previous world, you either killed someone on the outside or converted them. A lot of people feel the conversion-based orientation is a leftover. It may not fit today.”

But many conservative Christians feel they have no choice. To them, Jesus himself mandated that his followers seek out nonbelievers and bring them into the faith. The Gospel of Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Conservative Christians rely on another biblical verse they believe comes from the mouth of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6).”

To many Christians, that means heaven is available only to those who trust in Jesus. It is this verse, more than any other, that compels evangelicals to push for conversions.

Matt Rice, the minister of evangelism at Apex Baptist Church, is one such evangelical. He is among the group that stood at the edge of the Mormon temple in December handing out pamphlets. His church also took out half a dozen ads in local newspapers explaining the difference between what they see as true Christianity and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.


“In my heart of hearts, I know we are not the same, and I know we have to take a stand and proclaim there is a difference,” Rice said, referring to other faiths. “We see it as an opportunity to educate people.”

For Southern Baptists, evangelism is part and parcel of the American ethos.

They say the First Amendment encourages a free marketplace of religion in which competition plays a big role. In that kind of environment, why can’t they be as aggressive as the person next door?

“You appear to desire religious liberty for Bible-believing evangelicals as long as they agree not to exercise that freedom,” Patterson wrote in letter to a group of Chicago interfaith leaders who asked the Southern Baptist Convention to skip their city on their evangelism push.

Critics of the Southern Baptist Convention say that’s not the issue.

“Yes, Baptists have every right to be zealous about their faith,” said Bill Leonard, the dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. and himself a moderate Baptist. “But they also have to learn to speak in ways that value the people they are trying to win. It’s a thin line between evangelical zeal and religious bigotry.”

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Leonard and other scholars say Christianity must come to terms with the fact that it may not be able to convert the world but it can learn from other faiths _ and in the process deepen its own understanding of Christianity. It can learn from the Jewish experience of the Holocaust how to hold on to faith in the midst of annihilation. And it can learn from Hindus how to tolerate different expressions of God.

Mead, the church analyst, suggests it may be time to shift the emphasis away from the New Testament injunction to “make disciples of all nations” and instead focus on another Christian principle: servanthood.


“Jesus also said, `You shall serve one another,”’ Mead said. “That’s a very solid grounding for a different understanding of mission.”

Southern Baptists say they will never retreat from full-scale evangelism, because that would be like admitting that all religions are valid. That, they say, would be tantamount to abandoning truth.

“If you concede to pluralism, then the doctrines of Christ are irrelevant,”said Cky Carrigan, Atlantic Coast coordinator for interfaith evangelism for the Southern Baptist Convention.

But a Lutheran who lives near Apex where Baptists targeted Mormons believes America has long respected religious diversity and that tradition should continue.

“I cringe to think this is a form of evangelism. To me, it’s a form of hate,” said Linda Crandall of Holly Springs. “Evangelism should be positive. It shouldn’t be about denouncing other people’s beliefs.”

DEA END SHIMRON

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