Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?” Episcopalians are asked this question at every baptism celebrated according to the liturgies of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. “Word and example” — the phrase refers obviously to speech and action, and it echoes the common pairing of “word and deed.”
Episcopalians rhetorically affirm a connection between word and example, speech and deed. When it comes to practice, though, we typically say yes to example, yes to deed, but no to word, or, at best, maybe to word. Reticence about verbalizing the good news of God in Christ in actual speech is what underlies Episcopalians’ reluctance to engage in evangelism, still less to embrace it as a mandate for ourselves or for the Church as a whole.
Evangelism labors under weighty negative impressions of it: intrusive fundamentalists knocking on your door and telling you that only their version of the gospel and their church are acceptable to God. Televangelists who seem more concerned with raising money for themselves than with the welfare of their flock. Telling rather than listening. Arrogance and imposition rather than humility and affirmation. Read More
The Church Needs an Ancient Faith if It Is to Survive
Titus Presler offers some good observation about Episcopalians' reluctance to be evangelistic, observations that also apply to clergy and members of the Continuing Anglican Churches and the Anglican Church in North America. Regrettably he falls back on two old bugaboos of being evangelistic in the Episcopal Church, bugaboos that can be traced to the 1950s and which Episcopalians have used to justify their lack of evangelistic zeal. Nowadays the only folks knocking on people's doors and plugging their particular view of the gospel are Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. Door to door visitation has fallen out of favor in most so-called fundamentalist churches. Pastors and prayer teams may occasionally make home visits, introduce themselves, offer to pray for the members of a household, and leave literature about their church. But they have found that people for the most part do not respond well to unannounced visits. Pentecostal and prosperity gospel preachers now dominate televangelism. Evangelical churches have opted for more low key, less in-your-face approaches to evangelism.
The chief reason that I left the Episcopal Church in 2002 was the apathetic attitude of my own pastor and the clergy of the local deanery toward evangelism and church planting. The county in which I was living was growing exponentially and other denominations were planting new churches right and left When the bishop launched a diocesan-wide church planting initiative, the leaders of the parish church at the east end of the county begged him to not to permit the planting of any new churches at their end of the county out of fear the new church would take members from their church. They were sitting on their hands when it came to reaching out to their area's unchurched. The bishop listened to their appeal and held off permitting the planting of any new churches in the deanery until 2002. In 2002 he gave permission for a new church plant at the other end of the county. This church plant and a new church plant in East Baton Rouge were growing until the events of 2003, which killed the two church plants and set back other churches in the diocese.
Presler has his task cut of for him if he hopes to inspire a zeal for evangelism in Episcopalians. Episcopalians not only have a longstanding distaste for evangelism but they have also carried that distaste with them into the Continuing Churches and the ACNA. In my experience most of the people who take an interest in evangelism and church planting in the Episcopal Church are not cradle Episcopalians. They come from other denominational backgrounds.
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