Sharing the Good News - Anglican style
It’s no secret that Anglicans are often reluctant to engage in evangelizing. The reasons are many: worry about imposing one’s religious views on others, feeling ill-equipped, fear of being associated with the heavy-handed tactics and views of stereotypical "evangelicals," or simple shyness. According to the Rev. Scott Gunn, even inviting a friend to church is out of the comfort zone of most Anglicans.
Scott is the executive director of Forward Movement. It is an Episcopal Church ministry that has been teaching discipleship since 1934. He was at Christ Church Cathedral on the weekend of June 9 - 11 to preach at the Sunday services and offer a workshop, Anglican Evangelism for Ordinary People. Workshop participants included Bishop John and parishioners from the Cathedral and other churches. Scott began by acknowledging Anglicans’ typical discomfort with the prospect of evangelizing. But he urged them to reclaim the practice of sharing the good news.
"If we don’t go into the public square and add our voice to the chaos, people are left with the judgmental voices that pervert the Gospel," he said. They are also left at the mercy of marketers who try to convince people salvation lies in buying more stuff or being more beautiful. "No one needs to be more beautiful," said Scott. "We are all made in the image of God."
Scott emphasized that the goal of evangelism isn’t to save the Anglican Church by boosting its membership. "Our job is to form Christians, not Anglicans," he said. Bishop John reflected on the spiritual landscape the surrounds us. He wondered how different that landscape could look if different churches remembered we are all on the same team.
Scott noted our task isn’t to focus on creating new Christians at all. Our job is simply to share the good news of Jesus in our own lives, and then let the Holy Spirit do the rest. But he cautioned that "we can’t give what we don’t have." Mainline Protestant churches can be a comfortable roost for many of what Scott calls "habitual Christians" - members who attend every Sunday. But those attend every Sunday aren’t necesarily spiritually alive.
He readily admits to having been a habitual Christian for many years himself in his earlier life. "Everything was fine," he recalls, "but it was like the electricity wasn’t plugged in." We must see to our spiritual health "so we can speak out of a place of transformation, rather than inviting people to be another habitual Christian," he said.
One practice Scott found transformative was reading the bible, cover to cover. One of the churches he was serving decided to read the whole Bible, together, over the course of 10 months. He had spent years studying the Bible and zooming in to analyze the text in fine detail. Yet -like many Anglicans who hear only the lectionary readings without a surrounding context - this can mean one loses sight of, or never experiences, the overall narrative of God’s liberating love. Reading the whole Bible with other people, he said, was a game changer.
Scott pointed to the vast research and data gathering undertaken by Forward Movement while developing its RenewalWorks program. It found that healthy and thriving churches are those that prioritized the spiritual growth over membership numbers.
Like everything else, he said, sharing the good news gets easier with practice. We need to spend more time talking about the things that matter and less time about the things that don’t. What are things that matter? The fact of God's universal love. We know some prayers don’t get answered, he said, but we shouldn’t let that stop us from talking about the miracles that do occur.
The world is waiting for us, it appears. Scott said resarch on "Gen Z" shows about half of 11 to 27-year-olds pray daily or weekly. That is regardless of whether they belong to any community of faith. He urged workshop participants to consider their "elevator pitch" if a non-religious person asked them "So, why do you go to church?"
Don’t worry about living up to some imagined level of "holiness" or spiritual certainty before feeling qualified to share your story, he said. He finds reassurance in the verses of Matthew in which the 11 disciples met the resurrected Jesus in Galilee. "They worshipped him, but they doubted." Jesus turns around and tells them to go make disciples in all the nations, teaching people to obey all his commandments. Jesus commissioned all, Scott points out - even the doubters.
The questions and discussion among the workshop participants indicated that the Rev. Gunn’s challenge had struck a chord . People were left musing on the possibilities we have as individuals and church communities to be more effective bearers of glad tidings and good news. They wondered, how to offer a spiritual home to those who are not already part of a community of faith. "Many people in our society are giving up on Jesus without ever having been introduced," rued Scott. "I personally believe the best gift we can give someone is to help them know Jesus."