The Invitation: A Theology of Evangelism

By Richard R. Osmer

Moving beyond conversionism 

Many Christians today are uncomfortable with older, simpler notions about evangelism as conversionism but see as insufficient the more progressive model of evangelism as hospitality. Transcending that dichotomy, Richard Osmer advances a theology of evangelism as a multifaceted act of invitation into Christ-following community. 

Osmer begins by exploring references to evangelism in the New Testament—both in the Gospels and in the letters of Paul. He then enters into dialogue with Karl Barth to work through ideas of church witness and the relationship of evangelism to salvation. Finally, with lucid explanations and illustrative case studies, he offers guidance for pastors, laity, and students to use as they reimagine how evangelism might best happen in their churches and missional organizations. Osmer’s approach mirrors the conviction, stated in his introduction, that our concept of evangelism must be formed and constantly reformed by keeping the Bible, church doctrine, and practical theology in conversation.

Foundational to Osmer’s rendering of evangelism as invitation is the essential truth that it is Christ and the Holy Spirit who calls converts and makes disciples—not Christians. Thus, we can invite our neighbors to the wedding feast while remaining reassured that the table is already set.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467462655

Richard R. Osmer

 Richard R. Osmer is Princeton Theological Seminary's Ralph B. and Helen S. Ashenfelter Professor of Mission and Evangelism Emeritus. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he chairs the Committee to Write New Catechisms for the Presbyterian Church (USA). His other books include Practical Theology: An Introduction, The Teaching Ministry of Congregations, and Religious Education between Modernization and Globalization.

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PART I

Evangelism in Dialogue with Scripture

From the beginning, Christianity has been a missionary movement seeking to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the known world. The sociologist Rodney Stark estimates that in AD 40 Christianity had approximately 1,000 adherents, representing about .00017 percent of the Roman Empire. ¹ By AD 300, this stood at around 6,299,832, approximately 10.5 percent. N. T. Wright comments on the success of the Christian mission: The single most striking thing about early Christianity is its speed of growth…. Why then did early Christianity spread? Because early Christians believed that what they had found to be true was true for the whole world. The impetus to mission sprang from the very heart of early Christian conviction. ²

Over the centuries, Christians have rarely used the term evangelism to describe sharing the gospel with others in the context of the church’s mission. Once the church was legalized and given favor under Constantine in the fourth century, it spread more by diffusion than evangelism—through conquest, socialization, and cultural acceptance.³ When conversion did take place, it often was at the point of a sword. Four hundred years later Charlemagne (742–814), for example, compelled border tribes conquered by his armies to be baptized en masse to integrate them into the Holy Roman Empire. The spread of Christianity and the spread of Latin Western culture went hand in hand.

While mission by cultural diffusion was the norm in the West, what we would call evangelism today was carried out by Irish, Roman, and English missionary-evangelists from the eighth century forward. In the thirteenth century, orders of friars committed to social service also offered evangelistic preaching, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans. The dominant understanding of evangelism, however, was sharing the gospel through cultural diffusion.

This impacted the way the Bible was interpreted. The New Testament uses a variety of terms to describe communication of the gospel, like kēryssein (to announce news like a herald) and euangelizein (to announce glad tidings). Throughout this period, these terms were consistently translated to preach and to proclaim. Darrell Guder points to the underlying assumptions:

Such language demonstrates one of the basic assumptions of the Western Christian civilization, the corpus Christianum, which evolved from Constantine onward: the apostolic commission of the early church had been fulfilled with the Christianization of the West. The church’s ongoing task was to proclaim this word within the Christianized world, to expand its boundaries by diffusion, and very importantly, to ensure that everyone within these boundaries thought and acted in accordance with the church’s dogma and structures.⁴

Since priests and bishops were the ones who preached and proclaimed, the task of sharing the gospel with others was reduced to practices of preaching by ordained leaders and mission-minded monastics.⁵ It was not a task of the entire Christian community or its individual members.

While the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century brought many changes to the theology and practice of the Western church, it largely maintained the stance of mission through diffusion in established geographical areas. Thus, biblical texts that might have been viewed as commissioning the entire church to share the gospel with others continued to be interpreted in terms of proclamation by pastors in the gathered community. Both in theology and practice, emphasis fell on preaching and teaching, which were viewed as essential to reforming the church according to the word of God.⁶ It was not until after the Reformation that new ways of thinking about evangelism and mission began to emerge.

The catalyst of new theologies and practices of evangelism and mission emerged among German Lutheran Pietists, Baptists, and Anabaptists. Church renewal and overseas missions became priorities among these movements and the communities they established.⁷ They influenced the rise of the Methodist movement and American evangelicalism.⁸ It is from these post-Reformation developments that the modern missionary movement emerged, and it is in the context of this movement that the language and practices we commonly associate with evangelism and mission today began to take shape. Evangelism was viewed as converting non-Christians, renewing the faith of nominal Christians, and establishing congregations on the home front and the frontier. Mission was viewed as spreading the gospel and planting churches beyond North America and Europe.

Across the theological spectrum today, it is widely acknowledged that this way of viewing evangelism and mission is problematic on many levels. Viewing mission as something done over there in the non-Western world distorts the missionary calling of every congregation to bear witness to the gospel in its own community. Moreover, the missionary movement was compromised by its ties with Western colonialism. Too often, the spread of the gospel was confused with the diffusion of Western culture, and Christianity was used to legitimate the political control and economic exploitation of countries that were colonized. Though the story of Western missions is complex and filled with light as well as darkness, the shadow side is a deeply troubling legacy. This has been analyzed in depth by a range of scholars.⁹

The inherited distinction between evangelism at home and mission overseas has proved problematic for an additional reason. The secularization and de-Christianization of the West have turned Europe and North America into mission fields. Lesslie Newbigin, David Bosch, Darrell Guder, and many others have begun to describe the West as a post-Christendom context. They have challenged the Western church to rethink its understanding of evangelism and mission, posing fundamental questions: What is the relationship between the mission of God and the missions of congregations? What is the relationship between congregational mission and evangelism? Is mission broader than evangelism or are they identical? To what extent are evangelistic practices of one context transferrable to another? If contextualization is necessary for effective evangelism, how might this be done while remaining faithful to the apostolic mandate of the New Testament?

These questions are basic. They invite us to reflect critically on the language and practices emerging during the era following the Reformation. They encourage us to look anew at the biblical and theological foundations of evangelism and mission. In the following chapter, our exploration begins with two cases from an American context. We then turn to biblical resources that might help us think anew about evangelism in our own time and place.

1. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5–6.

2. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 359–60.

3. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989). For a more detailed discussion of the history summarized here, see also Milton Rudnick, Speaking the Gospel Through the Ages: A History of Evangelism (St. Louis: Concordia, 1984); David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991); and Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Thousand Years of Uncertainty, vol. 2, A History of the Expansion of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970).

4. Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 11.

5. There were some exceptions to this tendency. See George G. Hunter III, The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christians Can Reach the West … Again (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000).

6. It is no accident that John Calvin’s favorite descriptive word for the Holy Spirit was Teacher. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, The Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 187.

7. Douglas Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Peter Erb, ed., Pietists: Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1983); Katherine Carté Engle, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); J. E. Hutton, History of the Moravian Missions (London: Moravian Publishing House, 2011).

8. Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, History of Evangelicalism Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003); David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); John and Charles Wesley: Selected Writings and Hymns, ed. Frank Whaling, The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981).

9. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996); Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

CHAPTER 1

Evangelism and the Apostle Paul

Paul was the missionary and evangelist par excellence in early Christianity. He was a church planter who cared for his congregations like a long-term pastor. He shared the gospel with politicians and jailers, Jews and Gentiles, in the forum and the synagogue. He debated Greek philosophers and Jewish leaders on the significance of Jesus Christ. He confronted Jewish Christian leaders who he believed were leading his churches astray. He even was willing to take on established Christian leaders, like Peter and Barnabas, when their actions or judgments contradicted what he believed was best for the spread of the gospel.

Paul appears to have followed a clear strategy in his work as a missionary and evangelist. He concentrated on cities that were centers of Roman administration and commerce. They often had synagogues and religious temples.¹ Sea and land routes to these centers made travel much easier and safer than to rural areas. Paul sometimes used them as hubs of missionary activity to nearby regions. He planted a congregation, provided initial teaching and training of leaders and then turned over the church and its mission to the local community. The strategy of establishing a new community and moving on while allowing indigenous leadership to take charge seems to have been crucial to the spread of Christianity.

When Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, he appeared to be planning a new phase of his missionary work, which involved traveling to Spain (Rom. 15:24). In his letter to the Roman Christians, he likely was laying the groundwork for this future mission in hopes that the church in Rome would support him. Clearly, Paul was a planner and strategist who thought ahead. But it never was just a matter of his own reasoning or desire for success. He had an extremely strong sense of his calling as an apostle sent to the gentiles, the nations. He continually prayed for God’s guidance and was willing to change plans at a moment’s notice when directed to do so by the Spirit.² He worked as part of a team of missionaries and evangelists.

It is fitting, thus, that we turn first to Paul in our dialogue with Scripture. We enter this conversation after examining two case studies written by students in classes on evangelism at Princeton Theological Seminary. At the very end of the chapter, we bring the case material and our study of Paul into conversation.

Cases of Evangelistic Practice

From Scratch Evangelism

The first case was shared by a student named Bob. He told his precept group of ten students that the case represented his understanding of evangelism before coming to seminary. Back home in Colorado he became friends with a Jewish convert to Christianity, Bruce, who invited him to join in from scratch evangelism several evenings a week. Together, they would go to a large upscale mall called the Citadel, which had a variety of shops and outdoor rides. They chose this setting because it was a place where a lot of people hung out and were sometimes willing to talk to strangers like us. The following is a reconstructed verbatim of Bob and Bruce’s conversation with one man:

Bruce: Hi, my name is Bruce, and this is my friend, Bob.

Bob: Hi, what’s your name?

Francisco: My name is Francisco.

Bruce: Hi Francisco, it is a pleasure to meet you. May we ask you some questions?

Francisco: Yes, that will be fine.

Bruce: Do you believe in God?

Francisco: Yes, I believe in God. I was raised Catholic in Honduras, my homeland.

Bob: Do you still practice your Catholic faith?

Francisco: No. I haven’t been to church since I left Honduras. That was twenty years ago. I didn’t really look for a church once I moved to Colorado.

Bob: Yeah, it was probably enough of a transition just to move to Colorado.

Francisco: Well yeah, but I was also not very interested in going to church