Many to Belief, but Few to Obedience

“All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18-20).

This great commission, recorded at the end of the Book of Matthew, gives Christ’s followers the instruction to go and “make disciples” of all peoples, “teaching them to observe” all that Christ had commanded and taught them. They go in the name of Jesus Christ who has been given all authority, who has overcome the world and the militant cycle of death itself, who has inaugurated a whole new order in human affairs called the kingdom of God, who has called out a faithful people to serve as active agents of that kingdom which he will himself consummate at the end of the age.

The great tragedy of modern evangelism is in calling many to belief but few to obedience. The failure has come in separating belief from obedience, which renders the gospel message confusing and strips the evangelistic proclamation of its power and authority. The evangelistic question has become what do we believe about Christ rather than are we willing to forsake all and follow him. When the theology of faith is torn apart from the life of faith, what results is an evangelism that has more to do with doctrine than with transformation. In our times, obedience to Christ has been seriously compromised by an evangelism of easy belief and simple formulas. The radical demands of Christ have been reduced and all but obliterated by the modern evangelism that takes the liberty to conceal the cost of discipleship. Most of our contemporary Christian proclamations, regardless of labels and theological distinctions, are not involved in the making of disciples and are, therefore, failing to respond to the commission of Christ to his church. In fact, a clear proclamation of the gospel with the demonstrated power to “make disciples” is precisely what is most lacking in the churches. In the midst of theological cleavage and doctrinal disputes, one is hard pressed to know where to turn for the kind of evangelism with the courage to take Christ at his word by teaching men and women all that he commanded. Instead, that which offends, that which would necessitate fundamental change, that which would disrupt the social order, that which would threaten the power and policies of the state, that which challenges the needs and character of the economic system, or that which undercuts the vested interests of the established church, is all carefully removed from the evangelistic proclamation. The consequence of this radical surgery is evangelism without the gospel.

This evangelism of conformity provides no challenge to the dominant social, economic, and political values of a society but, rather, operates within the framework and consensus of those values. Therefore, such evangelism enjoys the blessing of the state and even the respect of the popular culture. Restricting its message to personal morality and private salvation, the church becomes friend and spiritual advisor to the rich and powerful, an honored chaplain who identifies with the purposes and destiny of the nation.

There is a long and tragic history of political rulers supporting religious concern which can serve their interests while suppressing religious conviction which threatens their regime. The former is blessed, its leaders are used, its activities endorsed, while the latter is put down for “meddling in political affairs.” The state will often give “religious freedom” to church leaders and evangelists who are willing to allow the gospel to be stripped of its political meaning and to preach an individualistic message which is no threat to injustice and oppression and is prophetically impotent. Such evangelism is biblically irresponsible and implicitly endorses a low view of Christ by suggesting the gospel is not relevant to the wider issues of human life and society.

The commission to make disciples is violated in different ways. It is violated by a secular theology that doesn’t recognize the need for a real Christ, actively transforming people’s lives. The commission is also violated by a doctrinally proper theology that presumes the mere proclamation of the grace of God available in Jesus Christ to be the same thing as making disciples. We are faced, on the one hand, with those who have dropped the proclamation of the gospel altogether and, on the other hand, with those who have substituted a truncated evangelism for the preaching of the good news of the gospel of the kingdom.

While most churches speak of the grace of God, the New Testament demand for absolute obedience and unconditional discipleship is often missing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning against “cheap grace” without the cost of discipleship, given many years ago in another crisis situation, needs to be raised again today. Too often, our preaching has become frozen into cultural or ideological molds, and the people perish without a biblical vision of the gospel or a visible demonstration of its transforming power. Our most critical need is for a proclamation of the gospel in word and deed with the power to break free from conformist patterns, vested interests, and ideological necessities so that the living Christ might liberate and remake us, transforming our hearts and minds and lives.

Most simply put, we are contending today for a proclamation and demonstration of the gospel with the power to make disciples. We must resist a spiritualized or privatized message which does not issue forth in radical obedience to all that Christ commanded, and we must resist the secularization of the gospel in a way that denies its spiritual power. We must contend against the constant temptation to accommodate the gospel message to the world in a captive civil religion that doesn’t threaten the social and political order. We are contending, instead, for a living affirmation of the lordship of Jesus Christ which brings his message of life, liberation, healing, wholeness, justice, and reconciliation into active confrontation and combat with the pervasive power of oppression, sin, and death of this present age.

Our gospel is God’s good news of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord who brings forgiveness, reconciliation, and a new creation; of his cross and resurrection which have won and sealed the victory over the forces of destruction and death; and of a radically new kind of community, a new humanity united in Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to live according to the standard and character of a new order. Thus, the coming of Christ heralds a new age, a new birth, a new peoplehood. The evangelistic proclamation of the church must make all this clear and visible. This is the message that must take concrete shape and form in history if the gospel is to have any international reality. The personal, social, political, economic, global, and cosmic meaning of the gospel must be recovered and clearly set forth if we wish to restore integrity to the church’s evangelism.

The salvation Christ brings is the gift which frees men and women from all that binds and oppresses them and enables them to “walk in newness of life.” Emancipated by Christ, persons are freed from the alienation of their own lives, the yoke of self-interest, the idolatries of the social and political order, the oppressive rule of the principalities and powers, the claims of imperial states, and the moral authority of death. Faith is the acceptance and celebration of that gift of life, freely given by the grace of God, in the midst of a world dominated by death. The response of faith always embraces the call to discipleship, the call to show forth the reality of the new life and freedom by following in obedience to Christ. The call to faith and to discipleship are the same and cannot be separated.

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself arid take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?’” (Matthew 16:24-26)

The New Testament story of the “rich young ruler” demonstrates that Jesus had only one criterion for salvation: unchallenged, unconditional allegiance. While the exacting demands of discipleship turned the wealthy young man away, “for he had many possessions,” he might have found a comfortable and prestigious place in many of today’s congregations. Here was a man who was morally upright among his peers, a respected and influential citizen. And yet, Jesus said to him,

“If you wish to go the whole way, go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and then you will have riches in heaven; and come, follow me (Matthew 19:21)

“After the young man turned away and departed in heavy sorrow, Jesus continued to teach his disciples about the great obstacle of wealth and possessions.

“I tell you this: a rich man will find it hard to enter the kingdom of Heaven. I repeat, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23, 24).

Also striking is the conversion of Zaccheus, a tax collector who had robbed from the poor (Luke 19:1-10). The significance of that conversion story is not that Zaccheus was so short he had to climb a tree to see Jesus, as children are often taught in their Sunday school lesson. The biblical witness to the conversion of Zaccheus shows that his repenting of sin and turning to Jesus involved making reparations to the poor. Because we profit from oppressive economic structures and relationships, the affluent countries are nations of rich young rulers and publicans who have robbed the poor. What, then, does the call to repentance and the gospel of the kingdom have to say to us?

Modern evangelism is always concerned with asking how many have been converted and brought into the churches. It is seldom asked how many have been turned away because of the radical claims Christ is making on their lives. A dangerous respect for numerical success has led to reducing the demands of the gospel, blurring the meaning of discipleship, and accommodating the evangelistic message to what the audience will find more easily acceptable. Rene Padilla, of Argentina, spoke to this point with clarity in his address to the World Congress on Evangelization in Lausanne:

…the Gospel of the cross leaves open the possibility for people to reject Christ because of finding his claims too costly and admits that there are cases when it is better not to have certain people in the church, even though it means a smaller membership. Was not this Jesus’ attitude in dealing with the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17-22) or with the multitudes at the peak of his popularity (Luke 14:25-32)? Furthermore, if a truncated Gospel necessarily results in churches that are themselves a denial of the Gospel, in speaking of the numerical expansion of the church it is not out of place to ask what kind of church is being multiplied. It may be that such a multiplication turns out to be a multiplication of apostasy.

Padilla continues,

The task of the evangelist in communicating the Gospel is not to make it easier, so that people will respond positively, but to make it clear. Neither Jesus nor his apostles ever reduced the demands of the gospel in order to make converts. No cheap grace, but God’s kindness which is meant to lead to repentance, provides the only solid basis for discipleship. He who accommodates the Gospel to the mood of the day, in order to make it more palatable, does so because he has forgotten the nature of Christian salvation--it is not man’s work, but God’s.

Faithfulness to Christ requires a faithful proclamation of the radical demands of the gospel. Anything less is a disservice to Christ and to those who would respond without a clear idea of the nature of the commitment called for by the gospel. Cheap conversion runs the grave danger of saying yes to the sin, instead of saying yes to the sinner. The grace of God is meant to justify the sinner and never to justify the sin. In Bonhoeffer’s prophetic words, “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church…Grace is costly because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life” (Cost of Discipleship, p. 47). The salvation that has cost God so much cannot be offered in cheap conversion.

A central weakness of many contemporary doctrines of salvation is that they produce a sole concern for personal redemption and justification before God apart from any reference to the kingdom of God. The common failing of many evangelistic proclamations comes when there is a concentration upon getting one’s heart right with God, which predominates over a primary concern for the meaning and coming of the kingdom. Christ the atoning sacrifice for sins is stressed to the exclusion of Christ the bringer and bearer of a new order in history that is in radical contradiction to the standards and structures of the present world. While the coming of the kingdom takes center stage in the evangelistic proclamations of the New Testament, it is often pushed to the periphery or brushed aside altogether in modern evangelism. Without the central focus of the gospel of the kingdom, the Christian message loses its core and integrating center. When personal transformation and redemption are separated from active participation in the kingdom of God, the evangelistic message easily degenerates into something which supports self-interest and vested interests in a society.

The forgiveness and reconciliation brought about in Christ are integrally connected to a change of allegiance and commitment to the kingdom. Indeed, belief in the redeeming and reconciling work of Christ and obedience to his kingdom form a living unity. The forgiveness of sins and justification through the death and resurrection of Christ are organically related to belief and participation in the coming kingdom. The “saving” of individuals apart from a radical allegiance and living witness to the kingdom of God takes the heart out of the gospel. Conversely, a belief in the kingdom apart from the transformation of persons in Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit is a false hope that loses the empowering dynamic of the gospel. The work of Christ in the life of an individual supplies the ground and possibility for participation in the new order that has invaded the world in Christ. To be Christian is to be possessed and dominated by the kingdom of God. Salvation must not be seen as merely an individual event but, rather, as a world event in which the individual has a part. The kingdom of God has come to transform the world and us with it by the power of God in Jesus Christ. The cross of Christ is not only the symbol of our atonement but the very pattern and definition of our lives, the very means of the new order that has invaded the world in Christ.

I believe that our distorted concepts of salvation are, in large part, due to the pervasive influence of individualism in the churches. The ideologies of individualism are certainly at variance with biblical understanding of salvation. In Scripture, personal realities are never divorced from social and historical realities. To do so is to invite moral atrocity. The terrible fear of a Vietnamese mother whose family may be exterminated by American bombs becomes translated into a “political” issue that is somehow outside the boundaries of the concerns of proper religion. The oppression and destruction of racial minorities becomes a “social” problem which we can choose to deal with or not. The misery and deprivation of the poor becomes an “economic” matter unrelated to our personal consumption, life-style, and involvement in the economic system. We easily forget that “social problems” are very personal realities for those who suffer from them. In other words, the victims of war, racism, and poverty experience the consequences of our social problems in deeply personal ways.

Only a white society can regard racism as merely a social problem. Only the affluent can view poverty simply as an economic question. Only a war-making nation can understand its destructive policies as just a political issue. Biblically, human suffering is a deeply spiritual issue and an urgent moral concern of the people of God regardless of the way the world may label and categorize its various “problems.” A relationship to Christ always involves a vital relationship to persons and the conditions of their lives. In Scripture, there is no salvation apart from one’s brothers and sisters. All that would bind and oppress, all that would hold people captive and prevent them from being what they were created to be, falls within the range and scope of the concern of biblical faith.

An individualistic understanding of the gospel carries the danger of making salvation into just another commodity that can be consumed for personal fulfillment and self-interest, for a guarantee of happiness, success, moral justification, or whatever else a consumer audience feels it needs. Some evangelistic proclamations go so far as to offer the real possibilities of financial success and blessing, personal advancement, community respectability, a well-balanced personality, social popularity, and the patriotic virtues of good citizenship for those who would be saved and get their hearts right with God. Conservative evangelical understandings of the gospel have often produced a private view of the gospel with a distorted emphasis on the consequences of the Christian message on the individual heart or psyche apart from the corporate, social, political, economic, global, and cosmic meaning of the gospel of the kingdom that has invaded the history of the world. Reducing the gospel to only personal and existential terms, the Christian message is easily co-opted by larger social and political forces which seek to make religion an appendage of the established order which assists in the task of furthering socialization, social adjustment, and conformity.

The meaning of evangelism, then, is the proclamation and demonstration of the "good news" that a new order is upon us and calls us to redirection, to change our former ways of thinking and living, to turn to Jesus Christ for a new way of life, to enter into the fellowship of a new community. Our understanding of evangelism will not go very far without a strong and sensitive awareness of the crucial issues of human life and society in our own times. Evangelism can never take place in a vacuum, in isolation from the critical questions and events that shape the context in which the gospel must be lived and proclaimed. The scope of our evangelism must be at least as pervasive as the power of sin itself. As sin and death manifest themselves institutionally, politically, and economically as well as personally, our evangelism must bring the gospel into active confrontation with the personal and corporate character and dimensions of sin and death.

Much contemporary evangelism has become calculating and compassionless as it has become successful in numerical terms. Many evangelists must plead guilty to the charge of holding a low view of Christ in restricting the gospel to the personal, private, and “religious” issues of life. This sort of preaching offers salvation without “making disciples” who live in radical obedience to Christ as active agents of the kingdom of God. Our evangelism, itself, must be converted to a deeper meaning of the gospel and the lordship of Christ. It may well be that the churches themselves must become a target of evangelism, to be awakened continually to the good news of the gospel of the kingdom.

Christian conversion is not static. Rather, we are instructed to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” We commit ourselves to a continuing reorientation to the will of God and the reconciliation brought about in Jesus Christ. The gospel is of a living Christ who makes “all things new.” The criterion to test the integrity of our evangelism is whether our message is as radical as the gospel. Are we softening the demands of Christ and adopting a method to persuade people to “make a decision’’ rather than clearly demonstrating, in word and deed, the costly character of discipleship? Are we trying to make the gospel respectable and self-fulfilling rather than allowing it to make radical demands upon our lives, to change us in fundamental ways? The quality of conversion lies in its wholeness.

When someone is converted to Christ, he or she does not receive an automatic pass to celestial bliss but is called to take up a cross and follow in obedience the one who fed the hungry, healed the sick, was a friend to all manner of men and women, most identified with the poor, the oppressed, the weak, and broken, blessed the peacemakers, and was executed as a political criminal and subversive. This is the Christ of the New Testament. There is no other. Preaching another Christ, serving another Christ, worshiping another Christ, is paying homage to an idol who is the incarnation of humankind rather than the incarnation of God. It is the Christ of the New Testament that we turn to for life because, like Peter, we have nowhere else to turn.

Evangelism that is obedient to the great commission brings fundamental and costly change in personal, communal, political, and economic values and relationships. It holds the individual and corporate dimensions of the gospel as inseparable. It bears the gospel of the kingdom which pronounces the judgment of God upon the present order of injustice and carries the promise of a new order and a new people. We can no longer talk of people’s need for salvation apart from our responsibility to give the kingdom of God a presence in our generation. Therefore, evangelism in our times must begin, not through new methods and techniques, but by repentance on the part of the church. The church must be continually reoriented to the gospel, a community of those freed from the service of self, of nation-states, of ideologies, of systems, of movements, of political realism, of economic necessity, of special conformity -- freed for the service of the kingdom of God.

AGENDA FOR BIBLICAL PEOPLE. copyright 1976 by Jim Wallis. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.