Throughout my reading and study for my Doctor of Ministry program and these thoughts, I had a recurring frustration expressed in the questions I raised for each author in my class assignments and my own notes. At some point in each work I read, the author seemed to shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s all up to God!” Over and over again, I read this statement. Sometimes it was phrased in more academic language, other times it was that blunt, but my notes are full of exasperation every time it is mentioned. I was looking for something concrete to implement in a congregation and did not find it, so my frustration grew. And yet, here I am in my own work saying the exact same thing: the work of evangelism is all up to God. Yes, there are practical things a congregation can (and should) do to foster an environment in which God’s action is more likely to be recognized, both by the members of the congregation and the “outsiders” the Holy Spirit gathers to it, but when looked at in its simplest form, evangelism is God’s work—Christians must trust that God will do what God has promised to do.
This is the tension inherent in evangelism, especially in a Post-Christian era. The critical moment in which a person has a transformative encounter with the God who raised Jesus by the Holy Spirit does not come about through human action. No amount of convincing, cajoling, or proselytizing; or even loving service, hospitality, and welcome can force a person to encounter the transcendent God, especially in the secular3 social imaginary and the immanent frame. Yet, as the spiritual stories I explored show, human action can certainly make that encounter more or less likely. Christian communities which are objectifying, inhospitable, and inauthentic push people away, especially those people who have a conception of Christianity that emphasizes authenticity, radical welcome, and loving service. A Christian community who lives out those more positive features can foster a transcendence of belonging to that community, even for people who are outsiders to it, that serves as a beginning of further openness to God.
In a Post-Christian era, I can understand the ease with which one might lose hope for the future of the church, as one reads about ever-decreasing church attendance in America even as a totalistic Christian nationalism grows in popularity. The modern social imaginary has little room for a transcendent god, even as it actively seeks transcendence outside of the Christian religion. An apatheist sees little practical benefit to any deity and does not care about what that deity might require of them. It certainly seems like a hopeless situation facing the church, except God gives hope for even the most hopeless situation.
Roger Owens and Anthony Robinson write of a dark night of the church, alluding to the poem by St. John of the Cross. In this time of uncertainty as the church with all its Christendom era systems is faced with a Post-Christian era, the way forward is hard to see. The programs and practices that the church has relied on are increasingly ineffective when apathy about God is commonplace. Owens and Robinson invite the church to remember a simple truth: “God is doing something.”1 For God is active in the world and in the church. The Holy Spirit is bringing humans into constructive interference with herself, gathering them to a congregation, and transforming them to bear witness as to the reign of God as pilgrim-priests.
I set out in my doctoralproject to answer a question which formed through my interactions with people outside of the church: What do the spiritual stories shared by apatheistic members of an online community centered around a video-gaming livestream say to the church about its identity as an evangelistic community, especially among people for whom the existence of God is irrelevant to their daily life? The answer I found was surprising in its straightforwardness: the stories of the apatheists I interviewed invite the church to be a welcoming alternative community—a place to belong and share life together, to care for one another and meet the needs of others, and to live authentically as people who proclaim the reign of God as pilgrim-priests. This calls the church to trust the work of the Holy Spirit in gathering Christ’s church rather than relying on their own efforts. Centering the work of the Holy Spirit frees the church to live at the edge of itself. As pilgrim-priests, the church is transformed and empowered by the Spirit to bear witness to God and God’s reign to those outside the church in local congregations. In response to the gathering work of the Holy Spirit, the church invites and welcomes those outsiders into a community in which they experience transcendence through belonging, while also being with them and representing them to God. As they continue to be with one another in community, the Holy Spirit continues her work in the outsider, that they also might be transformed by an encounter with God to be witnesses and pilgrim-priests of God to the world.
Notes
- L. Roger Owens and Robinson, “Dark Night of the Church: Relearning the Essentials,” The Christian Century, December 26, 2012, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-12/dark-night-church. ↩︎