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Wretched Urgency
The Grace of God or Hamsters on a Wheel?
by Michael Spencer

...I've been thinking these things for years, and they aren't shadows. What I am going to to say is real, and I am going to bet that once I let the cat out of the bag, a lot of readers will write me and say they thought it too, but were afraid to say anything because they didn't want to get in trouble or get preached at. So here we go.

I don't think Christianity is about converting people....

...This all started for me when I noticed that there was no concern for church growth in any of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. Read it. Stop right now and go read it.

OK. Am I telling the truth? It says to hold fast. It encourages purity, fidelity, bravery and love. There are commendations and criticisms. But nothing about church growth. Nothing that says the agenda of Jesus for these churches was militant evangelism. I'm not saying there isn't anything in these letters about evangelism. I am NOT trying to substantiate some kind of hyper-Calvinistic anti-missions philosophy. Far from it. I'm simply saying that in these two very important chapters summarizing the message of Jesus to these seven key churches in Asia Minor, there is no wretched urgency about evangelism and witnessing.

There is urgency about holiness, truth, and responsiveness to Christ. There is urgency about the Gospel IN the church, and among those who say they believe it. There is commendation for faithfulness in living it out. There just isn't anything about church growth or aggressive personal evangelism. If you find it, you're making it up.

How about the epistles in the New Testament? In those places where Christians are addressed as Christians, where is the urgency about church growth or personal evangelism?

Yes, I know that Paul is urgent about his ministry, but I don't find his instructions for other Christians to be entirely in the same vein. I hear Christians being told to live quiet, peaceful, honest, generous lives adorned with integrity and love. Christians are told to be devoted to their families, to love fellow believers, and to live in such a way that outsiders cannot accuse or criticize. If they suffer for being a Christian, it should not be because they provoked a response through simply living the life Jesus taught.

Again and again, I look in the epistles for the kind of Christian experience that I was taught was normal, and I do not find it. The statements of urgency are not statements telling me to turn my house and life upside down in frenetic efforts to persuade people to join my religion. The urgency in Paul comes from his personal mission and his own vocation as a church planter. I can't automatically apply it all to everyone else.

...I do not find guilt-inducing, blood on your hands urgency in Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians or Thessalonians, letters that are indicative of diverse pastoral situations and relationships. Each letter is consumed almost entirely with concerns and problems within the church. The "witness" Paul is working to shape is lives submitted to Christ in matters of doctrine and discipleship. He is not organizing confrontive door-knocking expeditions....

...The Thessalonians, who had caught a bad case of "Left Behind Fever," received this admonition: "1 Thessalonians 4:10-12 But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, 11 and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12 so that you may live properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. In fact, it is remarkable how often the advice to the Thessalonians could be paraphrases as "Calm down. Live sensibly and morally. Stand firm. Be the sort of people who have an anchor for the soul in times when anything goes."...