The following is a part of a speech that the late John Stott gave in 1974 at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. (https://lausanne.org/content/john-stott-biblical-basis-of-evangelism) In his speech, he is explaining the biblical basis of evangelism. After you read what he had to say please send me an email (bboydston@piu.edu) responding to the prompts. Your answers can be short or long. Just make sure you show me that you have a good understanding of what he is saying. (This assignment is worth 25 points.)
WRITING PROMPTS
- What does Dr Stott see as the relationship between results and evangelism? That is, how successful does evangelism have to be in order to be regarded as biblical evangelism?
- What, according to Dr Stott, is THE biblical method of evangelism?
- What point is he trying to make when he says that, "evangelism may and must be defined only in terms of the message."?
- What, according to Dr Stott, are the four elements of the Gospel that need to be proclaimed through evangelism, as presented in scripture?
Evangelism is an essential part of the church’s mission. What is it? Euangelizomai is to bring or to announce the euangelion, the good news. Once or twice in the New Testament it is used of secular news items, as when Timothy brought Paul the good news of the Thessalonians’ faith and love (1 Thess. 3:6) and when the angel Gabriel told Zechariah the good news that his wife Elizabeth was to have a son (Luke 1:19). But the regular use of the verb relates to the Christian Good News. It is the spread of this which constitutes evangelism. This fact has important consequences.
First, evangelism must not be defined in terms of its results, for this is not how the word is used in the New Testament. Normally the verb is in the middle voice. Occasionally it is used absolutely, for example “there they evangelized,” meaning “there they preached the Gospel” (Acts 14:7, cf. Rom. 15:20). Usually, however, something is added: either the message preached (e.g., they “went about evangelizing the word,” Acts 8:4), or the people to whom or places in which the Gospel is preached (e.g., the apostles “evangelized many villages of the Samaritans” and Philip “evangelized all the towns” along the coast, Acts 8:25, 40). There is no mention whether the word which was “evangelized” was believed, or whether the inhabitants of the towns and villages “evangelized” were converted. To “evangelize” in biblical usage does not mean to win converts (as it usually does when we use the word) but simply to announce the good news, irrespective of the results.
You may recall that the famous watchword of the Student Volunteer Movement, "the evangelization of the world in this generation," was criticized for this reason. Professor Gustav Warneck attacked it at the ninth Continental Missions Conference at Bremen in May, 1897, on the ground that it was a naively optimistic and rather man-confident forecast that the world would be won for Christ in that generation. But John Mott rallied to the watchword’s defense. He maintained that “the evangelization of the world” meant neither its conversion nor its Christianization, that it did not encourage superficial preaching, and that it was not to be regarded as a prophecy. As William Richey Hogg writes, the watchword was “a call to obligation, not a prophecy of fact!”
In a somewhat similar way J. I. Packer in his Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God has justly criticized the famous definition of evangelism first formulated in England in 1919 by the Archbishops’ “Committee of Enquiry into the Evangelistic Work of the Church.” It begins: “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit that men shall come to put their trust in God through him . . . .” Dr. Packer draws attention to the form of the sentence “so to present Christ Jesus . . . that men shall . . .” This is to define evangelism in terms of success. But to evangelize is not so to preach that something happens. Of course the objective is that something will happen, namely that people will respond and believe. Nevertheless, biblically speaking, to evangelize is to proclaim the Gospel, whether anything happens or not.
Second, evangelism must not be defined in terms of methods. To evangelize is to announce the good news, however the announcement is made, or to bring good news, by whatever means it is brought. We can evangelize by word of mouth (whether to individuals, groups, or crowds); by print, picture, and screen; by drama (whether what is dramatized is fact or fiction); by good works of love; by a Christ-centered home; by a transformed life; and even by a speechless excitement about Jesus.
Third, evangelism may and must be defined only in terms of the message. Therefore biblical evangelism makes the biblical evangel indispensable. Nothing hinders evangelism today more than the widespread loss of confidence in the truth, relevance, and power of the Gospel. When this ceases to be good news from God and becomes instead “rumors of God,” we can hardly expect the church to exhibit much evangelistic enthusiasm!
If we agree that the Gospel is God’s good news and that, despite all the rich diversity of its formulation in the New Testament, this was only one basic apostolic tradition of the Gospel (as Paul claims, 1 Cor. 15:11), we should be able to reconstruct it. Indeed, many have done so. All concur that, in a single word, God’s good news is Jesus. He is the heart and soul of the Gospel. Thus, what Philip told the Ethiopian was simply “the good news of Jesus” (Acts 8:35), and Paul began his great manifesto of the Gospel – his letter to the Romans – by describing himself as “set apart for the Gospel of God . . . concerning his Son . . . Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 1:1-4).
But how did the apostles present Jesus? If we compare the early sermons recorded in the Acts with each other and with Paul’s statement of the Gospel at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15, it becomes clear that the good news contained at least the following four elements.
First, there were the gospel events, primarily the death and resurrection of Jesus. Sometimes the apostles began with a reference to the life and ministry of the man Jesus, and usually they went on to his enthronement as Lord and his return as Judge. But their message focused on his death and resurrection. Nor did they proclaim these (as some say) as non-theological history, just “you killed him, but God raised him.” Already they had a doctrine of both. His death was “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23), and the Cross on which it took place they deliberately called a “tree” to indicate the divine curse under which he died (Acts 5:30, 10:39, 13:29; Deut. 21:22, 23; Gal. 3:10, 13; 1 Pet. 2:24), while the resurrection was a divine vindication, snatching him from the place of a curse to the place of honor and authority at God’s right hand (e.g., Acts 2:32, 33).
Second, there were the gospel witnesses. That is, the apostles proclaimed the death and resurrection of Jesus both “according to the Scriptures” (Acts 2:25ff, 3:18, 24; cf. 1 Cor. 15:3, 4) and according to the evidence of their own eyes. “We are witnesses of these things, “they kept saying (e.g., Acts 2:32, 5:32). So we today have no liberty to preach Christ crucified and risen according to our own fancy or even according to our own experience. The only Christ there is to preach is the biblical Christ, the objective historical Jesus attested by the joint witness of the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New (cf. Acts 10:39-43). Our witness is always secondary to theirs.
Third, there were the gospel promises. The apostles did not proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus merely as events, even when enriched by doctrinal significance and biblical witness. For the good news concerns not just the historic but the contemporary Christ, not just what he once did but what he now offers on the basis of what he did. What is this? In Peter’s Pentecost address, the very first Christian sermon ever preached, he was able to promise them with complete assurance that they could receive both “the forgiveness of sins” and “the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Salvation is more than this, but it is certainly not less. It includes the remission of past guilt and the gift of an entirely new life through the regenerating and indwelling Holy Spirit.
Fourth, there were the gospel demands, namely repentance and faith. “Repent,” Peter said (Acts 2:38, 3:19), but also declared that “everyone who believes in him (Jesus) receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43 cf. 13:38, 39). In addition he commanded, “Be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ.” The apostles certainly never held a mechanical view of baptism, for they always set it in its context of repentance and faith. On the day of Pentecost those Jews were being required to submit to baptism in the name of the very Jesus whom they had previously repudiated and killed. Whatever else baptism may signify, it certainly was and is a public token of repentance and faith in Jesus.
It is true, of course, that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, and we must be careful never to define faith in such a way as to ascribe to it any merit. The whole value of faith lies in its object (Jesus Christ), not in itself. Nevertheless, faith is a total, penitent, and submissive commitment to Christ, and it would have been inconceivable to the apostles that anybody could believe in Jesus as Savior without submitting to him as Lord. We cannot chop Jesus Christ up into bits and then respond to only one of the bits. The object of saving faith is the whole and undivided person of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Evangelism, then, is sharing this Gospel with others. The good news is Jesus, and the good news about Jesus which we announce is that he, died for our sins and was raised from death by the Father, according to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and that on the basis of his death and resurrection he offers forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit to all those who repent, believe, and are baptized.
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