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The Aquila Report

The Impossibility Gap

By Andy Bannister — 3 years ago

The Impossibility Gap

God plans to rescue and redeem people from every culture: from Iran to China, from ancient Greece to ancient Rome, right down to people from the secular post-Christian West. And the beautiful thing is that rather than do it himself, which he has the power to, God chooses to work through us, despite our fears and our inadequacies. God delights in using the weak things of the world—because it’s when we realise we don’t have the ability, we’re forced to rely on him, as we’re supposed to.

Some of my favourite places to speak at are venues like coffee shops, workplaces, or universities. After one such university event, where the Christian Union had asked me to talk on “Why did Jesus have to die?” we had an amazing time of Q&A after which I felt the Spirit nudge me to end the event by leading people who wanted to in a prayer to commit their lives to Jesus. It was an incredible evening and God was very much at work. But I remember that one particular evening not for how powerfully the Lord moved, but for a conversation afterwards. As we were packing up to leave, a campus ministry leader came up us and asked: “How did you do what you did there?”

“What do you mean?”, I replied.

“You just preached the gospel very openly then prayed, very publicly, and invited people to respond to Jesus—and you did that in a university meeting room. I didn’t think evangelism like that was possible in this day and age. How did you and your colleague do that?”

That’s not the first time I’ve heard that sentiment expressed: that evangelism simply isn’t possible. That a workplace, campus, group of people, or even our culture is so secular and so post-Christian that evangelism just doesn’t work anymore.

I confess I’ve occasionally fallen into the same way of thinking myself. A few years ago I became friends with Peter, a Christian GP. And I remember being very surprised when one day he casually remarked “I love being a GP, it creates so many fantastic opportunities for evangelism”. Without thinking, I said words to the effect of “Really? I thought the health service was so secular and any expression of religious faith so frowned upon, that evangelism just isn’t possible?” Those three little words just slipped out: evangelism isn’t possible.[1]

Why did I instinctively respond with incredulity? Why was that campus minister baffled by seeing evangelism take place on campus? Why do many of us (if we are honest) worry or doubt that evangelism is really possible in “this day and age”? I think it’s because there is a massive temptation to buy into the myth that the secular UK (or the West in general) is simply too difficult ground for the gospel. But is this actually true? And if we’re in danger of thinking this, how can we overcome the Impossibility Gap?

Challenging the Myth of Impossibility

Because the Impossibility Gap is so deep rooted in many of us (we haven’t deliberately adopted it, but we’ve become quietly and subtly infected by it), I want to hit it and hit it hard—so here are six powerful pieces of counter-evidence that taken together will, I hope, form a powerful corrective.

First, however tough a context for evangelism the secular West may be, Christianity has grown (and grown rapidly) in equally tough (or even tougher) contexts in the past. For instance, look at the growth of the Church in the first century. The first century Greek and Roman world was not easy, far from it. Yes, it was very religious, but religiously pluralistic—the pagan world had little time for the idea there was one God and that every other god was a false one. Add to that the ever daily threat and problem of persecution, as the young Church was seen as an increasing threat to the authorities. Yet despite those challenges—a hostile culture and hostile rulers—the Church grew from 120 people in AD33 to 31 million by AD350; or to put it even more dramatically, from 0% to 52.9% of the Roman Empire in 300 years.[2] The early Church didn’t look at the culture and think “impossible”, they looked at it and thought “What a challenge! Let’s follow the Spirit’s lead and see what happens”.

From the past, we can also look to the present. For today, Christianity is growing like wildfire in far tougher contexts than the West. Look at China, where the Church is growing exponentially despite the best attempts of the Communist Party to stamp it out, that there are probably about 120 million Christians in China. Indeed, China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian nation by the 2030s.[3] That growth has all happened in the past few decades. Or consider Iran, where a totalitarian Islamic regime rules with the iron fist of Sharia Law and has made conversion from Islam illegal. But despite arrests and torture, the Iranian church now numbers over a million and is the fastest growing church in the world.[4] There are similar stories across the Middle East. Christians in these terrifically difficult settings could easily say “Evangelism is impossible; it can’t be done!” but they haven’t and God is at work in amazing ways. Let’s be encouraged by and learn from their courage, faith, and example.

Third, sometimes the Impossibility Gap grows because we have a tendency to romanticise our own past. We imagine that churches were full to bursting in Victorian times (and before) and we pine for the lost Golden Age of Christianity, when our country was so thoroughly Christian it was like living in heaven on earth.[5] But that is far from the reality. In Victorian times, surveys of religious attendance show a very mixed picture. For example, Horace Mann, commenting on the 1851 Religious Census remarked that ‘a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion’.[6] One can read contemporary reports of ministers grumbling how ‘There were only a dozen people in church on Sunday, and three of them were drunk’.

A little earlier in time and Wilberforce, that famous Christian MP and reformer, was so upset by the spiritual state of the country that in 1787 he wrote in his journal that ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of Manners’[7] (he meant by the latter the spiritual reformation of his country). A few decades earlier still, John Wesley was so concerned by the religious state of the UK that he threw himself into the re-evangelism of the UK, covering over 250,000 miles on on horseback and preaching over 40,000 sermons as he sought to share Jesus.

It is clear: the past was not a Christian utopia, but as tough then as it is now, yet that didn’t hold back Wesley and others from faithfully preaching the gospel. And I’m thankful that they did: it’s because of that Great Chain of Witnesses which stretches down through the centuries that you and I eventually heard the gospel ourselves.

Fourth, it’s helpful to remember that the West is highly unusual. The secularism that we see in places like the UK, Europe, and North America are a cultural blip both historically and geographical. In most parts of the world today, religion is growing—humanity is becoming more not less religious and worldwide, atheism is in decline. According to the latest research from the well-respected Pew Research Centre, by 2060 the number of people identifying as atheists or agnostics will have declined to 12% (from 16% today).[8] And those patterns are increasingly being reflected in the UK through factors like immigration. Many of the largest churches in cities like London are now immigrant churches—and there’s a beautiful sign of God’s long-term provision in the way that those immigrant churches are now helping to re-evangelise the nation that evangelised them through the missionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fifth, remember that the UK and the West are not Christendom. Sometimes we can have such a myopic view of culture and history that we begin to assume that God’s plans and purposes for his Kingdom have the UK, or the US, or the West at their centre. And no wonder we then get distressed when those countries undergo seismic cultural shifts.

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