The Evangelistic Machine

Contemporary Christianity has been long sense seduced by the machine age. And this can be seen most clearly in those settings where evangelism has become a form of production: a machine for making disciples of Jesus Christ. In this post I’m going to assert that this understanding of evangelism is not warranted by the teaching of Jesus, and represents a mis-reading of his commands to his disciples. 

To see this we need to first look at the evolving relationship between Jesus and his disciples. Initially they are called to follow him. Their first (and as it happens final) vocation is to be witnesses to him; his teaching, his miracles, and his person. What they witness is this: Jesus never produces anything. 

This doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t exercise power. He heals, he casts out demons, he changes water to wine. But even when his miracles are of abundance, such as when he feeds the 5000, they aren’t characterized as production. He feeds the five thousand. He doesn’t produce food for 5000. There is a difference. 

Abundance in scripture is the result of nature taking its course under human guidance. Health is the restoration of the natural, not something produced by human effort. Casting out demons is a restoration of order, not the creation of order. And providing food for humanity without effort is a restoration of the natural order of Eden, not the establishing of a new order. After all, the Word created everything perfectly. The Word incarnate doesn’t need to make a machine to do what creation cannot. 

Nor does Jesus need to produce followers. Nowhere do the gospels suggest that Jesus has launched an evangelistic campaign to produce disciples. There is no suggestion of a strategy, of goal setting, or of mechanisms of persuasion. Jesus does his work of announcing (in word and deed) that God’s Reign is immanent and people choose to follow him. In doing so they are simply returning to their own true nature, to the natural order of the human relationship with God. Disciples arise as naturally as the wheat to which they are compared. 

This isn’t all they do. Jesus invites his closest disciples to go beyond witnessing to his ministry and actually join in it by announcing God’s Reign, feeding, healing, and casting out demons. And when they have gone out on their mission of restoration they return to Jesus not with new followers they have produced, but with new signs of the advent of God’s reign. 

Does something fundamentally different happens when after Jesus’ resurrection?  He says to the disciples “All authority in heaven and on earth as been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember I am with you always to the end of the age.” (NRSV) 

Is Jesus here asking the apostles to begin to produce something? To create an evangelistic machine for disciple-making? To transform raw human material into disciples of Christ? 

The best way to answer this question is to look at what the apostles actually did after hearing these words. After all, no one was or is in a better position to understand what Jesus meant than they. 

And what they did, so far as we know from scripture, is they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” (Luke 24: 52) Then, beginning on the day of Pentecost, they take up the task of being witnesses to Jesus, announcing the nearness of God’s Reign, and healing, feeding, and casting out demons. 

Of course there is something new. At the end of Peter’s first sermon, and apparently many other apostolic sermons, the announcement of God’s Reign stirs the crowd to ask, “what should we do?” And for this Peter has a ready answer. “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.”  And people do repent, and are baptized, and become part of the group of believers in Jesus in Jerusalem.

Notably absent from this scene, and all subsequent scenes, is any production of disciples by Peter and the other apostles. The only power present in Acts chapter 2 is the Holy Spirit, and far from proactively deploying that power to create disciples the apostles respond to God’s initiative by baptizing those whom God has called. And this is the pattern across the book of Acts and such history as we can read out of the various epistles. Those whom God is calling make themselves known, or perhaps better, finally realize God is calling them. And this happens when the apostles do exactly what they were always called to do: witness to Jesus Christ, announce God’s Reign, and perform signs of its presence. 

The apostles no more produce disciples than a farmer produces grain, and vintner wine, or a beekeeper honey. Their job is to be present to care for the harvest and to bring it in, not to produce it.

Imagine, if you will, a field of banana trees. On them hang bunches of bananas ready to be gathered, and they are. The someone, maybe not even the person who tended them, gathers them and sticks on a label: Chiquita. Has that person made produced bananas? Nonsense. No more that the person who put a label on the tomatoes in the store or slapped the Ford label on a pickup truck. 

But in the age of the machine the church quit seeing itself as a reaver, or possibly even a gleaner in the fields of the Lord and decided its job was to produce disciples. It read into Jesus’ words a machine-age imperative to apply power across a series of planned transformations (psychological or spiritual as you will) so that the result would be a disciple, which could then be labeled Christian. And because the processes of production were distinctive to particular groups of disciple-makers they would also put on their group imprint: Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Pentecostal, Catholic, Orthodox, and so on. 

It seems silly and is, when you consider it. But only if we forget just how how seductive it is to create and run an evangelistic machine that creates disciples with one’s very own imprint. It isn’t so different really from the sexual act, from seduction through foreplay to the intercourse that creates children born with one’s own features. Except that the evangelistic machine perverts the pleasure that rightly belongs to human participation in the Divine and thus wholly natural production of offspring into wholly unnatural manipulation of the human psyche. There is a difference between Ruth and Boaz and Dr. Frankenstein. 

There was a time when American Christians actually debated whether we should run evangelistic machines, or simply witness to Christ and wait for the harvest only God could bring. For the most part we gave up thinking about it. As a teacher of evangelism my shelves are full of books about creating evangelistic machines. They run from market surveys to goal setting to strategic plans to key words, messages and musical styles that can be persuasively deployed to best psychological effect. Evangelistic worship, like evangelistic preaching isn’t designed to praise God or witness to Christ. It is designed to create a psychological flow that will lead a person through awareness, to guilt and shame, to repentance, and finally to the altar.

And this has created a church of evangelistic engineers and the mechanics who attend to their machines. (For a critique see The Art of Pastoring by David Hanson.)

In the coming 2nd machine age the idea of “making disciples for the transformation of the world” by means of evangelistic machines will go from merely being dismissive of God and demeaning to humans to being as irrelevant as it is irreverent. Because production-oriented evangelism, like every other kind of production, will be better done by machines than humans.

Instead the Church needs to rediscover its actual vocation: which is witnessing to Christ, announcing in word and deed God’s coming Reign, and welcoming those whom God callsinto the fellowship of followers of Christ.