Querying Evangelism

There is a United Church minister in Toronto who took an empty downtown church and filled it by doing a reverse evangelism. Traditional evangelism has people within the church "selling" or "marketing" the church to the unchurched. The idea is that "church" is a package of goods and services that can be sold or marketed and bought at the other end. The church provides the package, the evangelized are the buyers.

Cheri Dinovo's type of evangelism goes the other way. The outsiders evangelize to the church. They teach, we listen. They have more to teach us about suffering, love, neglect, peace, violence, inhumanity, etc. than we have to teach them. We seek them out so that we can remain a church.

Dinovo spent time walking into the rougher neighbourhoods listening to people, bringing them into her church, not to follow but to lead. One person that had a big impact on her congregation was a cross-dresser drug addict who became the music director. She eventually died of an overdose. Dinovo points out that street people and poor people die a lot, so her church does a lot of funerals. But her church is filled with these kinds of people, sitting beside average families. This church requires a lot of close supervision to deal with potential situations -- so they provide it. They don't use the need for more supervision as an excuse not to let these people evangelize to them.

Dinovo's point is that the real preachers, movers, message-bearers always come from the margins of society. Jesus did, so did John the Baptist. If movers and shakers do come from within our congregations, we have a regrettable tendency to kick them out. Consider Lucretia Mott, George Fox, William Penn, John Woolman. The real evangelism comes from the outside in.

Churches do too much talking and too little learning and listening. Certainly, Quakers are a little different because everyone is equally a minister, and anyone can give ministry in Meeting. There is less of a marketable "package" to Quakerism. Yet our meetings have remarkably few drug addicts, street dwellers, runaways, etc. When we do outreach to these marginalized groups, it's usually to provide them with physical necessities, often through a third-party group.We have an arm's length approach to the very poor and unfortunate, perhaps not conscious, but it's still there.

Yet Jesus sat with prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, thieves, fishmongers. He didn't market his religion to them; he just listened to them, accepted them. He used washing to symbolize to them that their "sins" wash away like water, making them just as good as the "righteous" people. His message was: You're good enough the way you are - be one of my apostles.

I will ponder this idea over the Thanksgiving weekend so that I can talk clearly about it at the outreach committee meeting on Tuesday.