Understanding Evangelism in Relation to People of Other Faiths

Growing up in a Pentecostal family in India, I was taught that all those who did not believe in certain teachings of my church—whether Christians or non-Christians—were destined for damnation. Though the church was passionate about evangelism, we understood evangelism in the limited sense of preaching the gospel, going door-to-door, open-air meetings, tract distribution, broadcasting the Jesus film, sharing testimonies, and apologetic preaching. As everyone outside the church was considered the target of mission, our relationship with “the other” was limited to evangelizing and converting them to our church. With the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the enactment of anticonversion laws in various provinces in India, such evangelistic activities came under severe criticism. In a similar vein, Bishop Lesslie Newbigin noted that Christians in the West were growing ashamed of the aggressive and crusading spirit of evangelism of European missionaries in the colonial period.¹ And the opportunities provided by global migration to engage with non-Christian friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens, coupled with a desire to become agents of reconciliation rather than aggression, made Christians in the West ambivalent towards evangelism as a whole.

While we are called to be bearers of the gospel for all humankind, there is much confusion regarding what evangelism is in the post-Christian era, especially in relation to people of other faiths. In this brief article, we will look at how we can have a robust understanding of evangelism among those of other faiths in today’s world.

Evangelism and Culture in the Early Church

The term “evangel,” or “good news,” was used by the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to denote the “announcement of such events as the birth of an heir to the emperor, his coming-of-age, and his ascension.”² However, early Christians, who called themselves evangelists, used the same term to declare the good news of God’s reign and salvation brought by Jesus Christ. David Bosch argues that “evangelism is the core, heart, or center of mission.”³ Evangelism is announcing the transforming good news of Jesus Christ and inviting others to believe in it and to “become partakers in his Kingdom.”⁴

Following the Great Commission of Jesus Christ, early Christians made disciples wherever they went. Jehu Hanciles argued that as soon as Christianity emerged in Jerusalem, it spread immediately to the rest of Asia, Africa, and Europe through the work of Christian traders and merchants.⁵

In my reading, the early Christian community very well realized the significance of culture and traditions for individual and community development. The early Christians, who were mostly Jewish believers, retained their old Hebrew worship forms. In other words, their identity in Christ did not require them to eradicate their Jewishness. They continued regularly going to the local synagogues and the temple but broke bread in their homes. For the early church, evangelism meant contextualizing the gospel in people’s own languages and engaging with people’s varied cultures. A key part of this involved challenging injustice and exercising radical acceptance of the marginalized in different contexts, which became hallmarks of Christian evangelism. In this way, the gospel of Jesus Christ became the good news for all.

Colonialism and Mission

With the rise of the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation, however, a dichotomy was created between body and mind, religious and secular, and spiritual and material, which eventually placed religion as an activity of the mind. This had a great impact on evangelism and the ways the European church engaged with people of other cultures and other religions. The Euro-centric cognitive approach to religions privileged the verbal over the affective (and music over other art forms), and it redefined religious belief as an abstract and universal phenomenon originating from rational individuals. Religion was thus separated from any cultural roots, and religions were approached as monolithic traditions with grand narratives. Wilfred Cantwell Smith coined the term “reification of religion” to define this process.⁶

With colonialism, a European understanding of religion as a set of beliefs disconnected from domains of power became the norm for understanding world religions; this shaped our ideas of mission and evangelism. With the rise of the apologetic approach, in Christian encounters with people of other faiths, defending Christian doctrines was privileged over discerning what God was doing in other cultures and societies. As preaching became the prime mode of communicating the gospel, the process of inculturation being woven with the task of making disciples was frowned upon. Colonial mission and subsequent Christian traditions that emerged in Asia, Africa, and Latin America cultivated a rather negative attitude towards local musical traditions and artistic expressions. New converts were taken out of their cultural milieu and ushered into various traditions of European Christian heritage. Neglect of art was a major challenge that hindered holistic Christian witness in the modern period, argue Roberta King and William Dyrness.7 Such an approach obliterated the cultural diversity of Christianity, which “reflects the image of the creator God,” and prevented the gospel from taking deep root in local cultures and traditions and among communities of other religions.⁸ Thus, with colonialism, Christianity became known in the Global South as the “white man’s religion.”

A New Approach to Evangelism and World Religions

According to Newbigin, during the colonial period, Christian missionaries, who engaged in evangelism with the support of European colonial rulers, understood Christian mission as a “crusade” and promoted a kind of “aggressive evangelism.”⁹ The colonial mission model has come under severe criticism in recent decades—especially its role in legitimizing European colonialism and downplaying the indigenous agency in the propagation of Christianity. In the wake of such a discussion on Christian mission, how should evangelism—particularly among those of other religions and cultures—be done in the postcolonial world?

One significantly important thing is our need to understand religions as discursive traditions, in contrast to Orientalists’ approach to religions as monolithic traditions. Take Islam, for example. If, contrary to what we might learn from textbooks, Islam is not in fact a monolithic, trans-historic tradition, then how can we approach Islamic traditions? Building on the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, renowned anthropologist Talal Asad argues that we need to understand Islam, or any other religion for that matter, as hundreds of discursive traditions that are practiced by Muslims around the globe.¹⁰ Their interpretations of the Quran, Hadith, and other authoritative sources are very much shaped by sociopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions. Discursive Islamic traditions are also formed in conversation with other religious traditions, cultures, and ideologies. As these conditions constantly change, their understanding of Islam also alters correspondingly. In this regard, it is essential to note the following words of Diana Eck: “Religions are not like stones passed from hand to hand through the ages. They are dynamic movements, more like rivers—flowing, raging, creative, splitting, converging.”¹¹

In my opinion, understanding Islam as a discursive tradition will help us account for both the unity and diversity among Muslims. Such an understanding will force us to pay greater attention to Islamic traditions practiced by Muslims in various contexts. The following words of J. Dudley Woodberry are significant in this regard: “Any meaningful dialogue with Muslims needs to start by walking with them, listening to them, and asking them questions.”¹² The same should apply to our understanding and perspective of other religions.

Terry Muck echoes this sentiment when he argues that in order to contextualize the gospel, we should enter fully into the religious and cultural world of other people, “doing religious thinking alongside them, using their terms, asking their questions, using methods common to their way of thinking religiously.”¹³

In what follows, I will explore a few approaches by which we might engage with people of other religions in such ways.

Evangelism, Culture, and “Insider” Movements

Scott Sunquist remarked that “evangelism is a call to belief, and by extension, it is a call to values, community and actions.”¹⁴ It is an invitation to turning away from the world and a turning to Jesus and falling in love with him. As we are called to make disciples and not converts, conversion needs to be understood not as a once-for-all event or goal but rather as a continuous process of becoming a disciple of Jesus. Evangelism is an invitation to be part of a community of disciples transformed by the love of God. Conversion, however, should not be regarded as a total break from one’s cultural traditions.

Culture is what enables meaning, shapes sensibilities, and makes people comfortable with who they are. Culture is a set of subsystems that reflect the collective life of a community. It provides significance and goals for joint action. In my understanding, traditional models of mission follow the same logic as modern identity-making: by inviting people to take a new religious identity, we ask people to forsake all their preexisting ties and identities, thereby removing them from their sociopolitical and cultural traditions, which can be dangerous to new converts in many societies. For many Muslims, religious identity is strongly linked with all other aspects of life, so a change of identity would make it nearly impossible to remain a part of their own family, community, and society. Such believers should not be removed from their culture.

In this regard, and again taking Islam as an example, I would like to highlight the
observation of Woodberry that Donald Larson, in an article entitled “The Cross-Cultural Communication of the Gospel to Muslims,” developed the concept of “bi-passing” in which Muslims and nominal Christians of different cultural backgrounds can move directly into a “new humanity” (Eph 2:15) without either having to “pass” into the other’s cultures and become culturally like them as precondition of becoming a Christian.¹⁵ In my understanding, an insider movement among followers of Christ in other religious traditions—whether Muslim or Hindu or other—takes cultural issues into serious consideration. If someone believes in the redemptive work of Christ, then they should be allowed to be an “insider” to their families and socioreligious communities in order to witness their faith effectively. The key is to realize that there is no prescribed model for being a Christian socially, culturally, and legally.

Evangelism and Social Action

Sunquist notes that, in the past 20 or 30 years, many programs and books on evangelism have focused upon “community building and fighting against injustice.”¹⁶ If evangelism means bringing good news, there should not be any separation between evangelism and social action—the two essential elements of Christian mission. We cannot care only for the soul of the people without caring for the whole person. The Greek term for salvation, sozo, which means health or wholeness, implies that salvation is not limited to the spiritual needs of an individual but rather covers physical, emotional, and social needs. Sunquist writes, “It relates to all of a person, all relationships, and all of creation.”¹⁷

In the 21st century, in a religiously and culturally pluralist world, we cannot understand the meaning of the gospel or engage in God’s mission in isolation. People of other faiths are not only our target of mission; we need to partner with them.

Amos Yong argues that we must engage religious others at three levels of an “ortho”-triad: orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy.¹⁸ At the level of orthodoxy, we engage the religious others intellectually in interreligious dialogue in order to compare religious scriptures and doctrines. Though we can be quite “successful” engaging others at this discursive level, often such engagement is the result of our passion for articulating and defending the truth of Christian orthodoxy. The orthopraxic domain invites us to engage with people of many and diverse faiths at the practical level. This includes “biblically and theologically responsible practices, actions, and behaviors, ranging from the various rituals we perform (e.g., baptism, the Lord’s Supper) to the values we live out in the realm of social ethics (justice, mercy, prudence, etc.).”¹⁹ At this level, we are invited to think about issues of the common good and envision and act together to create a just and equal society for all—Christian or not.

Evangelism in the Context of Migration and Hospitality

A defining feature of current globalization is the massive movement of peoples and people groups around the globe. Globalization and changes in immigration laws have brought diverse languages, cultures and religious traditions from around the world to the West. It diversified our societies and radically altered the landscape of cities and towns with the mushrooming of mosques and temples—not to mention ethnic restaurants and other similar spaces. Thus, Christians, not only in the Global South but also in Europe and the Americas, now live amid cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others are our neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens making our workplaces and public squares much more diverse. The merging of cultures and meeting of religions are unavoidable, and ignoring religious others is no longer an option in our global village. Are we able to take the risk of being vulnerable by entering into the world of religious and cultural others?

Today, churches and Christian organizations cannot ignore migrants and issues related to migration. European and North American countries cannot sustain their economies without an uninterrupted flow of immigrants from the South. One pivotal question we need to ask is, how can we prepare churches and Christian organizations to shoulder the tremendous responsibility of serving millions of migrants, who come with their different religious and cultural traditions?

The meaning of hospitality is an important issue to be addressed in this regard. One question is about the role we want to play as the host to our guests. Do we want to serve immigrants on our own terms? Or are we ready to serve our guests on their terms? Are we ready to embrace them with their cultures and religious traditions, which may be foreign to us? Are we committed to being shaped by their cultures and traditions?

Hospitality is an integral dimension of interreligious encounters and dialogue. As Newbigin has noted, we often encounter religious others with the attitude that we have “nothing to lose but everything to give.”²⁰ For Yong, genuine hospitality is an invitation to open ourselves up to the ideas and teachings of religious others. “Those in other faiths have beliefs and practices that can challenge or enrich—sometimes both—our way of thinking and living.”²¹ Hospitality assumes a humble posture to understand the world from others’ perspectives and a commitment to be persuaded by others’ ideas. So genuine dialogue is not risk-free; “the goal of dialogue is not to establish an agreement or to ignore the differences.”²² Rather, it leads to self-criticism and self-discovery, which produces “authentic transformation in both parties.”²³

Evangelism and Orthopathy

Finally, returning to the “ortho”-triad mentioned above: the third component, orthopathy, invites us to engage with religious others on the affective level. It is engaging others at the heart level “in a much kinder, humbler, and more loving, empathetic manner.”²⁴ This level of engagement takes the moral significance of human passions, affections, emotions, and desires seriously.²⁵ Therefore, out of the three levels, it is the deepest level of interfaith engagement.

In a recent lecture, Yong elaborated on the meaning of the orthopathic dimension of hospitality in relation to people of other faiths.²⁶ We are motivated and driven by our bodies’ affective dimensions—concerns, fears, worries, anxieties. Even though these pathic dimensions of our beings are subterranean, they powerfully impact our engagement with others and the world. We are driven affectively more so than we are discursively or intellectually. Orthopathic engagement in multifaith contexts involves embracing our own fears while confronting the vulnerabilities of religious and cultural others. So, we not only share our faith with others but also develop the boldness to listen and hear the wondrous works of God in other cultures declared in other languages. Such an engagement is more meaningful and effective than entertaining ideas and doctrines at the ideational level. It challenges us to recognize the resources available in other cultures and traditions to deal with the issues and challenges of life. It motivates us to cross borders and enter into unfamiliar spaces to utilize these resources to deal with our own fears and vulnerabilities.

So, at the orthopathic level, when we connect with religious others at the heart level, there is an opportunity for mutual conversion and enrichment. Engagement with religious others at affective and pathic levels is even more profound than being open to the teachings of religious others (orthodoxy) and being willing to work with them on issues of common interest (orthopraxy). It is the deepest level of interfaith engagement because, at this level, we are continually transformed—in our way of life and in our loves, hopes, and desires—through mutual hospitality and persuasions.

May we engage with our neighbors of other religions in this way, and with an embracing recognition of their cultures, contexts, and their whole selves, as we continue to renew our understanding of evangelism in a post-Christian and postcolonial age.