Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends,

My favorite courses in seminary were on Mission and Evangelism. Leslie Newbigin was a British theologian, missiologist, missionary and author. His theology of mission was nuanced, compassionate, faithful, and rooted in deep respect for the cultures in which he ministered and shared the Gospel and we read quite a bit of his work in those missiology classes. 

One of my favorite quotes of his is, “A serious commitment to evangelism means a radical questioning of the reigning assumptions of public life.”

His belief was that the Gospel, to be believed, must result in a dramatic and different way of seeing the world — of seeing the good in it where others might not see it and to see that which has gone wrong where others see only good. To be faithful bearers of the Good News must mean a reorientation our assumptions about people, material goods, security, status, achievement, power, strength, weakness, forgiveness, punishment, and much more.

We humans have developed a fairly reptilian morality. When someone hurts a snake it bites them. When it’s hungry it hunts. When it’s thirsty it drinks. When a reptile needs something the. it takes it.

I’m not sure how much more we’ve evolved beyond that to be honest — as a society. When someone hurts us we imprison, bomb, or execute them. When we want something we’re happy to just take it. Over the years we’ve celebrated the “Greed is Good” ethos of the eighties, the “Your way right away” ethos of the nineties, the self-absorption of a modern era of constant selfies and instant celebrity, and many more. In all of it there is just a kind of reptilian reflexiveness — if it feels good and gives a spark of enjoyment it must be ok. Not just ok — it must be what we’re entitled to.

Now things seem even worse. Partisanship and political idols. Anger and 24 hour news. Climate change and denial. 

So I come back to Newbigin, “A serious commitment to evangelism means a radical questioning of the reigning assumptions of public life.” It’s almost impossible to argue that the reigning assumptions in our public life are really anything but sinful self-absorption made manifest. That’s not a political statement but it is a moral one. It’s also not new. The reigning assumptions in our public life are no different than those under the British Empire or the Roman Empire. 

The question becomes whether we have a serious commitment to evangelism. Sadly, I tend to think the Episcopal Church is too comfortable with the status quo and too adjacent to it to do the serious work of questioning reigning assumptions in public life. Our lives and our livelihoods are not threatened by the reigning assumptions so they remain an algorithm for us that simply moves along unseen in the background.

Last week we heard Jesus say he would put father against son and daughter against mother. Yet, for many of us, we’d not let Jesus get in the way of our commitment to a country or a political party. We prefer a Jesus who blesses our choices not one who changes our identity. We want Jesus to remain still on the cross or quiet in the crèche not alive in our hearts. For to have him alive in the heart of a person or a nation must mean untrammeled and unparalleled transformation — a radical questioning of reigning assumptions. 

This is what Newbigin was embracing. He saw, by visiting other cultures, by committing himself to the Gospel, and by throwing himself into the work of sharing it that the prevailing assumptions of his time about race, Empire, economics, and so much more were broken. But that wouldn’t have happened without a first and primary commitment to share the Good News that had changed his heart and life.

He had heard a news he couldn’t help but share and that undid his assumptions about the world (and about the British Empire) and made him open to truth and able to share it. There is much talk in the church and in the country about changing systems and whether we should leave up statues or what policing should look like. None of these, ultimately, is going to make that much of a difference if the reigning assumptions of our lives haven’t been radically questioned. 

That questioning won’t begin until we decide whether we believe that the news we have heard is good enough to share — whether we are willing to live it as evangelists.

Yours in Christ,

Robert