Today I want to speak about evangelism, which is a bit of a loaded topic among some Friends, so let me say briefly what I mean by this word. By “evangelism,” I mean the engaging and persuasive communication of our faith, combined with an invitation to visit the community that has been shaped by that faith. I want to emphasize that second part: an evangelistic communication isn’t complete unless it includes a way to experience how people who claim that faith have been shaped by it. In Quaker language, we communicate both faith and practice, implying that we do our best to keep them consistent with each other, and, welcome to Spokane Friends Meeting; here’s how we’re trying to live that out.

I want to contrast “evangelism” with “proselytism.” I see the first as a positive thing, and the second as problematic. Proselytism is trying to attract newcomers from spiritual homes that are serving them well, by implying that what we have is better than what they have. In other words, sheep-stealing.

You may have noticed that I put a question mark at the end of the title of today’s message, “A Silver Age of Evangelism?” The question mark is to signal that I’m asking questions rather than pretending to lay down things that I’m certain about.

So, for example, I’m going to suggest that the current attitude toward religion in the USA, which is increasingly negative, should be viewed as a time of great opportunity for evangelism. I’d like to compare today’s situation with what we might call “The Golden Age of Evangelism,” that is, that early period of church history that began with the Book of Acts. What can we learn from those earliest Christians that might apply to our challenging time?

The “golden” and “silver” comparisons are just handy tags for two different historical eras, which I’m borrowing from Russian cultural history. The Golden Age of Russian literature was the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, starting with Pushkin, and ending with Chekhov. It includes the giants Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. The Silver Age began shortly afterwards, and was especially noted for its amazing poets, such as Blok, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva, and included the early work of Mandelstam and Pasternak. Even though the two eras were not far apart chronologically, the context changed mightily from the Golden to the Silver Age. In the Golden Age, the Tsars basically had Russia locked down in what looked like a stable autocracy with little chance for reform. By the time the Silver Age began, revolutionaries had succeeded in assassinating a tsar, and a chain of events and personalities and polarizations was visibly underway that would end with the October Revolution in 1917. During those decades of the Silver Age, all the old certainties were up for discussion, including those involving faith and established religion.

Of course the parallels between church history and Russian literary history are very limited. Both Golden Ages involve strong and established empires; both Silver Ages are times of ferment, experimentation, and polarization. But the Golden Age of Evangelism, as I suggest it, started nearly 2000 years ago, and there’ve been numerous other cycles of stability and revolution in various parts of the Christian world before we arrive at our present situation. So my main question isn’t about how useful these tags are. I’m more interested in what the first era of church expansion in rough times can tell us about how to communicate our faith now.

Let’s look at the situation back at the beginning of church history, when Paul and the other apostles and their friends were building what became the church. We get several dramatic episodes in the book of Acts, and in particular in the series of visits Paul makes before and after today’s account of his visit to Athens. You might remember that his visits both before and after Athens were full of drama, as he and his friends clashed with both religious and secular authorities in the various towns he visited. Some of these clashes are with the established leaders of the Jewish communities from which Christianity arose, but those leaders are also nervously looking over their shoulders, worried that the disruptions caused by their disputes will attract unfavorable attention from the Roman overlords.

So … Paul basically goes to Athens for respite in between some of these turbulent visits, and waits for his companions to catch up with him there. And that’s where today’s excerpt begins:  

Acts 17:16 [NIV, adapted]

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” 21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And God is not served by human hands, as if God needed anything. Rather, it is God who gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man God made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and God marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek God and perhaps reach out for God and find God, though God is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in God we live and move and have our being.’[b] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are God’s offspring.’[c]

29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now God commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For God has set a day when God will judge the world with justice by the man God has appointed. God has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”

33 At that, Paul left the Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

Here are some things that strike me from this story; let’s see how many of them add to our thinking about communicating our faith today.

First of all, look how calm these discussions seem to be; Paul “reasons” with the people in the synagogue, with people out in the public, and with the Stoics and Epicurians. He speaks to the town council, a sort of combination of legislature and judicial body, and convinces at least one of them. Some people are not impressed by his message, as Luke candidly tells us, but others are.

Why this low-key experience? First of all, the Roman Empire, at least most of the time, was tolerant toward its many religions and deities. Even when people were commanded to exalt an emperor, they were not required to abandon their existing religious ties. The only thing that was not tolerated was political opposition to the empire and its authorities. It was not surprising that, in the melting-pot context of Athens, so many people were ready to hear new religious ideas.

Second, Paul’s approach itself was non-confrontational. He spoke about Jesus and the resurrection, but he also made connections with the public expressions of religious belief and religious yearning that he saw around him. He referred directly to that yearning: “God is not far from any one of us.” Their varieties of human-made idols doesn’t disqualify them from realizing this; in the past, God overlooked these substitutes that people made, not knowing that their Creator was closer than any of those substitutes.

A few days ago, I read a column in the Washington Post by Perry Bacon entitled “I left the church — and now long for a ‘church for the nones’.” He grew up in the church and became accustomed to the church being his primary social community. As he grew farther away from the theology and doctrines of the church, he couldn’t deny the importance of that community experience, and now he would love to see that same quality of community available to those like himself that he labels “the nones.” As you’ve probably heard, the “nones” are people who pollsters and sociologists in the USA say have no specific religious identity. As of a couple of years ago, those “nones” have grown to be as large as the Protestant and the Roman Catholic population of the United States, and are, or soon will be, the majority of Americans.

As Bacon says, “America today is a nation of believers (about 70 percent say they have some religious faith) who don’t regularly attend religious services (only 30 percent go to services at least once a month). I’m the reverse: a person without clear beliefs about God who wants to go to something like church frequently anyway.”

What’s interesting is that there have been attempts to create communities with churchy culture, singing, potlucks, and service opportunities, just without the faith component, but they have not taken off. According to historian Alan Kreider, the private social clubs of the Roman empire had similar functions; ostensibly organized around this or that deity, they were essentially a combination of supper club, mutual aid society, and a form of burial insurance.

Comparing today’s USA with the Roman empire of Paul’s day, we have a similar mix of anger and polarization on the one hand, the kind that drove Paul and his friends from more than one Mediterranean town, and, on the other hand, an overall tolerance that welcomes all sorts of faiths and, at the same time, trivializes them. Nowadays there’s some evidence that the more militant versions of Christianity have driven young people into the ranks of the “nones,” … but what we share with most of the Roman empire in its first two centuries is that there is no one religion that demands total loyalty. The tacit American assumption that being Christian meant being part of the establishment has weakened almost to the vanishing point. If being publicly identified as church people once carried a social advantage, apparently it doesn’t do so any longer.

What openings does this provide us Friends? We have very little investment in promoting ourselves as defenders of Christian respectability, or promoters of the religion industry in general. Our whole approach to evangelism is similar to what Paul said to the Athenians, “… God is not far from any one of us. For in God we live and move and have our being.” And our invitation is to look inward and see that witness that God has put into each of God’s beloved, and to join us in learning how to live by that witness, and its ethical consequences. This invitation can be as fresh for someone who’s spent a lifetime in the church, as it might be for someone who has never had any church experience at all.

For more of what we can learn from the early church, I’ve been reading a wonderful book by that historian I mentioned earlier, Alan Kreider.

The book is called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. I really recommend it. He helps us understand how this tiny little community of disciples, often despised, belittled, sometimes violently repressed, and utterly without political advantages in the Roman colonies around the Mediterranean and beyond, grew at the astounding rate that it did, and did so organically, without any evangelistic campaigns or requirements that converts try to convert others. By the time the Emperor Constantine claimed to become Christian early in the fourth century, the numbers had reached five or six million.

Alan Kreider’s explanations are fascinating, and seem to me to apply directly to our own situation, where our potential “great people to be gathered,” to draw on George Fox’s vision for Friends, are often angry, cynical, or allergic to actual theology. To summarize Kreider, he says that four factors were behind this improbable rise:

First, the virtue of patience. He writes, “The Christians believed that God is patient and that Jesus visibly embodied patience. And they concluded that they, trusting in God, should be patient—not controlling events, not anxious or in a hurry, and never using force to achieve their ends.” Kreider goes on to point out that this very virtue of patience even strengthened those Christians who met their ends in the gladiators’ arenas.

Second, the style of life and discipleship that such patience shapes. He writes, “The sources rarely indicate that the early Christians grew in number because they won arguments; instead they grew because their habitual behavior (rooted in patience) was distinctive and intriguing. … When challenged about their ideas, Christians pointed to their actions.”

Third, catechesis and worship. (“Catechesis” refers to preparation for baptism.) Kreider writes, “The Christians were vastly more serious about catechesis than were the members of other religions of their time—and for good reason. They believed that impatient habits (unlike those of Jesus Christ) were deeply ingrained in people who were raised in Greco-Roman societies. From experience they knew that if people were to develop patient reflexes, they need time, the friendship of mentors, and the opportunity to grow in patient ways of living that were normal for Christians. After being shaped by catechesis, people who become Christians were baptized and then were sustained by the worship of Christian communities.” Kreider points out that full participation in worship was only possible after the end of this shaping process.

Fourth, what Kreider calls “ferment.” It’s his metaphor for the dynamism of this patient but cumulatively impressive growth of the church. Kreider writes, “It operated reticently, by what theologian Origen called God’s ‘invisible power.’ It was not susceptible to human control, and its pace could not be sped up. But in the ferment there was a bubbling energy—a bubbling-up inner life—that had immense potential.”

Taken all together, we might conclude that all we have to do in our Quaker churches is keep our fires lit and assume that a passive approach will ensure the future of our witness to our suffering and angry world. I’d want to add a condition: do we see this ferment, this bubbling? Does our correct reluctance to resort to hype and theatrics in growing the church mean that we forget how to welcome and nurture those drawn by our patient witness? Specifically, when we’re challenged by the “nones” in our community to explain why we hunger for more than social togetherness, how do we gently and humbly testify to our assurance that “Christ has come to teach his people himself”?

Here are a few queries to consider in the silence. Use them if they’re helpful, but put the Holy Spirit first.

Do you find the concept of patience helpful? If it isn’t a virtue that you’d associate with yourself, do you appreciate the company of patient people?

How has the church (at any scale) helped shape your faith and your habits? Is there more that the church could do? Is there more you could do to help others in the church?

What more might Quakers do in this city, to provide more access to the church (this meeting or to the church at any scale) for people with spiritual and physical hunger? If answers do not appear immediately, might this be a question for patient consideration and waiting?

I hope to hear from you in these next weeks, and continue this conversation the next time I am with you.

This message was given to Spokane Friends Meeting by Johan Maurer during Sunday worship on August 27, 2023