Insiders looking in

Not only are disciples called to share Good News with God's missing children who may be thought of as being outside the Christian movement, but we have a commitment as well to evangelize within the community of faith. This level of evangelism has to do, first of all, with the reality that each of us has areas of our lives not yet surrendered to the liberating Lordship of Christ, not yet seeing clearly the world of need as God sees it, not yet victorious over the sin and doubt that accompany us on the spiritual journey of discipleship. Saved by grace, we still are sinners. And we need the heart searching, heart cleansing, heart healing hope of the gospel. Further, there is a tendency in us to forget or at least take for granted the transformation that God's amazing has indeed accomplished in us. When we forget that, we are not the witnesses God calls us to be. In the words of Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann, “evangelism is a task not simply of making outsiders into insiders, but of summoning insiders from amnesia to memory.” [Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism] We are called to remember who we are, by the grace of God.

Most of us, too, are associated with a fellowship, a family of faith, a church community that has within it those who have not yet made an initial profession of faith in Christ. These, too -- be they youngsters, oldsters or those in between -- need the clearest expression of the gospel. There is a sense in which many of us learn Christianity by doing, we become disciples by living among disciples. One test of the faithfulness of a particular community of faith is its capacity to mentor those inside the fellowship to become -- and mature as -- disciples.

I don't like the "insider/outsider" dichotomy, really. There's a bit of both in most of us. But this post is intended simply to remind myself and others of the need to be evangelized, and to evangelize within the community of faith as well as beyond it.