Reaching the Spiritually illiterate

Jesus sought to meet the minds of the common people.

Walter Scragg is president of the Northern Europe-West Africa Division.

FORTRESS ADVENTISM seems to be withstanding the assaults from the secular city rather well. Our schools are protecting larger numbers of youth than ever before. Our churches bulge toward second services. Our colleges and seminaries fashion articulate, erudite spokesmen for fundamental, conservative theology standards. Our expeditions into the territory of the enemy liberate more than ever before.

Yet all is not well within the fortifications. Desertions sometimes threaten to overtake new recruits. The exhortations of our generals leave large segments of the ranks unmoved. Our captains ponder the breakdown in discipline between Sabbath parades. There is the suspicion that some shuck their uniforms on work days and go AWOL. Often the media drumbeat of the alien culture seduces the soldiers of the cross to inattention and insubordination.

The pastor, frayed and frazzled captain of the local regiment, wavers be tween retreat into the more secure areas of the fortress, where many of his members may not follow, and an advance into new territory where he may find himself cut off from lines of communication and the supply trains. Often this dichotomy strikes at the very heart of the church's mission.

I was reared within the fortress, product of a second-generation Adventist ministerial home, who saw that the stout walls of church school and college surrounded me. Even the language clanged the gates shut every time they threatened to open. Non-Adventists we dubbed "outsiders." They were appropriate victims for an evangelistic foray of a Sabbath afternoon, but not to be mingled with, or sought out on a social or intellectual basis.

In MV Society we reported on "contacts" with "outsiders" and pledged our selves to keep the "Morning Watch" lest a sudden dawn assault find us unprotected.

With our campaign maps coded ac cording to Bible Readings for the Home Circle, and heads charged with texts while our pockets bulged with tracts, what could we do but rejoice in the "outsider" who "just looked like an Adventist"?

And so evangelism shaped its strategy around the idea of finding "the honest in heart" who might easily be recruited to swell the numbers inside the fortress. Even today our better programs shape themselves around this strategy. Success burgeons from Biblemarking plans, Gift Bible Evangelism, Bible correspondence courses, Bible crusades.

We probably won't give up the use of this strategy, for large numbers of people are still spiritually literate, even if not as Biblically literate as they once might have been. But in the secular city, stronghold of secular man, different strategies and tactics seem far more appropriate. To confine ourselves to the role of switching one set of doctrines for another as we "complete the Reformation" may suffice in some cases, but takes on the sound of an alien code for many dwellers in the secular, materialistic apartment towers and housing developments.

Six-Day Secularists?

Even within our own ranks, many Seventh-day Adventists switch roles to six-day secularists come Saturday night. The interface of our lives and the lives of our members is with the secular. We mingle with secular man, we partake of many of his goals, his ambitions, his successes.

It might well be easier to tut-tut this all away as being another sign of the end time, gather the armaments of fundamentalism around us, and fire volleys of ire and indignation at a world gone crazy. In doing so we may rally to the flag the loyal, the devoted, and the convicted, but having done that we may well have left the field to satanic recruiters.

What we need to know about the for tress of Adventist belief and practice is whether it is stout enough to arm us as we venture with our people into the secular world they inhabit, and, just as important, whether the banners we wave will attract the belief and loyalty of new recruits.

The elements of a pastoral and evangelistic strategy toward the secular city exist. More and more plans and ideas are developing among thoughtful pas tors and their laity for reaching secular man.

Fortunately the church has had to face a pagan world since its overseas work began in 1874, and the basics necessary for confronting a secular world are similar.

Bible Strategy

It should come as no surprise that the Bible offers many concepts that will fortify the church in its assault on the bastions of worldly wisdom and indifference. Paul and the apostles had to succeed in a world much like ours, with its Greek philosophy and Roman materialism.

Paul therefore kept an adaptable strategy as he moved among the sophisticates of the Greco-Roman civilization. "I have, in short, been all things to all sorts of men that by every possible means I might win some to God. I do all this for the sake of the gospel; I want to play my part properly" (1 Cor. 9:22, 23, Phillips).*

On Mars Hill, Paul proved that he could adapt himself to the intellectuals of his day and conduct a successful evangelistic campaign. Before Festus and Felix Agrippa he showed how to use common ground in order to reach out to these somewhat cynical government officers. In his reasoning about wisdom and the cross he was using concepts that were familiar to his Greek audience and hardly Judaic in their origin.

In His search for common ground Jesus fell afoul of the spiritual leaders of the Jews. "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look at him! a glutton and a drinker, a friend of . . . sinners!' And yet God's wisdom is proved right by its results" (Matt. 11:19, N.E.B.) + At least to a certain extent, in evangelism, Jesus said that the end justifies the means. His mingling with the lower classes and the irreligious alienated the Pharisees. They regarded Him as contaminated, as lowering the standards of righteousness by His actions; but He retorted that the results proved His methods right.

"We may reflect with profit upon His manner of teaching. He sought to meet the minds of the common people. His style was plain, simple, comprehensive. He took His illustrations from the scenes with which His hearers were most familiar." —Evangelism, p. 565.

Meeting Felt Needs

Then blessings on the pastor-evangelist who knows how his people live the six days they are away from church; who reads their newspapers and news magazines; who watches television and listens to radio (within the grounds of Christian propriety and standards, of course); who knows the streets they walk; who senses the social pressures they endure. And if he also knows this about his community and his city, he is all the better equipped to meet the challenge of the secular and the indifferent.

Jesus Christ sought to answer the felt needs of the people. He wasn't passing out baby clothes to senior citizens, or seeking to fill the bellies of the famished with sermons on Revelation 10 and Daniel 11.

"This work God would have us do. Christ's example must be followed by those who claim to be His children. Relieve the physical necessities of your fellow men, and their gratitude will break down the barriers and enable you to reach their hearts. Consider this matter earnestly." —Testimonies to Ministers, p. 424.

In seeking to answer human need, one great danger exists: we may be come satisfied with the means and for get the end. "Everywhere men are unsatisfied. They long for something to supply the need of the soul. Only One can meet that want. The need of the world, 'The Desire of all nations,' is Christ"—The Desire of Ages, p. 187.

Many programs have been developed in recent years to meet human need. The Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking, the Four Dimensional Key to the Cause of Alcoholism, "coffee shop" ministries, inner-city programs reinforce the pastor as he sallies into the heart of the secular city. The development of witnessing techniques that seek to confront the Biblical illiterate with the person and claims of Christ helps prevent the use of programs for the sake of the program. And we need more concepts that take the person who is basically pagan in thought and deed and bring him to Christ.

Recently John Robertson, of the Voice of Prophecy, has developed radio spots that nudge secular man toward the consideration of Jesus Christ as an alternate to the other answers to the world's problems. The "Aware" series has enjoyed unusual success. Now the Voice of Prophecy is shaping similar designs for youth and other audiences.

"All These Puzzles" offers no Bible studies, doesn't presume a knowledge of the Bible, or even of Jesus Christ. It offers Jesus Christ as an answer that might be considered and might prove more effective than the scientific, sociological, and technical answers that seem to have failed. And even then Christ usually appears only in the closing paragraphs of the chapters.

Still Need the Nets

The pond of Biblical knowledge still holds many fish, and we still need the strong nets of Bible study and doctrinal analysis to convict and modify belief. But more and more fish swim in other waters. Then we must use other methods, other bait. This is why the emphasis found in Century 21 and other health-related programs designed for the next quinquennium has such significance.

The quantity of these new programs, the quality of their focus must increase if we are to continue to reap in the 1980's as we have in the 1970's. "Remember: sparse sowing, sparse reaping; sow bountifully, and you will reap bountifully" (2 Cor. 9:6, N.E.B.). Sowing the field of secularism does not so much demand new kinds of seed as it demands new methods of fertilizing, new plans for watering and irrigating. If we sow only in the methods of Bible course study, or doctrinal tracts, we may pronounce the field stony and footworn and unproductive.

We know that the secular citizen needs Jesus Christ. But does he know that? And if he suspects it, can he recognize our concern to genuinely help him in our approaches to him?

Back to Fortress Adventism for a few moments. Need we fear that new approaches and methods will demolish the walls and let the armies of apostasy and compromise overrun the citadel? Fears like this are expressed whenever some one tries a new approach. The Voice of Prophecy still smarts from wounds received in its foray into the world of young people with "The Way Out." And the wounds didn't come from the conflict outside. The fiercest darts were hurled from within the fort. Yet this program has put more than a million names of non-Adventist youth on the mailing lists of the Voice of Prophecy. In a sense AWARE is just as revolutionary, though not so controversial because it is couched in conservative English.

What many of these new techniques are saying is that it is right to meet man where he is with his minimal knowledge of the Bible; that it is not just our job to complete the reformation in the minds of the doctrinally literate; that we have a responsibility to all men, whatever their condition, their knowledge; that we really have eliminated all traces of the shut door of our beginnings; that some things ought to be done regardless of the soul count at the end.

In the secular city the pastor and his recruits must take a "disinterested" stance toward human need. Not uninterested, but disinterested. So many phonies batten on human need that we dare not raise the suspicion of new ones. Our disaster vans roll because of people in need, not because someone will call the lay activities director to account for expenditures in souls won. The world seeks concern, not manipulation. And in this involved but disinterested stance, the spiritual programs of the church may succeed even better.

Jesus told His disciples, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." To lift up Jesus in the heart of the secular city means something far different than it did fifty or even twenty years ago. It's the same Jesus, but the question we must answer is, How can man best know and understand the Jesus we are lifting up before them?

* From The New Testament in Modern English, © J. B. Phillips 1972. Used by permission of The Macmillan Company. 

From The New English Bible. The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1970. Reprinted by permission.


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Walter Scragg is president of the Northern Europe-West Africa Division.

April 1976

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