Winnipeg Free Press October 19, 2006 Harold Jantz I always find it surprising when non-Christians object to Christian efforts to evangelize for their faith. The impulse to persuade others to embrace our understanding of reality lies deep within all of us. This weekend, Winnipeg will be home to what has been dubbed the Central Canada Festival with Franklin Graham. He is the son of the world-famous evangelist Billy Graham and increasingly a well-known evangelist in his own right. The festival begins Friday evening at the MTS Centre and will feature talented entertainers like Paul Brandt, Rebecca St. James and Michael W. Smith alongside Graham, who will invite visitors to make "peace with God" through faith in Jesus Christ. The people putting on this event would likely describe themselves as evangelicals and there are many of them around. Of Winnipeg's nearly 400 churches, probably a third or more would place themselves explicitly in the evangelical category. A good many of them are lively centres of worship with large numbers of families and young people attending. Of course, Winnipeg also has many Christians who might not identify themselves with the evangelical church community and yet share many of the same convictions. Most would agree that it is the Christian's responsibility to seek to live the faith in such a way that others, too, might find it easier to place their faith in Jesus Christ. Evangelicals here are involved in many centres of service to the community -- in the inner city, among the old, within aboriginal communities, helping those with HIV/AIDS, working with troubled youth -- the list is long.
Evangelicals are your neighbours and mine in every area of the life of our communities. They are in government, in education, in business and industry, in medicine, in every field of endeavour. They don't stand out by their dress or appearance, but they often stand out by their ethics and performance. Who are the evangelicals? Historians have used various definitions, but in the end most arrive at several key conclusions. In the first place, they form a stream of Christianity that sees itself as reflecting historic orthodox Christian faith -- they should not be seen as some recent aberration within Christianity. But they place particular emphasis on conversion to Christ, trust in the Bible as the authoritative source for faith and life, a sense of urgency about witnessing to their faith and a belief that it is in the death and resurrection of Christ that human salvation will ultimately be found. For those who are Christians, none of this sounds strange. The problem is that significant streams of Christianity, particularly on this continent and Western Europe, have abandoned such understandings -- substantial parts of the United Church of Canada, for example, in our country -- even though some assume that these streams represent what the church is really about. The reality is, in fact, quite different. If one goes by church attendance, they no longer form the mainstream -- Catholics and evangelicals do. These have kept the core of what the church has always confessed as its faith and continue to grow new churches. That is true here and it is even more true in Asia and Africa and parts of the southern half of our globe. For example, one of the largest missionary-sending countries today is South Korea. Cities like Manila, Kinshasa, Sao Paulo or Addis Ababa are the great Christian cities of the world today. In his masterful account of "the coming global Christianity," Catholic writer Philip Jenkins says it is these, and not "Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London and New York" that should be seen as "the centres of the church's universality." Would you have guessed that Kinshasa in Congo has virtually as many Mennonite churches as does Winnipeg? From 1960 on, the majority of missionaries sent into cross-cultural settings around the world have originated with evangelical church bodies in North America and elsewhere. Some want to think of evangelicals as somehow threatening in a political sense. But they are off the mark. The New Testament scriptures that guide Christians provide the strongest argument possible for a clear separation in the roles of church and state. Christians may be encouraged to bring their values into their roles in government, but the church forms a community within society that can live very comfortably alongside others of other persuasions. It works by persuasion rather than coercion as government ultimately must. If it is evangelicalism rooted in the gospel, it will say that its law is the law of love, Christ's love. It asks only that it be free to witness to its faith, just as others are free to witness to theirs. The highly regarded American church historian Mark Noll wrote a book entitled American Evangelical Christianity in which he portrayed the movement as "culturally adaptive biblical experientialism." That's a mouthful, but most apt. Evangelicals more than any other branch of Christianity have had the ability to embrace elements of the culture that has enabled them to communicate the meaning of Christ to people -- especially young people -- within the culture. Of course, it is also their Achilles heel, as they keep on discovering. Nonetheless, it helps explain why evangelicals have been so ready to embrace worship styles, music and language that other church streams find more difficult. That will be quite apparent in the Franklin Graham festival this weekend. The music and events will seem like many a concert put on by secular entertainers. But within these will be a very serious message: for people who don't know how to get their lives in order, or for those who sense a vacuum at their core, God is waiting to come in through Jesus Christ. If the history of these events is an indicator, hundreds if not thousands of Manitobans will open themselves to that message and begin a journey of life-change in the process.