You're Included

JMF: Thanks for joining us on another edition of You’re Included – the unique interview series devoted to practical implications of a Christ-centered Trinitarian theology in today’s complex world. Our guest today is Gerrit Dawson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and author of Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation; An Introduction to Torrance’s Theology; and Discovering Jesus, Awakening to God. Thanks for being with us again.

GSD: It’s wonderful to be here, Mike.

JMF: What are the biggest challenges facing Western Christianity today?

GSD: I think the challenges are huge, because the church in the West has been on the decline for some time. Theologically speaking, one of the challenges that we face is a kind of prevailing pluralism – that [although] most people in America still believe in God, they figure that there are many paths to get to that one God. And one of the biggest negatives about Christianity [in their view] is our insistence that salvation is in Christ alone, and that Jesus uniquely shows us who God is. People almost instinctively see that as mean-spirited, exclusive, harsh and forbidding.

JMF: And yet, how do we balance that with the fact of the wideness of the grace of God and his desire to include and bring to himself every human being?

GSD: That’s exactly the challenge – because we have the most all-inclusive love story of any religion that’s ever been on the face of the earth – the news of this wonderful world-reaching embrace of our God coming to us in Jesus Christ, and yet we are saying that because God has shown himself to be this way – this is who he is – so we have anexclusive revelation that has an all-inclusive embrace. And as we face those challenges, we’ve got to be sure that we communicate the love, even as we are insisting on the truth.

JMF: Now, God loves everyone – he sent Christ because he loves the world, and Christ says, if I’m lifted up, I’ll draw all men to myself, and God does not let anybody slip through the cracks, and he’s fully interested in every human being – and yet we have a role to play. How do we balance the fact of our call to evangelism, to call people to faith in Christ, and the fact that God’s better at that than we are and isn’t going to abandon someone because we don’t get to them in our evangelistic efforts… How do we balance that?

GSD: That’s a wonderful question, and I think that it has far-reaching implications for the mission of the church as a whole – because the ministry is not my ministry or your ministry, it’s Christ’s ministry. And the world is going not where I make it to go, but where the Lord Jesus makes it to go. So on the one hand, we relax, in that we realize that God is working his purposes out – that even if I can’t figure out a perfect answer to the question of “what about the person in the farthest reaches of the earth who’s never heard of Jesus – does he, or does he not make a profession of faith?” – the impossible theological questions like that, we trust that God has a plan for it. God who loved us enough to join us to himself forever to die for us, as you said, is not going to let anyone slip through the cracks accidentally. No one’s going to be left out by some kind of divine amnesia. At the same time, we know that Christ sent the church into the world. He said, “all authority has been given to me, now therefore go and make disciples of the world.” We know that not everyone accepts this message, tragically. The mystery of iniquity is that, faced with the most wonderful news in the universe, we sometimes turn from it.

I guess that because of Christ’s sovereignty and the reach of his grace, the burden is not on me to try to convince you to believe. My task is to bear witness to say, “This is who I’ve seen Jesus to be, and this is what he has done in me. This is who Christ is according to the Scriptures; this is who he’s been in our lives. Now I hope the Holy Spirit is creating faith in you. I hope that you want to embrace that.” And then I leave it, with all prayer and sincerity, in the hands of the Holy Spirit to create that faith in the listener – because that’s his work.

JMF: Now, sometimes our presentation of the gospel, of who Christ is and what he’s done for us, is poor. Sometimes it’s very good, other times it’s pretty poor. Some of our presentations are downright nasty and leave a bad impression. Is it fair for us to think that a person who doesn’t respond to the gospel, even though they’ve heard it, and perhaps sometimes very badly and they’re put off by it because of the behavior, the approach of us evangelicals sometimes… (For example, surveys have shown that people would rather live next door to a used car salesman, or a drug dealer, let’s say, than an evangelical Christian, simply because they’ll get less pain from the others. That doesn’t speak well of the way evangelicals are perceived, in terms of judgmentalism, pushiness, and so on. That really isn’t a correct, right picture of Christ, it really isn’t a proper presentation of the gospel.) But are we saying that God has a way, because his goal is to draw everyone to himself, of overcoming our short-comings and weaknesses in evangelistic presentation?

GSD: I think there’s a lot in that, and it ties back to this difficulty that we have with an all-inclusive love of Christ who’s revealed himself exclusively in Christ Jesus. And so much of that, I think, depends on our realizing that our job is not salesmanship to religious consumers. Our job is to love in Christ’s name, and to bear witness to what he has done. That really changes the whole dynamic. There were times in my early life as a Christian when I felt like, it was my burden to share a tract with every person that I met, and then if I didn’t do that, they might be going to hell and it would be my fault. That, I think, was a very young faith that didn’t have much trust in the sovereignty of God.

Now maybe the sharing of those tracts played some role in someone’s salvation. Maybe it became a roadblock for some that the Lord had to overcome in different ways. The point is, I don’t have to try to convince perfectly content pagans that they should buy my religious product. The reality is, is that hurting and broken people – all of whom are facing mortality and frailty, broken relationships, a sense of guilt, a sense of not being able to measure up even by their own standards – to them I’m sent with marvelous healing news that calls people out of darkness and into light. It’s so much different in trying to sell a religious product.

JMF: Henri Nouwen wrote a fascinating book called The Wounded Healer in which he helps pastors see past the need to feel that they’re perfect, in presenting some kind of perfection to the people they’re trying to help, but identifying with them on a level of realizing that they are as broken as the people they’re trying to help – isn’t that true of the church as well, in terms of evangelism?

GSD: It certainly is… a pastor who used to pray to the one who took his thorns and wore them as a crown – the idea that Jesus who ascended gloriously, as we’ve been talking about, yet, as the hymn says, “has rich wounds, yet visible above.” But Christ understood our humanity and he was pierced for our iniquities and he is constant unto our suffering. He is a ready friend to us as we recognize that we’re not perfect.