Go and sin no more

Does the Christian gospel have to be watered down to make it attractive to people in this secular age? Do Christians have to sand off the sharp edges of biblical truth to make truth palatable?

A lot of folks seem to think so. Several Christian publications I glanced through last week, for example, featured the theme of evangelism-but never once mentioned the issue of sin. That's like running a hospital and refusing to acknowledge that infection exists.

If sin is too tough a topic for us to handle when we're telling unbelievers about Jesus, maybe we should get out of the business. If the best we can muster is to talk to people about their needs, their anxieties, their boredom, and their lack of identity, perhaps we should admit that we're not really talking about authentic Christianity.

"You shall call his name Jesus," the angel told Mary, "for he shall save his people from their sin."

If anything is central to the message we Christians have for this world, it's that God saves sinners. But far too often, we evangelicals have gotten wimpy and euphemistic about the task. It's not a subject that attracts crowds, we're told, so if we really want our churches to grow, we'll save the discussion of sin for Sunday evening services (if there is one) or for the faithful few who show up for mid-week Bible study.

Most evangelicals would deny, of course, that they ever change their message just to make it more popular. They argue instead that communication and trust must first be established. So we have vast movements in evangelicalism devoted to cheery chatter, to frivolous fellowship, and to warmups for worship-all of which goes on endlessly while we wait to get to the core issues.

But when you leave sin out of the first part of the discussion, you also make it very difficult ever to get back to the subject. That's why more and more evangelical literature never does get back to the subject. (A notable exception is Cornelius Plantinga's Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, named book-of-the-year by Christianity Today.) This whole tendency to stash biblical doctrine away in the attic is precisely why the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, meeting in April in Cambridge, Mass., called so vigorously for evangelicals to get serious about what they say they believe, and to quit trying to sugarcoat the truth.

So can you be winsome and attractive without trading away your sound theology?

On a very basic level, Evangelism Explosion, the organization founded three decades ago by D. James Kennedy, proves you can. There's nothing shallow about the diagnostic test he suggests when talking to just about anybody: "Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? If you were to die tonight, do you have confidence you would spend eternity with God in heaven? If you were to stand before him and he were to ask you why he should let you into heaven, what would you say?"

Those are not patently offensive questions-but neither do they beat around the bush. They are God-centered, but respectful of the person to whom you're speaking. They're timeless enough and free enough of cultural overtones to have been found effective in every nation on earth. (When Evangelism Explosion recently launched a small work in North Korea, it meant the ministry had gone to all 211 nations of the world.)

One reason the Evangelism Explosion approach has worked so well in so many contexts is that it doesn't try to be trendy or cute. Instead, it gets right down to basics. I know from personal experience, for example, that you can't get five minutes into such a conversation without soon having to talk candidly about sin. But that's the way it ought to be. For how can you talk specifically about God's answer to the human predicament without first being quite specific and realistic about that predicament? The problem with so much modern-day evangelism is its vagueness about both the predicament and the answer.

Jesus set the pattern for addressing sin directly, but with utmost compassion, when he spoke to the woman accused of adultery. He didn't make excuses, shift the blame, or suggest therapy. Instead, he spoke the most freeing words the woman could possibly have heard: "Go," he said-guaranteeing that she would not be stoned to death as she had certainly feared. But this was no easy-believism. For she must certainly have spent the rest of her life pondering the other four words in Jesus's charge: "... and sin no more."

Is modern day evangelicalism really better at all this than Jesus was? Would we have handled this woman by skipping all reference to her biggest problem? Then the ultimate question would be whether the things we went on to say about Jesus were really true either.