From the President: Strategy, Evangelism, and Freedom

By Dr. Chris Seiple on 01 March 2005

A few years ago, some well-intentioned but strategically unwise Christians were operating in a Muslim country that didn't allow religious freedom. Their goal was to convert the entire country by the end of the millennium. In the spring of 1999, when they realized they weren't going to meet their quantifiable objective, they changed their strategy. Soon they were throwing Bibles over residential walls — in some cases literally hitting people on the head with the Word of God. Far from introducing this country to Christ, they tarnished his name while triggering a crackdown and getting themselves thrown in jail.

Unfortunately, most Christians know a tale, or two, about missionaries behaving inappropriately in a foreign context. Stories like this raise three questions, with implications for all Christians — irrespective of their faith tradition or profession — and how they engage the world:

• What is strategy?
• What is evangelism?
• Why is religious freedom important?

The answers to these questions help us distinguish between evangelism and proselytism; they also help us identify why Christians and non-Christians should work for religious freedom.

Strategy

The Christian missions movement often obsesses about which strategies produce converts; but strategy, properly understood, is merely the "process by which ends are related to means, intentions to capabilities, objectives to resources."¹ Good strategy is grounded in a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the world as it is. Successful strategy prioritizes ends and allocates means.

And yet, while Christians should understand strategy as such — it enables them to engage the world shrewdly and without deception, as Christ admonished in Matthew 10:16 — they should never rely on this definition alone. Strategy is merely a tool, something which must always be informed and molded by an awareness of culture and, more importantly, by the Creator of culture and the transformative power of His love.

When Christians worry more about strategies and techniques than love, they become fixated on their own plans, their own goals, their own deadlines. If God is truly in charge, strategy is merely the short-term process of matching ends and means in a way that shows awareness of and respect for the local culture. Long-term success is faithful obedience to God, not the skillful execution of a pre-determined plan.

Evangelism

Evangelism is the process by which the Good News — that Jesus loved us so much that He died for our sins, conquered death and will return again — is shared by followers of Christ. Jesus gives us three practical principles to obey as we share the Good News.

The first principle is love. Jesus gave us two commands, upon which everything hangs: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor, including your enemy, as yourself. Love is an action verb made possible only through our relationship to God and to those around us. What we do, personally and professionally, is secondary to the opportunity it provides us to put that love into practice.

Second, we are called to be both "shrewd" and "innocent" (without guile or deception) as we love God and people. Jesus himself lived this approach, loving God, and those around him, even unto death. He reached those around him by loving them for who they were, and engaged them where they were. He didn't use a cookie-cutter approach based on checklists or deadlines. He just loved them, from the Centurion to the woman at the well, in a way that they could understand, in both word and deed.

Third, in loving those around him, Jesus always respected the freedom with which God had endowed each of them. He wants each of us to come to him freely. Faith without freedom is no faith at all.

Religious Freedom

Religious freedom is the right of every person to discover (or choose not to discover) the truth about God and to live in accordance with the obligations that ensue. Religious freedom — because of the inherent dignity that every person possesses as someone made in the image of God — is immunity from coercion by any human agent. It means the opportunity, protected by governments, to worship, to teach, to preach, to raise one's children, to vote, to labor and to love — all in accord with one's religious beliefs. As such, religious freedom is a "big tent" issue. If you are a son or daughter of Abraham, then your faith respects freedom of conscience given by God. If you are a global humanist, then you believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 18's call for freedom of conscience, belief and religion. And if you are an American, nothing could be more fundamental to the founding of our republic than religious freedom.

As everyone's issue, the cause of religious freedom provides a way for people to work together, toward a world where we don't just tolerate faith traditions other than our own, but respect them. There is room for all of God's children, all over the world, to find common cause in the (re-)discovery of respect for the minority in our midst.

This is the real beginning of civil society; when citizens value religious freedom, their respect allows for the moral and economic contributions of all religions to society. In other words, religious freedom is the cornerstone of a civil society where long-term social stability and political security are the natural byproduct.

The Institute for Global Engagement

The opening vignette of this column, about proselytizers throwing Bibles at Muslims, was one of the reasons the Institute was created. Our founder — Ambassador Robert A. Seiple, a Christian who served as the first-ever U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom — asked himself two questions:

• Can we help educate Christians to be ambassadors of Christ's love who honor His command to be shrewd and innocent, no matter their profession, ethnic group or geographic location in the world?
• Can we understand, engage and transform the structures of persecution worldwide?

In addressing these questions, the Institute achieves results through a patient, long-term approach, waiting upon the Lord as relationships emerge and His work and strategy, already in progress, reveals itself. Our job is to be obedient, and to come alongside that work — no matter what the statistics say about that country's strategic importance or insignificance, no matter if we fully understand His strategy or intent.

In other words, we tackle these two questions through love. We love our fellow Christians by helping to inspire and equip them to understand and engage this world strategically — with shrewdness and without guile — so that they themselves reveal the love of Jesus Christ. We also love them and our non-Christian brothers and sisters by helping to develop environments in which they can seek truth freely and without coercion.

In short, the Institute is an evangelical — but non-proselytizing — organization. It is our great hope that our non-Christian friends worldwide, given the true opportunity for religious freedom, will choose and experience the transformative power of Christ's love. Achieving that end, we confess with gratitude and awe, is His job, not ours. Our task is to love God by loving His people and working to build healthy societies in which they are liberated and empowered to respond to Him. I hope that you will join us in this great cause.

Last updated 15 September 2008