It sounds as if it should be the first line of a nonsense poem:
‘The danger of isms and and zations and ises –
all human deceptions in different disguises!’
My new role gives me responsibility for encouraging others to put evangelism at the heart of all they do, and while the spirit of that idea is something I completely endorse, I don’t like the language.
Having lived in the Soviet Union under communism, I came to realise that ‘isms’ are belief systems that cage people in a world which is divorced from reality. Under communism people said they believed things that were quite clearly impossible and untrue. You had to agree that your government were leading you into a bright future even while you were standing in a grocer’s shop that had nothing on the counter except one scrawny yellow chicken that would cost you a fortune, and you had to wrap your deceased relatives up in crepe paper and stand them in the foyer
of your block of flats till they could be transported to the cemetery because there was no functioning undertaker service.
‘Isms’ box us in. They suggest there’s a complete way of understanding one’s world which will give us order and certainty and save us having to think for ourselves and be open to realities that challenge our beliefs. Gradually we allow them to describe a world that doesn’t exist, and a gulf opens up between us and the world that does.
So I think we need to think of a better term than ‘evangelism’. I don’t think Jesus was an ‘ism’ – maker. He was constantly questioning the unexamined teaching and assumptions made by religious teachers around him. He smashed the walls of the glass cage of the rule-bound Judaism of his day. If ‘evangelism’ describes a process based on a mindset that wants to make others believe what I believe, it isn’t worthy of Jesus or the gospel.
What we’re called to do is be ambassadors for God in Jesus Christ. This may lead others to find a doorway into the kingdom of God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, where they will encounter the wonderful freedom of the children of God and be led by the Spirit into an ‘ism-free’ dynamic relationship of continual discovery.
