Mission and Missions: Evangelism in the 21st Century by Julius Kim

The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Now for most of us in this room, when I say this phrase, you understand what I am talking about. But not everybody does. This phrase reminds us of a story of a computer programmer who created an application that would translate English into a foreign language and vice versa. I’m sure you’ve seen these programs before. Well, he decided to create a translation program for Russian. The day arrived when he felt the program was ready. To test the program, he typed in this phrase, “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And out came this phrase in the Russian cyrillic alphabet. Since he didn’t know the Russian language, he asked the computer to translate the Russian phrase back into English. And out came this phrase: The whiskey is stronger than the beef.

Now in one way it makes sense, doesn’t it? When I first said the phrase, most, if not all of you instinctively placed the main words here, spirit and flesh, within the context of the Christian life. In fact, most of you know this phrase because it is what Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 26:41 when they were having trouble staying awake and praying: “Keep watching and praying, that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” So, we had no problem understanding the phrase because we immediately placed that phrase within the right context. The computer, however, did not have this context, or frame of reference, to understand the true meaning behind those words.

One thing we’ve learned in missions over the last hundred years or so is that when someone takes the gospel to a new culture, he needs to find appropriate ways to communicate that message so that it is clear and cogent; in short, comprehensible and understandable to the people in that context. So much time is spent learning the language and culture of the new context so that the missionary’s words are clear and appropriate. And herein is our challenge.

Dr. Horton earlier in our conference used a striking analogy to describe the task of those witnessing to the gospel. He said, “We are ambassadors, sent on a plane, into hostile territories, to declare a peace treaty of the Great King.”

More and more, our hearers, not just overseas in foreign countries, but all around us, are hostile. That is, they have developed worldviews, views of how they understand and relate to their world that are no longer influenced by a Judeo-Christian worldview. In light of the massive shifts that have occurred in the last century—like religious pluralism, the death of God, and the loss of a sacred canopy—we don’t have to go very far to discover that many of our neighbors around us are not mere blank slates waiting to have the good news of Jesus written into their hearts and minds. Rather, they have a variety of conflicting worldviews that need to be challenged.

Furthermore, another challenge of doing missions in the twenty-first century is that older methods of sharing the gospel—like Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” that start with man’s need and Christ—don’t make sense in light of the non-Christian worldview. Larger questions regarding man’s origin and man’s purpose presuppose a particular cosmology, or a view of time, space, and history. Simply put, many twenty-first-century humans whose core view of life is utterly existential and subjective—in short, post-modern and post-churched—need an alternative worldview where the cross of Christ makes sense.

Walter Truett Anderson humorously gives us an insight into this in his book Reality Isn't What It Used to Be. He reflects on our predicament by pre¬senting an analogy from baseball. A premodern baseball umpire would have said something like this: “There's balls, and there’s strikes and I call ’em as they are.” The modernist would have said, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call ’em as I see ’em.” And the postmodernist umpire would say, “They ain’t nothing until I call ’em.”

So, we cannot assume people who are unchurched as well as radically affected by postmodern ways of thinking have the categories they need to understand the gospel. Evangelism needs to start farther back. People won’t be able to make heads or tails about the solution Jesus provides for their sin if they have no understanding of the creator God who gives meaning to all of life and reality. That is why I believe, along with ministries like the Two Ways to Live evangelism program, that our witness in the twenty-first century must be “worldview” evangelism.¹ We need to find bridges to the core values, thought patterns, life principles—in short, worldviews—held by people today.

Now, why all this talk about contextualization and worldview? I’ve been assigned the task to give you my thoughts on the future of evangelism and missions in the twenty-first century, thus the title of my lecture, “Mission and Missions: Evangelism in the 21st Century.” As I’ve been thinking, reading, and teaching on this very subject, I’ve come to some conclusions about Mission and Missions, that is, the Mission of God to save a people for himself, and our role as individuals and the Church in carrying that task in our Missions.

Much, as you can imagine, can be said on this topic. What I’d like to do is make this more practical for you as individuals. Because at the end of the day, as you catch the vision of what God is doing in the world through the gospel of grace, I want to help you more effectively witness to this gospel of grace in our increasingly post-modern, post-churched culture.