We recently heard a sermon preached in an evangelical church dismissing St. Francis of Assisi’s oft-quoted adage “Preach the Gospel always; when necessary use words.” This called to mind one of the lines of thinking upon which we’ve based our work at Givers by Design.
Our speaker made the point that words are indeed needed. Of course! At some point, lacking a direct vision from God (such as Paul’s Damascus Road experience) people must hear the Gospel message if they are to have the opportunity to say yes. As Romans 10:17 puts it, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.”
Again -- Yes, of course. Yet we fear that Assisi’s point was missed. First, the adage implicitly argues that we are on-duty as ambassadors for Christ at all times, not just when sharing the message of reconciliation. And, second, he was not saying that words are of no value in our ambassadorship -- but that love, tangibly expressed, is a powerful witness, a witness that our world understands and is looking for. Clearly demonstrated love, in tandem with God’s message of reconciliation, paves the way for people to say “yes” to Christ. The Great Commission and the Great Commandment are two sides of the same coin, each needing the other in order to achieve the fullness God designed them for.
So the message of reconciliation is more easily understood and accepted in the presence of tangibly demonstrated love. The Evangelical Church in America is big on sharing the Word in the poorer parts of our world, but less so on the tangible loving that needs to go with it. Richard Stearns, past president of World Vision, noted in his landmark book “The Hole in Our Gospel” that collectively, our nation’s Evangelical churches spend plenty on real estate and staff, but less than 1% of their budgets on helping those who suffer in Extreme Poverty. This raises a question: Are our efforts to share the Word among the world’s poor diminished because we fail (<1%!) to attend to their desperate need?
What about our witness here, at home? When we separate the Gospel from the love that is its essence, we are left with a cold, sterile kind of personal piety characterized by a list of don’ts. We Christians seem to be known more for what we are against (fill in the blank) than for what we do (love). Not a very effective witness, and one that misses the point.
The Gospel is about God’s love for us, tangibly expressed in Christ, reconciling us to Himself. “For God so loved the world…” -- Love is the reason for Christ’s mission to earth, and a large part of our own transformation in response to that mission. And as ambassadors for Christ, our love (or lack of it) powerfully colors the message of reconciliation God has charged us with bearing. This is the real point of Assisi’s adage.