Ethics is ‘glue’ that runs through Christian disciplines

DALLAS—Ethics—how people apply what they believe to daily life—is the "glue" that moves through Christian disciplines, and should strengthen an individual's commitment to evangelism, according to a presenter at Texas Baptists' Christian Life Conference.

Before he was director of theological education for Texas Baptists, Bill Tillman was the T.B. Maston chair of Christian ethics at Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon Semin-ary. Reflecting on that teaching experience, he shared that before students can share the good news of Christ, they must first know what it is and how it has impacted their lives.

Bill Tillman

"What drives evangelism essentially is God's redemptive purposes toward human beings, and the expectations of God that redeemed human beings communicate these purposes to other human beings," Tillman said. "And what these redeemed humans communicate will have a degree of abstract facets but also personal, specific facets."

Too often, students—and other Christians—skip past examining their own beliefs and understanding of God to focus on the methodology of evangelism, Tillman said. For them, sharing the gospel focuses on a mechanism through which people become Christians, a technique to bring satisfactory results rather than a natural outpouring of one's belief and ethical systems.

"The students carried a real sense of obligation about evangelism—evangelism, basically defined as communicating good news was a part of the 'this is what a Christian ought to do,'" Tillman said. "In their church cultures, however, not enough help had come for them to find a way to do evangelism which flowed out of them in the most natural ways peculiar to them."

The result of an environment that focuses on the how rather than the why of evangelism is a continual sense of guilt, Tillman noted. Christians know they should share the gospel but struggle to express what the gospel is or what it means in their lives. They feel guilty for not sharing more, and church leaders who blame congregations for not reaching evangelism goals only make the issue worse.

Because the focus for many people has become the methodology of evangelism, when they do share, non-Christians become scorecards to keep track of the faithful's success and failure ratios, Tillman added. The process of listening, building relationships with others and recognizing their God-given dignity is lost.

"The effect was a depersonalization and dehumanizing one—abstract souls were sought, but lives were too often left unaffected," Tillman said.

An impersonal approach to evangelism runs contrary to the approach Tillman sees Jesus take in the Gospels. He met people throughout the course of his day and sought to live out his deeply held beliefs as he would with any other person. What that looked like varied from person to person.

"Jesus did provide an honest appraisal to those he met of who they were, their level of human integrity, if you please," Tillman said. "He met them in the context of life. He used the momentum, the passion of one's life toward developing further, more completely the expression of the image of God in them, yet the power to become more truly human as they were intended to be."

In other words, people who strive to live out the Great Commission will do it wherever they go, whatever station of life they find themselves in, Tillman argued. They understand what the gospel is and how it has transformed their day-to-day lives. They'll naturally find themselves sharing that good news with the people around them.

"It is a rough paraphrase, but still true to Jesus' intents when we read the Great Commission statement as 'be my witnesses in all your worlds,'" Tillman said. "With that understanding though, we are assimilating the idea that we be all we can be as a Christian in whatever location we find ourselves but also whatever role we find ourselves in—parent, child, friend, neighbor, in our workplaces—and all kinds of layers through those categories and other you have had come to your mind."