The Church must be willing to go into some “very dark places” to share the Good News of Jesus Christ while being careful not to compromise the Gospel, says evangelist Ben Jack.
Jack has been an evangelist for 26 years, currently working with The Message Trust in the UK, and is a former DJ. He didn’t decide to be a DJ for its own sake, he told the World Evangelical Alliance’s general assembly, but rather intentionally - to be a missionary in the nightclubs and bars of the UK.
Becoming a DJ made it possible to go into these spaces to share the Gospel through words and actions with people who were “looking for an escape from reality on a Friday night after a difficult week, because reality is hard for a lot of people”.
Rather than looking for an escape, his simple but effective message was that they could instead find the best possible reality and embrace it - Jesus Christ.
Those years in the nightclub taught him two important things about evangelism. The first was that Christians who want to go out into these dark places to share the Gospel need to be sure about what they believe so that they can influence the culture - otherwise the culture will influence them.
“If we don't know the Gospel deeply, richly and above everything else, when we go into the world to engage culturally it is culture that will evangelise us, rather than we who will evangelise into the culture,” he said.
“There are many, many well-intentioned people who seek to use the things of culture as a gateway into giving people access to the Gospel, but over time their good intention of desiring to impact and encounter people in the cultural space starts to eat away at the integrity of the Gospel."
He said it was all too easy for Christians to start altering the Gospel in a bid to win others, but reminded WEA delegates that anything less than the Gospel is not what the world needs to hear. Meeting practical needs should not mean that Christians renounce telling people about the Gospel, he went on.
“Before we know it, we do what Paul warned us against in Galatians and we either add something to the Gospel that shouldn’t be there or, more likely, we take something away from the Gospel and we turn it into no Gospel at all - and there is no point to no Gospel at all.
“The world has a billion and one gospels it thinks will save them but there is only one true Gospel - the Gospel of Jesus Christ," he said.
Jack challenged Christians to think about just how much they trust that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is enough. When this conviction is firm, then Christians can think about how they can “use culture to our advantage”.
The second thing he learned from his experience of being a missionary in nightclubs was that while tradition is important, it is “not ultimate”, especially if it stops Christians from entering into unholy places to reach the lost.
“If we get too trapped into our traditional ways of doing things, we will never go into the nightclub spaces because we will think ‘no, no, we mustn’t do that, we can’t do that, our tradition dictates that that is not a place for us to go and be’.”
He continued, “If we’re going to reach the world with the Good News by 2033, we need to do two really important things: we need to make sure that the Gospel is the thing we commit to above all else - that we know it, we live it, we breathe it and give glory to the One whom it is all about.
“And secondly, that we ask careful questions about our traditions because we want to be rooted in our tradition enough that we are not tossed around by the spirit of the age - that we have an anchor, a firm foundation - but that we are not so beholden to traditions that are extra to the tenets of the Gospel itself that we then fail to be faithful to the opportunities that God has for us.
“If we could get over ourselves a little bit, we could go and do some things that we are otherwise not inclined to do.”
The World Evangelical Alliance's 14th general assembly has been taking place throughout the week at SaRang Church in Seoul, South Korea. It is being attended by 850 Christian leaders from 124 nations under the theme of "The Gospel for Everyone by 2033". It concludes on Thursday.
