In a paper presented at a recent mission conference, Trevecca President Dan Boone explores how believers can position themselves in a world that often views wisdom and redemption as opposing narratives.
The following thoughts were presented in February 2025 at a Nazarene mission conference called M25 in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme of the conference was evangelism. As it can be difficult to discern the tone of a written piece, please receive these words as a gentle reflection from a lifetime Nazarene on where we have been, where we are and what we might consider for our future. Our witness to Christ in the world is something that should concern us deeply.
I begin with profound gratitude for a church that grew me up in the Nazarene Young People’s Society, invited me to pastor a country congregation when I was 15, educated me at Trevecca Nazarene College and Nazarene Theological Seminary, allowed me to serve three wonderful congregations, trusted me to lead her university, published my writings, and offered me platforms like this to influence our denomination.
I love the church. And I find myself in the closing chapters of my leadership hoping to help our church get into her future, or better yet, get God’s future into our present. As I live and serve among the college generation, it matters to me that they see the beauty of Christ’s bride and be attracted to it.
In this spirit of gratitude and hope, I want to help us think carefully about our witness to Christ in the world. The question I pose is, “Can we be good news people again?”
As I’ve worked on this paper over the past months, three books have been helpful. They have shaped my thinking and will probably leak through.
- “Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church” by Stephen O. Presley (Eerdmans Publishing Company).
Presley revisits the relationship between the early church and the Roman Empire of the first centuries. Specifically, he considers how they lived winsome civic lives, cared for the outcasts, prayed for the emperor without worshipping the emperor, and discipled new converts into a resocialized Christianity. - “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World” by Tom Holland.
This book revisits the relationship between the crucified Christ and empires across 2000 years. He finds that the gospel appealed to the lowest of society because it gave them what culture/empire had taken from them – human dignity, worth, community, and belonging. The church took in those that the empire had tossed out. - “Vanishing Grace: Whatever Happened to the Good News?” by Philip Yancey (Zondervan Press).
I found Yancey’s membership in a book club with other thoughtful friends, of whom he was the only believer, to be a faithful reflection of how Christians are perceived today. Suffice it to say that his friends were thoroughly turned off by the current version of Christianity.
I am indebted to these authors for helping me think. I also want to reflect on three movements that have shaped evangelism in the Church of the Nazarene during my lifetime.
- The Church Growth Movement. I was introduced to the writing of missionary Donald McGavran during my early years as a pastor in North Carolina. Peter Wagner and John Wimber were the primary spokesmen who came to our North Carolina District to train us in church growth. They espoused the homogeneous unit principle, which stated that the fastest and easiest church growth was evangelism of people who were already like us, similarly cultured neighbors. While true, this movement taught us to do evangelism in the most comfortable confines of our narrowed perspectives. It was a significant step away from our early founders who went straight to the wrong side of the tracks where the hardest converts were waiting. This movement also thrived during the years that we flipped our nose-counting priority from Sunday School to worship attendance. We elevated the crowd showing up for evangelism in public services above the crowd showing up for spiritual formation/discipleship in small group gatherings.
- The Seeker Sensitive Movement. Bill Hybels and the people of Willow Creek church struck an entrepreneurial nerve among Nazarene pastors as they attempted to exegete the world we were living in. They offered the gospel to “seekers” in well-imagined services designed to make converts. Many Nazarene pastors attended the Willow Creek Leadership Conference and decided before their car was back in the garage that they would transition their congregation to be a seeker-sensitive church. Only a handful of our churches were able to make this transition without significant division. This opened a period of worship wars where our conversation was centered more on music, drama, lighting, technology, and relevance than on the importance of evangelism. Our people were not ready. In the words of one discerning worshipper, “I come here (to the sanctuary) every week to get away from the world, not to have it dramatized before my very eyes.” While this movement was helpful in reminding us that we need to exegete the world into which the gospel is going, it also made us shallower in giving the world mature followers of Jesus whose way of life was inviting. My primary critique of the seeker-sensitive movement is that it identified the wrong seeker. God is the ultimate seeker of the lost and we are called to follow God into the world in search of the lost sheep, coin, and son.
- The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism. Ron Benefiel is our best in-house teacher on the impact of this current movement. This is not just a Nazarene phenomenon; it is a global reality. In times of rapid change, massive technological invention, and loss of tradition, we move quickly from anxiety to fear to anger. And we justify this reaction as a religious defense of the gospel. The energy of a church that once moved outward in compassion and mercy, now moves inward in fence-building, enemy-making, and position defending. We are good enough Bible-quoters to cut and paste supporting texts and thereby justify our defense of the fundamentals. The product of a frightened, angry fundamentalism is anything but good news in the ears of our world.
With the background of these three books and these three movements, let’s examine how we might position our movement in the world. Presley writes in Cultural Sanctification:
Our engagement with culture is not very effective as we have been soundly dismissed as judgmental, arrogant, opinionated cults who, in our anger, just want more power to make people do what we want. We once had a social structure that granted us some limited power to do this – but it was dissolved. Now we are trying to resurrect a religious right, and our strategy is to debate, shame, frighten, name enemies, and justify attack. The proof of the pudding is that almost none of the people we have targeted are stepping into our baptisteries to assume our identity. They’re not even stepping inside our gathering. They know us by meme, tweet, and post. And our gospel is, to them, the farthest thing from good news.
This same judgment comes through loud and clear from Philip Yancey’s book club experience as well as his examination of Christianity on the streets.
I would offer an important disclaimer here. I live among Christians in churches and find that this characterization does not fit the majority of believers that I know. I see kindness, generosity, and faithfulness in the silent majority who frequent Nazarene congregations. This gives me hope. But I also believe the silent majority does not know what to do next. The noise from a minority of wounded, angry, loud congregants and ex-congregants has created a caricature that the church cannot avoid addressing. We are labeled by their tweets, posts, and pain. We have challenging work ahead in listening to, confessing to, and healing these who, like the lost coin, were already in the house when their lostness occurred. So, what is going on?
I was taught in the early 1970’s by Dr. H. Ray Dunning that there are two biblical narratives that run side by side through scripture. They dance with each other and are woven together into a single tapestry from the first to the last page of Holy Scripture.
The first narrative is the wisdom story. It is about creation, order out of chaos, a structured world in which humans can thrive. It offers law, how things work best, consequences for behavior, family structure, justice in the courts, and governmental authority. This gospel of wisdom/order is neat, tidy, structured, boundaried, predictable, and clean. It is the formula for the recreation of Eden, if only we would organize our lives in keeping with the way God intended it to be.