Recently loaned this book by a friend, I decided I would share some thought’s on Elliot Clark’s excellent short book here.

Clark offers a valuable challenge to our evangelism in this book: questioning the place of the fear of God in our evangelism, contextualising our conversations, and framing the discussion within a helpful exposition of 1 Peter. As a British reader, the US context in which Elliot wrote was at times confusing but by no means to the detriment of the book as a whole.

Premise

Clark identifies helpfully the place of Christianity in our postmodern, Western societies. Christianity is no longer the cultural norm in our communities, and so “we must learn and apply the proper dispositions of a church on mission, living as strangers in our own land” (22). We are strangers in our own towns, cities, and nations. We are on mission in our everyday. We are exiles from our true, eternal home. We are foreigners in a strange land.

But we are here for a reason. We are here holding out the words of truth, the only means of salvation. But when we recognise our position as exiles and strangers in our own lands, we must learn how to live as such. And this is the premise upon which Clark challenges his readers: we must learn how to live and love faithfully as we seek to engage in evangelism as exiles.

Challenge

Clark’s book helpfully challenges the preconceptions we have around evangelism. His book opens with the reminder that evangelism is not simply the Christian we see on the TV Channel, or onstage at the big event, but the life and activity of every believer. But as Christians, as evangelists, we operate in a strange land. We are exiles in our evangelism. This frames our efforts, our glory and hope is not in this world, but in the world to come. We see this, in 1 Peter, through the truth of the Gospel. “Peter wanted his readers to understand that God glorified his Son in order to give us, his children, hope for our own exile” (30). Such hope, says Clark, gives us joy in our suffering, a point well made with reference to his own stories on mission in the Middle East.

This challenge allows Clark to get to what, for me, was really the issue at the heart of the book. A challenge to the place of fear in our evangelism. As we live as exiles in a strange land, who do we fear as we consider reaching those we know and love, and those we don’t know, with the Good News of Jesus? “Fear is closely related to shame and it is still a real factor in our evangelism” (50). Is our fear driven by shame in our faith, or is our fear rightly directed at God? “The solution we find in 1 Peter is to fight fear with fear – to grow in our fear of God and our fear for (not of) our fellow man” (50). Clark’s point here challenged me and my all so often fearful evangelism. The challenge is not to reject fear, but to redirect fear. We know the fear of the Lord is a good and right thing. Prov 9:10: it is the beginning of wisdom. Time and again in the Psalms we see fear of God eclipsing fear of man. To fear rightly is to live with confidence. But more than this, as Clark so winsomely states: this fear must drive us to a fear for our fellow man. We must not have a fear of them, but as we rightly direct our fear towards the Lord, we must fear for their own standing before the Lord and Judge of all things.

And this is Clark’s conclusion: “this is why the Gospel must be proclaimed, because all will give an account to [the] One who is ready to judge the living and the dead ([1 Peter] 4:5-6)” (58). Our fear of God, a right fear, must stir up a fear for man. A fear that those we know and love who do not know Christ, who will have no defence on that final day. But the Gospel – the Good News – is that the Judge Himself sends His Son to provide that defence for mankind. At the Cross, guilty sinners are washed clean. We ought not to allow a fear of man to thwart our evangelism, rather, our fear for man ought to stir us towards evangelism.

There are further challenges I could pick up on, and Clark writes astutely on the roles of prayer and hospitality in our evangelism. Do we bring our efforts to God, do we commit our actions to Him? Do we open up our homes, and our lives, to those we do not know, or to those we would rather not mix with?

Empathy

Clark understands that evangelism is hard. But this shouldn’t stop us from engaging with those we meet. Indeed, Clark urges his readers to consider evangelism as so much more than the mention or namedrop of Christ or the Church. How guilty I am of that in my own evangelistic efforts! Clark confronts this attitude head on (96): “We must consider why we’re only willing to speak the gospel when we perceive openness on the part of another. We must ponder whether we even have a category for proclaiming a message that people oppose, one that’s innately offensive. Or do we tiptoe through polite spiritual conversations and timidly share our opinions, then call it evangelism?” We cannot count our evangelism as a simple mention of our faith, we must confront people with the wonderfully offensive message of the Gospel.

But Clark does not challenge us, in this or in other ways, without a gentle sense of brotherly empathy. Having experienced the mission field first hand, he knows the reality of standing out for the Gospel. “When we are visibly other… the pain of ridicule and social exclusion can be sharp” (121). To be Christian is to be other. To speak the Gospel is to reveal that otherness. And that can be so costly. All the way through Evangelism as Exiles, Clark uses stories of his own time on mission to illustrate his points, and the cost of discipleship is so clear to see in his stories of brothers and sisters living for Christ in the Middle East. We are exiles, we are other. But we must keep on in sharing the Good News that has made us strangers in this land, because we are citizens of the Next.

Summary

Evangelism as Exiles is a helpful read, and one that confronted laziness, shortsightedness, and sin in my own understandings of personal evangelism. Clark’s helpful exposition of 1 Peter is clear and valuable teaching, and an encouragement to see his points so clearly rooted in God’s word. As a Brit, I struggled with fully translating aspects of this book to a UK context, and at times I found perhaps an over-reliance on personal experience took a little away from what was being said. But this book clearly challenged and clearly encouraged me. I would heartily recommend it to those asking questions around evangelism, witness, and our status in this world. As we speak the glorious Good News of Jesus Christ, we are exiles, strangers in a foreign land. This book encourages us to live out our lives, for God’s glory, as we await our true home. I was reminded of Paul’s words to the Corinthians (2 Cor 5:5): “Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.”

We live now as exiles, but we are purposed by God, equipped by the Spirit, and guaranteed to one day come to our eternal home.

Evangelism as Exiles is currently available for free as an e-book from The Gospel Coalition: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/this-weeks-free-ebook-evangelism-as-exiles/.