Should Christian stories evangelize?

I have been chewing over how to answer this question.

It is hard for me because I have come to believe that “Christian fiction” is not a thing that should exist. Just like Christian music, Christian movies … they are industries that provide a sanitised version of entertainment to people who have been told it’s somehow better for them to be segregated from society as a whole (with the possible exception of actual worship that is directed at God, not at people, though the line is kind of wibbly-wobbly).

In that sense it’s nearly impossible for it to evangelise anyway, since it preaches to the choir, and any audience it finds outside of the church is going to be pretty minimal.

A tale should have a soul and its nature will shine through every word. If a message is forced into it, the accidental unbelieving reader is likely to feel patronised and that is not a positive experience for anyone.

Tell a good story. Let plot and character and poetry of language demonstrate goodness and hope and above all else, beauty — for everything truly beautiful is a reflection of the face of the divine.

Should Christian stories evangelize?

This is a crucial issue for anyone who loves stories but loves Jesus more, and wants to glorify Jesus through our enjoyment of stories or our making of stories.

During October our new SpecFaith series explores this issue.

On Thursdays, reviewer Austin Gunderson and writer E. Stephen Burnett host the conversation with interactive articles. On Fridays and Tuesdays, guest writers such as novelists and publishers offer their responses to the question.

We invite you to give your own answers to the #StoryEvangelism conversation.

Should Christian stories evangelize?

The easy answer is: “yes, we should evangelize.” Evangelism is often about making the world see our light…without us being aware of it.  They see us warts and all, without us being preachy.

However, most Christians are

1. legalistic and preach the law more than the riches of His grace;
2. inside a box but don’t realize they are;
3. don’t seem to understand that it is often the goodness of God that calls sinners to repentance;
4. are not really good at speaking about other big issues in the world; and
5. American Christians preach their class, race, agenda, and denomination.

Here is more of what I mean.

1. We don’t know enough about the riches of God’s grace to share that. So often preachers will preach about the many facets of being good and how we should not sin and how thankfully Jesus saved us. This is preaching legalism under the guise of preaching grace. We have to understand the many facets of His grace. We have to widen our understanding of grace. Then we can teach and evangelize instead of always majoring in being good.

2. Christians often think they know what the world is saying, thinking, doing. But really they don’t know. Case in point, most Christians have been so taught that the world really needs to understand John 3:16. But honestly, the world has heard that a lot. The world already knows the gospel. Another case in point, most Christians see every conversation through what their church or denomination teaches. So even when they talk to or debate a fellow Christian, they are often unable to hear what the other Christian is saying because they are so trained to think the other Christian thinks like they do. Can you imagine such folks having conversations with non-Christians? Already imagining where they think the other person is coming from.

Case in point — a recent conversation I had with two Christians in which I used this quote:

“Once our hearts get broken, they never fully heal. They always ache. But perhaps a broken heart is a more loving instrument. Perhaps only after our hearts have cracked wide open, have finally and totally unclenched, can we truly know love without boundaries.”

— Fred Epstein

Every Christian who spoke with me about it interpreted it as Epstein saying “God’s sovereignty created trouble.”  They were self-righteous and angry and could not see that God was not shown as the causative agent at of broken hearts at all. They could not see past their assumption about what the “other” was thinking or about where the “other” came from.

For 3, I will just point you to this article. Note that this writer WAS a Christian and she believed that we go to heaven because we are “good.”

For 4, I will also use the above link. Note also that she speaks of social justice. American Christian evangelism generally only speaks of sin. There are no Romeros, Martin Luther Kings, etc in the United States. Not in a big way. Most of the times Christians talk about anything in the world, they speak of it in order to get a “person” to stop sinning. They ponder only personal evangelism and saving each human or saving The United States (as a nostalgic hearkening back to a rural type of Eden where America is the unique country, the city set on a hill) rather than saving the world.

The problem is that while some folks are focused on their personal sins and will be open to dealing with their own salvation, there are other larger “secular” (so-called) issues that Christianity could touch. And I don’t mean “touch” as “show how sinful it all is.” American Christians are also very divided so they deal with issues in a very me-oriented way. Most white Christians don’t go on marches against guns, poverty, climate change, torture, war. They don’t give flaky lectures in the way New Age philosophies do. Christianity and art. No. Science, sex, and dehumanization …or whatever else. The spiritual joy of sex, artistic creation, linguistics, horse-racing, interior design, fabric design, whatever. Christians are just not good at engaging the popular culture without making it be all about sin.   The upshot is that the world (and the world’s religions) speaks of stuff like this and there is no Christian counterpart. There are Christians who don’t seem to understand that all good gifts come from God therefore even atheists are blessed with talents, etc, and are speaking of God’s beauty and creation even though those atheists aren’t aware of it.

For 5, I will use as an example the following quote:

I ask, “How have you all this wealth?” For the care of the poor consumes wealth. When each one receives a little for one’s needs, and when all owners distribute their means simultaneously for the care of the needy, no one will possess more than one’s neighbor. Yet it is plain that you have very many lands. Whence all these? Undoubtedly you have subordinated the relief and comfort of many to your convenience. And so, the more you abound in your riches, the more you want in love.

— Basil the Great

Even if this might be deemed by some as a bit extreme, a Christian should not look at the quote and immediately start talking about welfare mothers. But this is just what most white Christians do — especially when the quote is mentioned by a black Christian. If the quote is mentioned by a white Christian, then most Biblical American Christians will start talking about commies and progressives.

So then, to your question. How can people who have so much of the world in us, how can people who are so blind to the speck in their own eyes, how can people who cannot see past their own cultural issues truly bring a great wonderful Christ to a sinner without the sinner — if said sinner is perceptive — rolling their eyes?

Earthly things lead to heavenly things

Jesus said, “If I tell you of earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell  you of heavenly things?”

I think Christian fiction could improve by being more cosmology based. And not the usual cosmology of angels but about some personal dear truth that touches the writer’s unique soul.

There is a kind of trust Christians should develop, a kind of fearless delving into the unknowing and letting the creative chips fall where they may. But often we are so afraid of veering into sin, of veering into what we don’t know, and we work from an invisible doctrinal outline. I really think we have to brave the creative process and discover our own emotional issues. The Holy Spirit works in our spirit and in our emotions. The book of Revelation says that he who overcomes will receive a white stone with a name on it which no man knows but the receiver.

I think our personal relationship with God is like that. We are individuals whom God loves — and He works within our individuality and personality. As artists, Christians are so aware of a Christian creative tradition (Lewis, the Arthurian Cycle, and Tolkien, for instance) and so aware that other Christians want something like Tolkien and company that they unconsciously write for other Christians instead of writing from their own unique souls.

I think the problem with many Christians is that they are very conscious of planting spiritual seeds that might grow and mature in the reader’s mind. And some Christian writers even go so far as wanting to write a book that plants seeds, waters them, and harvests them into an altar call at the book’s end. But I think that’s hard to do when there are often so many mental, emotional, and theological arguments that make the mental soil of the reader so hard to cultivate. If the field is the soul of the reader, then Christian evangelism should try to affect that soil/soul. Even if we only cultivate the soil/soul and someone else reaps the harvest, we will have done our part.

One of my favorite books written by a Christian is George MacDonald’s The Day Boy and The Night Girl. One cannot read it and say it “means” anything. Because whatever theology contained in it is pretty unclear. But it touches the soul. There is such a thing as soul. And so many Christian fiction books touch doctrine, or the mind, or the emotions but not the soul.

It’s not an evangelical book but it is a seed-sowing kind of book that breaks up fallow ground. We each know what has wounded us against God or religious people, what has troubled us about the world, what has terrified us about the cosmos, what has enchanted us about the universe. That is our little white stone with our name on it. And sometimes we don’t really realize that what is what our soul wants to write about. If we would simply trust the creative force of the Holy Spirit and believe that we can dive into a piece of writing without being theologically “sure” how it will all turn out, then our souls will peek through.

When I wrote The Constant Tower, I wasn’t aware the story would be about God’s love. But since my spirit is joined to God’s spirit, God knew what the story would be about. When I wrote My Life as an Onion, I thought I was writing a romance, but Holy Spirit knew that I was writing about woundedness. When I wrote Wind Follower, I thought I was writing about cultural wars but Holy Spirit was writing about loss.

All these things — loss, woundedness, God’s love — are not obviously about the cross of Christ or His great work of salvation. But they can touch the fallow ground souls of people and will help to prepare the soil by creatively doing the Great Commission Work of healing, cleansing and raising their souls from the dead.

Should Christian stories evangelize?

This is a crucial issue for anyone who loves stories but loves Jesus more, and wants to glorify Jesus through our enjoyment of stories or our making of stories.

During October our new SpecFaith series explores this issue.

On Thursdays, reviewer Austin Gunderson and writer E. Stephen Burnett host the conversation with interactive articles. On Fridays and Tuesdays, guest writers such as novelists and publishers offer their responses to the question.

We invite you to give your own answers to the #StoryEvangelism conversation.

I’m curious about your thoughts on any of these definitions, and/or why Christians keep having the “should Christian fiction evangelize” discussion, and/or the spiritual/social pressures of “evangelism opportunities.”¹

First of all, excellent breakdown. When tackling a subject this rife with potentially-uncomfortable implications, it’s crucial that we thoroughly define our terms.

Sensing scant quibble-fuel in your first two definitions, my attention is immediately drawn to the words “fiction” and “evangelize,” for it’s at their confluence that friction is most frequently generated in the Christian community. While many Christians see evangelism as antithetical to the spirit of good storytelling, many others point out that since all fiction inevitably contains thematic messaging, Christian fiction should make an effort to deliberately leverage that quality for the glory of God.

But which approach is best? Which will actually bring God the most glory?

Broadly speaking, I think the source of the confusion typically surrounding this topic can be traced to the failure of evangelicalism to articulate a coherent doctrine of vocation. I think it’s this failure more than anything else that hobbles Christian achievement in the arts.

Let me give an example of what I mean. Say you have a pastor and an auto mechanic. The mechanic loves God and wants to glorify Him, but has always nursed the sneaking suspicion that he isn’t living up to his potential, that he’s been compromised somehow.

He listens to his pastor exhort him to fulfill the Great Commission, and goes away disquieted.

He can’t witness to his customers the way the pastor witnesses to his congregants; such behavior would impede his work and drive away business.

He tries to contribute to spiritual ministry in other capacities — volunteering for mentoring, showing up early or late to help with VBS, taking time off for short-term missions.

But always in the back of his mind there’s this understanding that full-time ministry is more spiritual, more eternally valuable, more pleasing to God than what he spends the majority of his life doing. And yet the work is necessary to pay the bills, so over the years the mechanic becomes calloused to this apparent discrepancy. “It’s just secular work,” he tells himself. “It’s a necessary evil. Maybe if I’m successful enough at it, I’ll be able to retire early and start really serving God.”

And so the quality of the mechanic’s work gradually begins to deteriorate. There’s no spiritual value in replacing transmissions, after all, so what’s the harm in cutting corners and taking it easy when no one’s looking over his shoulder? He’s just doing what he must to get by, all while feeling vaguely guilty that he’s not a pastor or full-time missionary.

Obviously, this is a problem. So what’s the knee-jerk evangelical solution? Why, it’s for him to view his place of work as a mission-field, of course! After all, an auto mechanic has opportunities to talk to people who’d never even think of entering a church. Who’s this guy to say that God hasn’t put him under the hood for such a time as this?

Of course, after a while the mechanic figures out that that’s generally bunk. He can’t very well turn his shop into some “Carburetors for Christ” shtick, and yet he can’t help craving more than a second-class citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

And now evangelicalism’s fresh out of answers.

The ministering storyteller

At this point, many readers, fed up with my trite and overlong parable, are no doubt shouting at their computer screens something to the effect of, “He doesn’t need to evangelize in order to glorify God, silly!” Oh really?

So now let’s pretend the mechanic is an author. Did anything about your opinion just change? If so, this bears further examination.

Let’s return to the mechanic for a moment. If it’s not apparent by now that the man’s mental bifurcation of reality into separate “sacred” and “secular” realms is deeply mistaken, consider this: he, and those like him, pay the pastor’s salary. Without his “secular” job, without his revenue-generation, there can be no pastor, no church, no “sacred” anything. He makes it possible.

That alone should indicate to us that the secular-spiritual dichotomy is false. Far from being peripheral — some kind of mammon-enamored layman whose inadequacies God tolerates — the mechanic is essential to the functioning of that spiritual apparatus whose “legitimacy” he envies. And that’s just in reference to how he relates to the “official” church! We haven’t even touched upon the ways in which he’s enriching the lives of his neighbors by combating the forces of entropy. And yet in his heart he despises his occupation. He doesn’t perform his duties out of faith that they, apart from their use to evangelism, matter to God.

That’s a tragedy.

And it’s unbiblical. What does the Scripture say?

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.²

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.³

Whatever you do. This is not an admonition to apostles. This is a command that applies to all of life, even to those mundane and “unspiritual” activities that evangelicals tend to think of as distractions from the “real” work that most pleases God. It is not God’s design that we should feel forever guilty for spending the majority of our lives as non-mouth members of the Body of Christ!

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.⁴

The Christian life is far more than some giant pyramid scheme that exists solely to expand. The gospel, far from being a mere sales pitch, is a whole-life transformation. Even the Great Commission itself is most accurately translated not as “Go and make disciples,” but rather, “As you are going, disciple people.” Jesus isn’t commanding us to abandon our “secular” occupations, but to approach them in a transformed manner — in light of His lordship and our status as princes and princesses in His already-and-not-yet kingdom. He is glorified when we plunge into life with the burning desire to do what it is we do in beautiful and excellent ways, as though we’re standing in His presence and presenting Him with the works of our hands and minds. Because we kinda are.

There’s a pervasive notion out there that full-time evangelists deserve preeminent status in Christendom, and that they somehow know better than the rest of us how to make use of our various talents. But as C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists — not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

The lack of storytelling insight possessed by full-time evangelists is so obvious to Lewis that he uses it as a humorous anecdote to illustrate a larger point. Bishops writing novels? LoL!

So it falls to storytellers to tell excellent stories. But this begs the question: what comprises beautiful and excellent fiction? What will be the result if we write fiction with God’s pleasure in mind? And it’s at this point that we can very suddenly find ourselves right back at square one.

At its onset, the gospel’s transmitted through words. And, like you said, Stephen, we tend to look at written fiction, comprised as it is of words, and have a difficult time parsing its highest purpose from that of the persuasive work of the evangelist. Automobile repair is easier to isolate, because it so little resembles “full-time Christian ministry.” But writing? Writing exists in the realm of ideas. It has the capacity to shift psychological stasis and alter human behavior — to reshape our view of the world. With this in mind, should Christian fiction really “make the most of every opportunity” to proclaim Christian doctrine and normalize Christian practice?

Should Christian stories evangelize?

This is a crucial issue for anyone who loves stories but loves Jesus more, and wants to glorify Jesus through our enjoyment of stories or our making of stories.

During October our new SpecFaith series explores this issue.

On Thursdays, reviewer Austin Gunderson and writer E. Stephen Burnett host the conversation with interactive articles. On Fridays and Tuesdays, guest writers such as novelists and publishers offer their responses to the question.

We invite you to give your own answers to the #StoryEvangelism conversation.

My apologies if you can’t get that song from Aladdin out of your head for the rest of the day.

This is going to sound like a shameless plug, and it is, but please bear with me: my sixth novel, Beast, released late last month from The Crossover Alliance. It’s a disaster tale set aboard the world’s largest oil rig, nicknamed “The Beast.” My coauthor on this project is a real-life oil driller that I met online after hitting up several oil industry forums to solicit help for the book. I wanted the book and the setting to be larger than life but also grounded in reality. This was a challenging task, because I knew absolutely nothing about offshore oil drilling. Over the course of about one year, my coauthor and I conjured up a relentless, explosive story that takes place among some really outrageous machinery — a lot of which was real and some that was fabricated for the book, because every story needs a bit more pizzazz than reality can offer.

I didn’t want to rely solely on my coauthor to handle the technical stuff, because I was the main storyteller and I was going to have to carry my own weight. Therefore, I threw myself into the mind-boggling world of oil drilling. I watched documentaries, I read articles, I followed industry news reports, I memorized technical terms, I studied diagrams…and then I made it bigger, louder, faster, more dangerous. Beast dabbles in what I refer to as realistic sci-fi: near-future machinery set in our contemporary world, and it may even be possible; it just hasn’t been done yet. I felt out of my element the whole time I was writing, but by immersing myself in this macho world of mega-machinery, I was able to create devices and floorplans and events that my coauthor signed off on. If he gave his stamp of approval, I knew I had to be doing something right.

This book was the most difficult and challenging project I had worked on, but what I learned from the experience went way beyond the writing craft.

We all know that our world is dominated by oil. The fluctuating price of gasoline reminds us every day. The plastic keys that I’m typing on right now used to be some form of fossil fuel deep below the Earth’s surface. But what I never thought about was the human toll. Fortunately, fatal accidents are rare, but injuries are common, and these workers are cut off from their friends and family for weeks at a time, working 12-hour shifts for two weeks straight before getting a few days off to head back to dry land. Of course, they are compensated very well, but that doesn’t console a child who wonders where his father is on his birthday or a wife who freezes with fear when she sees the words “Offshore Oil Drilling Accident” on the scrolling news ticker on TV. It’s an intense job that is not for the faint of heart or body, and one that I no longer take for granted when I fill up my car at the gas station.

One of the most common pieces of writing advice is “Write what you know.” I took a big risk and wrote about something I didn’t know, and my eyes and mind were opened. By stepping out into this unfamiliar territory, I learned a lot and gained a deep respect for a world that I only knew in passing.

So how about you? Writers, did you feel compelled to write a story about something you knew nothing about, but grew to know and respect during the course of your writing? Readers, did you ever pick up a book about a subject that didn’t interest you or you weren’t familiar with, but that changed by the time you were finished? It doesn’t have to be something from the real world; the world of imagination can be just as real.