Standards of Evangelism, Part I

As most of you know, Young Life, the youth evangelism organization started by Jim Rayburn in 1941, has been a huge part of my life for the last ten years. After my sophomore year of high school I went to Lake Saranac, a Young Life camp in the Adirondacks, where I heard the Gospel presented to me clearly for the first time. It changed my life, and I wouldn't be who I am today without Young Life. Granted, God could have chosen to work in my life in some other way – but the fact remains that it was because of Young Life that I came to accept the Gospel and begin my relationship with Christ.

Over the years, I've become very familiar with the ministry, both from serving as a volunteer leader in Bloomington and from working on full-time staff at Lake Champion for more than two years. But for the past few weeks there has been a great cloud of controversy surrounding the ministry – a cloud that has turned into a bit of an internet firestorm in the last week or two.


The background

Nine members of Young Life staff in Durham, North Carolina, were terminated or resigned at the end of November after they declined to abide by a new set of “non-negotiable” guidelines for proclaiming the Gospel set forth by Young Life. From my understanding – gathered from news articles I've read and from accounts from friends still on staff, the "non-negotiables" were set forth late in 2007 as a response to a series of Gospel presentations at summer camps and a paper written by Jeff McSwain, the director of Young Life in the Durham areae. Here's the synopsis from an article in Christianity Today:

The Non-Negotiables statement came out after a paper circulated last summer by Jeff McSwain. The former YL area director for Raleigh and Chapel Hill, McSwain was the highest-ranking staff member fired. In his paper, McSwain criticized YL’s traditional approach to evangelism, which he said emphasizes kids’ separation from God. His paper, “Jesus Is the Gospel,” said such gospel presentations can be more Unitarian than Trinitarian, because they draw a sharp contrast between the holy God and the incarnated Son who “actually became sin.”

“I can go into the realm of the most lost, furthest-out kids, knowing something that is true about them before they do,” he wrote in the paper. “They are lost children of God; people can’t be lost unless they have a home!”

YL’s eight-page Non-Negotiables statement requires a sequence for gospel presentations that closely resembles Campus Crusade for Christ’s Four Spiritual Laws. Talks must begin with the person of Jesus Christ, “the overarching theme of all our talks.” From there, evangelists should explain the reality and consequences of sin before presenting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. Talks end with an invitation to believe and become a disciple of Jesus.

The Christianity Today article is an interesting read, but I disagree with their assumption that the non-negotiables require a certain sequence of Gospel presentation. More about that later. There's also an interesting article about the situation from Christian Century.

Also, here are the six key points from Young Life's "non-negotiables." The full, eight-page text can be found here.

1) We proclaim the Person of Jesus Christ in every message.

2) We proclaim the reality of sin and its consequences — that apart from divine grace, we are estranged from God by our disobedience and incapable of a right relationship with God.

3) We proclaim the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the ultimate proof of God’s love and the only solution to our problem of sin.

4) We proclaim the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

5) We proclaim the risen Christ’s offer of salvation by inviting our middle school, high school and college friends to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior.

6) We proclaim God’s call to discipleship by encouraging all who respond to grow in their faith.

There has obviously been a lot of fallout from the dismissal of the 10 staff members in the Durham area. I hate that this situation has come to that, yet it seems that in our sinful nature, theological disagreements – and sometimes splits, become inevitable, if not unavoidable.

On December 11, Young Life posted a statement about the incident on its Web site, saying that its method of presenting the Gospel "has been widely applauded within the mission" and that only "a small fraction of staff" have disagreed.

"We start with love in our proclamation of the gospel," the statement reads. "Young Life reaches out to adolescents in friendship, loving them where they are and as they are. It is in this context of grace that we talk about the truth of sin that separates us from relationship with our Creator."


The debate

Let me get this out of the way – I'm no theologian. My knowledge is severely limited, but I like to think about and investigate these things as they pertain to our faith in Jesus Christ. So, I'm not going to go so far as to make a judgment on this topic. For now, I simply want to figure out the question.

It's important to remember that while hundreds of people are abuzz about these "non-negotiables" and the debate surrounding them, hundreds – no, thousands – of high school kids are attending Young Life camps and hearing the Gospel. Thousands of kids are coming to know Christ because of Young Life leaders and staff members all over the country and all around the world. That is important work, and we should all rejoice because of it. In Philippians 1:18, Paul says:

"What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice."

The great point being that we're debating about details. Whenever and wherever the Gospel is proclaimed, we should rejoice.

I also think it's important to note that when I accepted Christ at Saranac in June 1998, the camp speaker that presented the Gospel was – you guessed it – Jeff McSwain. I obviously have a tremendous amount of respect for the man and have no desire to belittle his efforts for the sake of the Gospel.

I'd love to read McSwain's paper to better understand what he is standing up for and what exactly he believes – but unfortunately the paper is not public, so I'll have to go off what is reported. Below is pretty much the full list of all the sources I'm using. If you Google "Young Life non-negotiables" you'll come up with a lot more results. The Tony Jones blog is interesting, and much of it I pointedly disagree with, but you should read it anyway.

News articles:
Christianity Today: Gospel Talk
The Christian Century: Young Life draws fire over new ministry guidelines
The Jesus Manifesto: The Gospel according to Young Life

Tony Jones blog:
Something is wrong at Young Life
More on what's wrong at Young Life
Closing the loop on Young Life

It seems that this debate from the 10 staff in Durham is creating quite a stir (considering there are 30,000 Young Life volunteers/leaders/committee) and it's become popular to attack Young Life for it. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect an organization like Young Life to create a policy for all of its staff to follow. I don't think it makes them overly controlling or dictatorial. I would expect a worldwide ministry to have something like that in place.

There are a lot of things that frustrate me about Young Life, and I could go on for a day with critiques about things I think they could do better. Young Life is a great high school ministry, but tends to "lose" kids after they've made the initial commitment to Christ, failing to plug them into a church or helping them grow and become rooted in their faith. But that's not the point here.

This debate is centered on the order of things – specifically, the order of repentance and salvation. You can label it as a Calvinistic debate about soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). Here's what Tony Jones says:

It seems that YL President Denny Rydberg and others in the organization are worried about the influence of neo-orthodox theology, and they are thus battening down the hatches on a certain type of conservative, Reformed orthodoxy. For instance, staffers are told in the statement that they must not introduce the concept of Jesus and his grace until the students have been sufficiently convinced of their own depravity and been allowed to wallow stew in that depravity (preferably overnight).

...

YL has embraced the very “gospel of sin management” that Christian leaders like Dallas Willard and Brian McLaren have criticized. It is unhistorical, and, arguably, unorthodox. Even Augustine, Calvin’s predecessor in all things Reformed, came to faith and then was convinced of and convicted of his sin. Remember, Augustine wrote his Confessions a couple decades after his conversion, so all of his talk of his own sinfulness was realized by him after he came to faith in Christ.

This is simply unfair. I have heard hundreds of Young Life talks and their process is simple and effective. There is not a desire to make kids "wallow" in their sin before they hear that there is an answer (in my experience – there are always exceptions). They do, however, lay out first that we are condemned because we are sinners, and then explain that Christ is the answer for that problem. But every time I've seen one of these "sin talks," it is overwhelmingly done with a spirit of love, and hinges on the fact that there is hope for us in Jesus Christ.

The text of "non-negotiable" point two supports this:

We maintain that sin’s consequences include a broken relationship with God, so relational words such as estrangement, alienation, lostness and purposelessness do represent our condition. We also maintain that words such as guilty, rebellious, separated and condemned are descriptions that characterize sinful humanity and necessitate God’s ultimate rescue in the Person of Jesus Christ.

Great care must be taken to keep Jesus present in this message about sin. Gospel narratives, including the paralytic brought to Jesus by his friends, the woman at the well, the rich young ruler, the woman caught in adultery, Peter’s characterization of himself as a “sinful man” and other passages all may be used to communicate this message.

The frequent criticism of "sin talks" (see Tony Jones' comments above) is refuted by this text: Great care must be taken to keep Jesus present in this message about sin.


The theology

Going back to the soteriology debate, the Young Life Gospel presentation includes 1) the person recognizing that they are in a sinful, broken state and 2) the person repenting and accepting Christ (gaining faith). It suggests that our salvation is not complete until we make a decision to have faith and accept Christ. This seems to me to be a fairly Calvinistic approach – see Calvin's doctrine of "evangelical repentance."

For since pardon and forgiveness are offered by the preaching of the Gospel, in order that the sinner, delivered from the tyranny of Satan, the yoke of sin, and the miserable bondage of iniquity, may pass into the kingdom of God, it is certain that no man can embrace the grace of the Gospel without retaking himself from the errors of his former life into the right path, and making it his whole study to practice repentance. Those who think that repentance precedes faith instead of flowing from, or being produced by it, as the fruit by the tree, have never understood its nature, and are moved to adopt that view on very insufficient grounds.

First is pardon and forgiveness – which go along with the recognition of being in a broken and sinful state. Then, faith and repentance come hand-in-hand, one flowing out of the other. I don't believe Young Life is stating that we must repent before we have salvation. However, they are saying we must make a decision to have faith before salvation is complete.

McSwain's theological views are clearly a bit different than Young Life's – hence the dismissal – but I'm not entirely clear on how. It is my understanding that McSwain is arguing that the work of salvation is already complete before we gain faith – citing Romans 5:8: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

McSwain is also quoted in the Christianity Today article as saying: “They are lost children of God; people can’t be lost unless they have a home!” This is totally correct. But I'd add this: We are all broken Children of God, but if you don't realize you're broken, why would you ever look to become whole?

Christ died on the cross, but not everyone is going to heaven. Why? Because we have to make that conscious choice to have faith, to accept Christ and follow him – thus completing salvation.

“From what are people being saved? Not from visible warfare or barbarians but something far greater: from their own sins, a work that had never been possible to anyone before.”

-John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, 4

((A side note: most of the articles seem to suggest McSwain is more in line with theologian Karl Barth, who I don't know much about. This largely deals with the principles of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, and if anyone has anything to add on these subjects (ahem: Dan) I'd love to hear it!))


The question

OK, I've written a novel and hardly scratched the surface of this subject – this will have to suffice for now. The point of writing this wasn't to stick my own opinion out there (though writing this has helped me realize where I stand), but to raise awareness of this situation, and ask you, my friends, what you think. I put a Part I on here – maybe there will be a Part II. Maybe not, though.

I think what gets me the most worked up is the harsh criticism and vitriol towards Young Life in some of the articles written. It's too bad. Young Life is far from perfect as an organization, as is the case with each and every church and para-church organization. None of these folks or churches or organizations has it "right", but I believe YL, just like all the others out there, is trying to do the best job they can while staying true to their beliefs.

I don't think they're a fundamentalist dictatorial monster taking evangelism to hell in a handbasket. I don't necessarly think there is a great evangelical "schism" forthcoming (see Tony Jones again).

Anyway, we should approach this with an open spirit of love and concern, not with a spirit of criticism and condemnation. I hope I've not put any words into Young Life's of Jeff McSwain's mouths in this article. I know that Young Life is a wonderful, Christ-seeking ministry and that McSwain is a fine, Christ-seeking man – who presented the Gospel to me, and I believed.

Amen.