When Episcopalians recite the Baptismal Covenant, many people seem to want to rush past the commitment to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.”  Given that “Good News” is just the English for the “evangel,” proclaiming the Good News in any fashion implies evangelism. But it is still a word that elicits some negative emotions in many Episcopalians. Yet, proclaiming the Good News of God’s reconciling the world to Godself in Jesus Christ is an essential Christian practice and we are the more spiritually impoverished the less we engage in it. 

Sharing with others that “if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation” is so much more than peddling fire insurance. Contrary to the view held by many who have engaged in the lion’s share of evangelism in the contemporary United States, the vision of salvation through Christ offered by the earliest Christians had little to do with avoiding an eternity of torment in Hell by mentally assenting to the idea that Jesus is your Lord and Savior. 

If Jesus is Lord, the economy is not. If Jesus is Lord,  some political party and its agenda are not. If Jesus is Lord, our country is not. If Jesus is Lord, even our own material comfort and safety are not. Proclaiming Jesus as Lord means very little if we do not strive against these forces when they demand that we give them the ultimate allegiance that belongs to Christ alone. Saying Jesus has triumphed over Death rings hollow if we do not unmask death’s impotence by dismantling its perduring effects in the forms of life- and dignity- denying forces like poverty, hunger, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. 

Still, we must be on guard against understanding the Good News such that it dissolves into a kind of generic humanism or philanthropism. Christ’s Lordship  may entail improving people’s material, social, and political conditions, but such work hardly exhausts the new life offered through Christ nor indeed does it even capture its primary character. Union with God both as individuals and as communities, the goal for which God created us, is our salvation. And union with God comes for us through relationship with Christ—and a relationship with Christ, no less than our relationships with any other people, means getting to know Christ. Indeed, we cannot hope to become more like Christ, to follow his teaching and example, if we do not actually know that teaching and example. Nor can we expect others to enter into this relationship without their hearing about his life and teaching. 

Proclaiming the Good News to others both by word and example seems to me essential for the Christian life. This recognition does not negate the fact that a desire, even a sincere one, to share the good news has rationalized all manner of ethnocentric, colonialist, coercive, manipulative, and abusive behavior. Any attempt to proclaim the Good News, if it is to truly evince love and respect for the other, must strive to avoid such mistakes of the past. Given human fallibility, no method will ever be foolproof, but there are certain postures that we can assume to minimize the potential for replicating the harms that accompanied the proclamation of the good news in other times and places. 

First, we must strive to be invitational rather than intrusive or argumentative. We won’t argue or badger people into a relationship with Christ. We may, however, invite people into such a relationship if we can testify to the new, joy-filled, abundant life we ourselves have experienced in Christ. 

Second, invitation has to come from a posture of vulnerability. God’s foundationally gifting us with free will shows that a true relationship can only come about if others can enter into it freely. We must always leave people room to reject the offer of a relationship with Christ—and we must accept the possibility of the pain such a rejection can engender. It is far better for us to cultivate an openness to graciously receiving rejections, even violent ones, to our proclamation of the Good News.   

Proclaiming the Good News may be essential to our faith, but that hardly makes it easy. In fact, it is something that, left to our own power, would be impossible for us. Happily, we are not left to our own power. We make the promise to engage in such proclamation, as with everything else in the Baptismal Covenant, “with God’s help.” Jesus goes even further, making clear that the Spirit will give his disciples the words to say when arrested for doing the work of proclamation (Matthew 10:19-20). Rather than a burden or an embarrassment, we are gifted, through the opportunity to proclaim the Good News, with the ability to carry life and hope into a world largely devoid of these things.