Note: From Evangelism in an Age of Despair (Baker, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Evangelism and discipleship are fused. Evangelism is the invitation to receive consolation, to receive ministry. Evangelism is the reception of care that places a person on a path of encounter with the divine. Evangelism is the invitation to lean into one’s sorrows to find the sacramental presence of the living God changing one’s deaths into life. Walking this path, the one receiving consolation moves into discipleship as they lean into and give over their sorrows to the man of sorrows, Jesus Christ. By leaning into our sorrows, we are evangelized and therefore become Jesus’ disciples. We are Jesus’ disciples when, having received consolation, we go into the world to give consolation to others. This continues the unbroken circle of evangelism and discipleship, of the divine coming near to the brokenhearted, bringing life out of death and therefore saving the world.
What you’re about to read is a case for how a practice and theology of consolation – which births a theology of the cross – can transform the human being so deeply, with such good news (evangel), that the human being is converted and claimed, made alive and saved right within all their sorrow. This project secures evangelism inside my construction of ministry as the place where the divine encounters the human. It offers a view of evangelism from the theology of the cross, one that avoids all instrumentality. It allows relationship to be for relationship (not for some other means), taking us into the divine claiming the human.
Blessed be the Lord of the cross, who raises the brokenhearted from the dead….
When We Least Expected It, Evangelism Is Actually Welcomed
Fraught complication is just the air we breathe. We have a good sense that this air is polluted but inescapable. We’re all inhaling plumes of debris from the countless explosions of our culture war. Inside this culture war, hardly anything is straightforward and almost nothing is uncontested. Confusing times make for odd bedfellows. Seemingly opposed ideas, concepts and perspectives often somehow nestle together between the sheets, knee-to-knee. Just when you’re sure this or that will be either hated or loved by a certain group, you find the opposite.
Evangelism is an example.
American Protestantism is undoubtedly in the throes of a shake-up. Some even call it a “reckoning.” Particularly, the children of conservative Protestants have been pushing back, many even exiting the churches of their youth. And not quietly. They name regressive social stances; a lack of acceptance or openness to pluralism, difference and gender; and an overall capitulation to partisan politics (they’re particularly disturbed by one party’s perceived regressive social stances) as their reasons for leaving….
Conservative Protestants in the last decades of the twentieth century copied how brands convert people: meeting their felt needs and advertising a lifestyle. Conservative Protestantism offered people programs as products and branded their local congregations, all as a way of converting people’s interests. This version of evangelism is bound in a consumer logic that holds to a tacit theological anthropology that believes people are most fundamentally what they are individually interested in. Having come of age inside a conservative Protestantism bound in consumer capitalism, and being natives of digital influencer-based marketing, these young exiles are predisposed to accept evangelism. It’s part of the consumer zeitgeist, and even the word “evangelism” is something ordinary from their past. As long as evangelism isn’t harsh, abusive or repressive to identity openness (ignoring its link to late consumer capitalism), it’s fine. It’s even normal and assumed to be part of faith practice. These exiles have not escaped this consumer evangelistic ethos. They’ve just shifted it to an open lifestyle and a new brand of religion that refuses and resists the old brand of classic conservative Protestantism.
One powerful way to get attention is by calling out the repressive religion of your past. Most disaffiliating exiles, therefore, never really think to join a mainline church because its lifestyle appears too passé and irrelevant. Its brand is too bland. They adopt instead this more progressive Christianity not by joining a community but by changing their digital consumer patterns – following different people on Instagram and updating their podcast feeds. They do what they’ve been taught to do by this consumer secular evangelism. They broadcast their departure and change in lifestyle loudly on social media, winning more attention.
Evangelism Is Our Schmole
We find ourselves in a moment when evangelism is not completely hated and thus discarded and canceled. But nevertheless, evangelism is confused and mostly unwanted. Evangelism has become American Protestantism’s schmole. In the parlance of slang, a “schmole” is a friend, or core part of your group or crew, who is an obnoxious downer who you don’t really want around. But the schmole comes with the group. The group has not figured out how to rid itself of the obnoxious and embarrassing schmole. The group knows or senses that, in the end, it needs the schmole – maybe for the schmole’s energy but more so for the schmole’s car or access to the pool.
Evangelism is the schmole of American Protestantism. Evangelism is assumed to be a bit obnoxious and annoying and more than a little embarrassing – even a potentially dangerous downer if we’re not careful. Mainline and exiled evangelical Protestants worry that if they give evangelism too much focus, evangelism will potentially ruin things, violating ethical and cultural sensibilities. But these Protestants, while mostly uncomfortable with and wanting to ignore evangelism, sense that they need evangelism. Evangelism can’t just be kicked out of the crew! Hence, American Protestantism’s soft openness to evangelism.
Yet even with this soft openness to evangelism, most would agree that evangelism has little traction in the discussions, let alone practices, of American Protestants. Evangelism is the schmole, after all. Evangelism is kept around, though banished to the fringes, because we think we might need evangelism, even if we’re embarrassed by it. After all, evangelism might be necessary in helping us beat back decline and the need for lifestyle marketing. Evangelism is justified for its instrumental function. It’s a tool (and to add another layer of slang, a schmole is always a tool).
This (tacit) assumption shows that our conceptions of evangelism have been almost completely hollowed out. Evangelism has become shrouded in immanence, or stuck in the tangible, because evangelism is assumed to be a tool to gain things that can be counted. Mainline and exiled evangelicals may not count souls converted, as classic conservative Protestants do, but they nonetheless count. They’re not counting who is praying the sinner’s prayer, but they count how much their soft evangelism wins them reach, quantified by the number of new members and the amount of likes (which is a direct sign of brand uptake).
Focusing on the immanent and quantifiable affords little to no sacramental sense to our visions and practices of evangelism. There is little grasp of how evangelism witnesses to, and joins, the infinite’s participation in the finite. Little concern with how evangelism testifies to a reality – to a world as a whole – that is sacramental in nature. Our lives in the world are the very place where God comes to and shares in. Theologians call this “sacramental ontology.” The sacraments themselves, such as bread and wine, witness that the infinite God shares in our finite bodies in the world, joining us in finite elements. The world is a place where the infinite and finite commune.
How evangelism invites others into this event of communion has not much been explored. The shell that remains of evangelism is almost completely immanent, with little to no inbreaking transcendent quality. Evangelism’s value contributes only to the finite plane (more people will come, giving will go up, relevance will increase, institutional fragility will be reversed).
But there are risks that come with getting free from being locked solely on this finite plane and placing evangelism on the ground of a sacramental ontology. Inside this more mystical (or even liturgical) spirituality of divine and human – infinite and finite – union, evangelism risks becoming abstract and disconnected from the concrete lives of people like Mary Ann and Renate [whose stories we heard earlier in this chapter]. Trying to place evangelism on the ground of a sacramental ontology – onto a place where the divine truly encounters the human – runs the danger of losing the practical nature of evangelism, which is the only thing keeping the schmole in the crew. If this abstract anti-practicality prevails, what’s the point of keeping evangelism around at all? This danger of abstraction from our concrete lives casts suspicion on an evangelism that is bound in something other than the immanent and instrumental.
But this shouldn’t be. Attending to the sacramental shape of divine and human encounter in evangelism should not lead us away from the concrete and practical lives of Mary Ann and Renate. Nor should focusing on the practical turn evangelism into a schmoley tool for crass gains. But how do we keep this two-headed monster of a problem from chomping? How do we imagine evangelism as sacramental without losing evangelism’s practicality and concreteness?
The answer is by joining sorrow.
Content taken from Evangelism in an Age of Despair by Andrew Root, ©2025. Used by permission of Baker Academic.
Andrew Root, Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry, Luther Seminary
