Exercise evangelism

Originally posted Sept. 30, 2010, at Nachfolge. Republished with permission of the author.

I have been having an evangelism experience at the gym lately.

I’ve struggled with back pain off and on for the past two years, and I’m finally mostly pain-free after well over a year of physical therapy, chiropractic care and essentially taking better care of my body.

About two months ago, I was sharing my struggle with Michelle, our kicking spin instructor who has fought cancer and won over the past year (you have no idea what a simpering little wimp you are until you watch a bald woman lead your spin class with a chemo port in her arm).

As we were talking about juggling parenthood, vocations, exercise and all the other important stuff in our lives, she said, “Hey, we’ve got this new class starting called Centergy — you should give it a shot! It sounds like it could be just what you need.”

So, last Friday I gave it a whirl. Centergy is a combination of yoga, pilates and other stuff set to music.

Was Michelle ever right — the class worked all the muscles my physical therapist and chiropractor identified as trouble spots for me.

Now, here’s where the evangelism part comes in. Some of my blogger friends have been visiting the topic lately, and I think they’ve presented some valuable insight. I think they’ve covered why we (the ELCA) aren’t particularly good at evangelism, but here I’d like to offer some thoughts on how we could be better.

1. Evangelism addresses the need of the evangelized, not the need of the church. My friend Michelle wasn’t teaching that particular Centergy class, nor was she going to receive a commission if I attended.
   
   She had no thought of her own reward for getting me to sign up: what she saw was my need for something new and a way our gym could provide it. Our most effective (and, dare I say, most holy) evangelism comes when our concern is for our neighbor, not our church.

2. Effective evangelists listen and hear before speaking. Michelle didn’t break into our conversation with some sort of ham-handed script extolling the benefits of Centergy. We were talking, as friends, and she heard and understood what I was saying before mentioning the class.
   
   It felt natural and good because it was natural and good. If the church is to be trustworthy in a post-Christendom environment, it starts by listening to others for the sake of their own story, not that of the church.

3. Effective evangelists believe they are offering a real, concrete benefit to the lives of the evangelized. Again, Michelle didn’t suggest the class because it’s what she was “supposed” to do: she offered the class because she thought it could help.
   
   Our gym has a lot of other classes and programs, including a very spendy personal trainer program: if Michelle’s concern was helping the gym’s bottom line, she could have done so a hundred times over in the year we’ve been going to spin class.
   
   But Michelle saw that this class could directly address the very problem I was facing. Is it so much to ask the same of the church? Effective evangelists, having heard, offer a benefit that can contribute to the life of the evangelized. In other words, they don’t evangelize because the church needs people: they evangelize because they believe something in the church can help people in their real, actual, present circumstances.

As Bonhoeffer wrote and others have affirmed, “The church is only the church when it exists for others” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison). When we use the term “effective” as an after-the-fact descriptor, we emphasize very clearly that these are not techniques to develop so much as they are gifts embodied in the act itself.

There is a new reality afoot for the church, especially the mainline American Protestant tradition. Our comfortable position as the de facto guardians of middle class morality and decency has been pulled from underneath us by a God who “takes by its corners this whole world and shakes us forward and shakes us free.” (Rich Mullins)

This new reality may be uncomfortable for a while. It may even feel like we’re dying. Some of our churches may indeed really die. But death hasn’t been a barrier to stop God in the past — why should the present, and God’s future, be any different?

Find a link to Scott Johnson’s blog at Lutheran Blogs.