My grandmother was an evangelist. Offering a piece of pie to any teenager or adult who came in her door (a Texan-Baptist, she always had freshly baked pie), within minutes she would be engaged in a lively discussion of faith. In public, she would move from placing her order with a waiter or paying for a hotel room to presenting the “plan of salvation” with seamless conversational grace.
I have something of my grandmother running through my veins. Conversations about life and faith exhilarate me and come naturally. In fact, others broach these topics with me, on flights and at school. But I am not a Southern Baptist as my grandmother was; I am an Episcopal priest. Episcopalians do “outreach,” not evangelism. We do social justice and good liturgy, not revivals and salvation tracts. We re-incorporate disenfranchised and disillusioned Christians into the church; we don’t call sinners to repentance. At our best we testify to God’s grace that “befriends” human flesh and doesn’t destroy it; uphold mystery in common prayer; and bear the marks of Christ’s reconciliation, of diversity in unity and unity in diversity. Yet, I cannot escape the feeling that we have lost some of the loving zeal so central to the early church’s identity, to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of sins…in [Jesus’s] name” (Luke 24:47).
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