Wednesday, January 24, 2001

Everytime I read something like [Dr. John Hatcher's recent] column, which says that the main purpose of Christians is to convert nonbelievers, I feel a mixture of anger and frustration.

Anger because Baptists like yourself stress "witnessing" over the vastly more important command of our Lord, which was to love God and love our neighbors. Jesus said, "When you pray, don't be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them.... When you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father secretly."

We don't need to be constantly proclaiming our faith to others. As a matter of fact, doing so often spills over into becoming spiritual pride, which is just as destructive and sinful as any other kind of pride.

I feel frustration because I believe you are obscuring and misrepresenting the central message of Christianity. Jesus and the New Testament writers do tell us to spread the word, but they don't say it's our main purpose.

In my view and in the view of centuries of Christian writers and thinkers, the Christian life is in some ways mainly an internal thing. We are supposed to root out our own sinful nature and be kind, loving, forgiving, and patient with others. (As a matter of fact, when it comes to our neighbors, I think there are more injunctions against judging them than perhaps anything else other than simply loving them.)

Always telling Christians that they ought to witness at every opportunity shifts the focus from the internal to the external, and seeks to prove one's faith through external actions that very often have little to do with actually loving our neighbors.

Rather than preach to them, we ought to be kind when they make us angry; rather than tell them to believe in God, we ought to show them through our patience and generosity what a belief in God can do.

Christ said we should be fishers of men, and to do so we need to use different bait and tackle for different fish. Some may respond to aggressive evangelizing, as you advocate, but I believe many, many people are repulsed by it and require a subtler approach.

There is no doubt the evangelical movement has been successful in gaining many converts and saving many souls. But it has also been responsible for alienating a perhaps larger group in our society by its overreliance on emotionalism, moral self-righteousness, and its intransigent stance against science and reason as threats to faith, rather than as buttresses of it.

Besides, your characterization of St. Francis was quite wrong and mildly if not overtly anti-Catholic in tone. First of all, in St. Francis' day there wasn't a bunch of nonbelievers to be converted. (The rise in nonbelievers didn't begin in earnest until Protestantism gained strength and fragmented Christianity.)

Second, his whole purpose was to put God's love into action and reinvigorate the faith by preaching to the common man in his own language and removing Christianity from its more legalistic and dry dogmatics. If you were to choose a Catholic to pick on, you should have picked St. Augustine, who was much more strident in his emphasis of the internal nature of the Christian life.

Also, your column a few weeks back when you scoffed at the congregant who died of a heart attack after several years of looking down upon lower-income members of his church was incredibly contrary to the spirit and requirements of our faith.

You should have forgiven that man his all-too-human weaknesses instead of chastising him and mocking him in his death. Loving people like him is what our purpose is, not preaching on the corner for our own prideful satisfaction.

I thought it interesting in your article that quotes to back up your contention that the most important thing we can do as Christians is to convert our non-believing brethren were few and far between, and I think I have a reason: although as Christians we are commanded to spread the good news, loving God and loving our neighbor takes precedence over anything else. That is our purpose.

Or at least, I think it can be reasonably argued that loving God and our neighbor is a more important purpose than constantly "witnessing" to our neighbors, many of whom find that particular practice off-putting and insulting and who come to have a negative view of Christianity as a result of it (me included).

Trey Hoffman

Member of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

Peachtree City

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