Reductionism

Honey, I shrunk the gospel

Last week I wrote about Prioritism - the idea that the proclamation of the gospel must be prioritized in missiology. This week I offer the struggle that prioritism has produced in well intentioned ministries: reductionism.

Reductionism occurs when we try to scale, systematize, or make spirituality more efficient. Sometimes that means we try to make it short, sometimes it means we try to make it acceptable to the masses.

The prime example of this is just about any short-form gospel presentation. I am referring to things like The Bridge Illustration, The 4 Spiritual Laws, Roman’s Road, and so on. These are all helpful tools to explaining the gospel message to somebody. They are all reductionist tools, reducing the gospel to shortened version that inevitably truncates meaning.

Last week I was at lunch with an old friend, a missionary from Southeast Asia. We were at a Turkish restaurant and the young woman serving us had a Turkish accent. At the end of the meal, my friend asked her if she knew much about Jesus. “A little,” was the giggled reply. “Here,” he said, “take this and read about Jesus.” He gave her a little leatherbound book that contained the stories of Jesus (the four gospels). As we talked about this on the ride home, he noted that these books are better than tracts because a person can read the words of Jesus for themselves, in their entirety. So, while Bible containing only the four gospels is indeed reductionist, it provides so much more context than most “drive by” gospel tracts which are utterly reductionist.

This year I am well aware of reductionism because our annual theme at Missio Nexus is evangelism. Our annual conference this year (I hope you will join us! Click here for information) will feature different ideas and views about evangelism. I publish a monthly “CEO Only” email and when I wrote about evangelism, some of the responses surprised me. For example, one leader wrote, “We don’t do evangelism in our ministry.” Well, I had to know more, so I asked how a missionary agency avoids evangelism. What I learned was that this leader really meant “traditional forms of evangelism” like those mentioned above. In reality, this organization was doing hundreds of Bible studies with spiritually open people, explaining the gospel through the narrative of the Bible. This is, of course, evangelism. But the term has been muddied, and in large part this is because of reductionist presentations. Other ministry organizations similarly responded. I realize now that “evangelism” as a word is a bit bound in the 1970s in many people’s minds.

Reductionism doesn’t just occur with evangelism. There is a debate raging among field missionaries about movement-oriented ministry approaches. One of the concerns is that movement approaches reduce the understanding of church. They charge that “church” is being reduced to nothing more than a roomful of people studying the Bible. They further suggest that this happens because the movements are designed to “scale” (grow) and thus they redefine what a church is. Whether or not this is fair is beyond this post but note that reductionism may apply to more than evangelism.

In our social media age, in which we seek to convey the deep spiritual truth of the gospel, reductionism is a significant temptation. Videos of 30 seconds or less, tweets that are necessarily short, and emails that are only partially digested and read all lend themselves to reductionism.

A driver of reductionism are the metrics we use for ministry. For pastors, the most important metric is often head count. They don’t like it, they know it is a poor metric, but one of the first questions they ask other pastors (and get asked) is, “How big is your church?” Similarly, when we count professions of faith, baptisms, or church plants we may be veering into reductionism. None of these are adequate for understanding heart-change, spiritual brokenness, or other markers of deep discipleship.

I heard this struggle just yesterday when I spoke with somebody working to grow marketplace ministry. The traditional measurements used in missions are hard for marketplace missions to achieve. They do not want to be held to a standard like counting baptisms or church plants. Instead, I heard the language of transformation. This is powerful, biblical language and it is not improper for us to yearn for transformation as God works in the hearts of others. Transformation, though, is slippery. How do you know when somebody is transformed? On a good day I realize how “untransformed” I am. Thus, I always walk away from these conversations feeling like transformation, while theologically rich, lacks helpful handles for ministry practitioners.

At Missio Nexus we like to say, “Join Missio Nexus if you care about evangelism, discipleship, and planting churches.” I understand that this itself is a bit reductionist. It is something I wrestle over. Yet, I also know that “ambiguous ends are aimless friends.” There is a reason for focus even if it carries with it the potential of reductionism. This is a balance that must be lived with instead of solved. That can be hard for us as Evangelicals.

I mentioned reductionism once in a panel discussion that took place at a conference. One of the people who heard me challenged me afterward. “Jesus was a reductionist, you know,” he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “he reduced the whole of the Jewish Law down to two little points.” I did not know how to respond in the moment. After, as I reflected on this, I realized that the opposite was true. Jesus was not reducing the law but expanding it. It was no longer a matter of simple obedience to the law. It was the heart attitude that went along with that obedience. Heart attitudes are hard to measure, making them resistance to reductionist evaluations. Jesus shows that we can be short and concise without being reductionist.

Does this all mean that we avoid sharing the gospel unless we have weeks and months to explain in great detail? Of course not. We should be casting the seeds regardless of the soil. We cannot know a person’s heart and should not prejudge their response. At the same time, we need to be realistic about the efficacy of efficient, short-form evangelism.

We don’t want to shrink the gospel but share it in as much fulness as possible.