This article first appeared in the July 4, 1999, issue of The Living Church.
By Bill Ferguson
“There’s a dramatic shift going on in the Anglican Church, with great growth in Africa and Asia while in America the church continues to lose ground. The average person in the Anglican Communion is no longer white, well off and comfortable but Third World, black, poor, evangelical, and almost certainly charismatic.” This was the observation of the Rev. Michael Green of Oxford, consultant on evangelism to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, in a keynote address at the Evangelism Congress ’99 held June 3-6 at Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina. The conference was sponsored by the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and the Evangelism Office of the national Episcopal Church. Nearly 500 people from all over the U.S. participated in three days of worship, gospel music, noted speakers, and workshops, all dealing with aspects of evangelism.
Using Dickens’s words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Fr. Green described the “best” as the growth of the church in the Third World, “80,000 to 90,000 becoming Christians every day — 20 percent in China.” Against this, he related the statistics for the Episcopal Church over 10 years: “loss of a third of membership, including 400,000 in the Decade of Evangelism.” He spoke of disunity, internal conflict, and “single-issue people” as contributing to the decline. But he was optimistic about the possibilities. Calling the congress “very wise,” he said that the best defense is to advance, “and this congress is doing just that. There’s no reason why you can’t turn the tide through evangelism.”
With the vision of church growth in Africa before them, the congress heard from the Most Rev. Emmanuel Kolini, Archbishop of Rwanda. He spoke of “mysterious” events in his land, the 1935 East African Revival that started in Rwanda, and of the 1994 genocide that swept his country. “Ninety percent of Rwandese are supposed to be Christians,” he said, yet terrible events happened. He witnessed killings in Uganda by ldi Amin’s soldiers. And he said he struggled with the Christian way of forgiveness. Finally he decided, “By the grace of God I can do it.”
The Rev. Franklin Reid, rector of St. Luke’s Church, Bronx, N.Y., achieved rapid and rapt attention when he declared, “I bury more children than adults.” He said “there is pain in the city,” citing gangs, drugs, and crime. He sees the crying need for evangelism relating to the “something” people are looking for, the “something” they are coming to church to find. He urged his listeners to evangelize “by the working of God’s Spirit.”
The Very Rev. John Rodgers Jr., former dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, chose 1 Peter 3:15 to emphasize the need for Christians to speak out about their beliefs. Peter was speaking of Christians being persecuted for the gospel’s sake. He said people are not allowed to speak out in many places such as Sudan, India, and Islamic nations. “But we are protected by law, so be faint-hearted no longer. Be a witness no matter the cost.”
The 1988 Lambeth Conference resolved that the 1990s should be a “Decade of Evangelism,” marked by “renewed emphasis on making Christ known to the people of his world,” with special initiatives in each province. The Rev. Michael Green (1930-2019), a senior leader among evangelical Anglicans, led the Springboard Initiative, which trained lay evangelists, and led conferences to develop the Church of England’s passion for sharing Christ with others throughout the decade. The Decade of Evangelism was largely deemed a failure in the Global North, but Anglican churches in the Global South, especially in East Africa and Southeast Asia, grew dramatically during the 1990s.
