What Is Evangelism?. Patricia M. Lyons

      When I ask many Episcopalians about God, they often start telling me about their church, what it’s called, how old it is, how long that person has been a member. In fact, more than once as I’ve pressed people to tell me about God and less about their church, they have looked at me in the face and said that they don’t know how to talk about God without talking about their church. We are shy about sharing our faith, because we are uncertain that our faith is making any daily or hourly difference in our lives. Being a member of a church is not the same thing as having a transformative relationship with Christ, though of course they can happen at the same time. When it comes to church, there is a difference between going and growing.

      For centuries many have been going to church, but the question is, have they been growing in their personal and collective relationship with God? We have stories about going to church, but do we have stories about growing at church? I visited a church in Ohio recently and met a man named Bill. He walked up to me after I delivered a sermon and wanted to tell me about his faith. “I am 82 years old,” he said proudly. He wanted me to know why he went to that church. “I learn something every week at this church, about God, and there aren’t many places that think I still can.” Bill doesn’t just go to church. He is learning at church. He is growing at church. It is where he is learning to have an intimate relationship with God in his daily life.

      This is why we speak of sharing the gospel in the world as reconciling the world with God. No one is introduced to God for the first time by another person. We are all created by and for God, but we also believe this freedom was given to all creation. To ignore the presence of God within us or name it or treat it as anything we want separates us from what God intended us to be.

      I believe one reason we are not helping people find and know a personal relationship with God is that we talk less and less about the soul and instead more about the details of joining or maintaining a church. Read the prayers in the prayer book or the words of our hymns that speak endlessly about the soul of the person. In the Roman Catholic Church’s Catechism, there is a definition of the soul that mirrors the Episcopal conviction that God is present and waiting to meet us in our soul at any time. This Catechism refers to the soul as one’s conscience.

      For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in the depths.⁵