Evangelism

We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

— 2 Corinthians 5:20

Evangelism is the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who do not believe it, calling them to repent of sin and trust Christ for salvation. It names an act of communication rather than a general disposition or manner of life: the church’s ordinary work of declaring the good news, through preaching, teaching, and personal witness, to those who have not yet heard or believed it.¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to evangelism or missions as such; the confession’s account of how sinners come to faith belongs instead to effectual calling, where chapter 10 states the doctrine of the call itself.² What belongs here is the wider Reformed confessional family’s teaching that God has appointed gospel preaching as the means by which he calls sinners, and that the resulting offer is genuine and addressed to all who hear it, not merely to the elect. The Canons of Dort describe God as working through human proclamation:

And that men may be brought to believe, God mercifully sends the messengers of these most joyful tidings, to whom he will and at what time he pleaseth; by whose ministry men are called to repentance and faith in Christ crucified. Romans 10:14, 15: “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?”³

Dort goes on to state that the promise attached to this preaching is sincere and universal in its address, whatever its particular effect:

The promise of the gospel is, that whosoever believeth in Christ crucified, shall not perish, but have everlasting life. This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be declared and published to all nations, and to all persons promiscuously and without distinction, to whom God out of his good pleasure sends the gospel.⁴

Biblical Basis

Christ’s own commission to his disciples grounds the church’s ongoing task: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20), stated in similar terms in Mark 16:15-16.⁵ Paul makes the same logic explicit in Romans: calling on the Lord depends on believing, believing depends on hearing, and hearing depends on someone sent to preach (Rom. 10:13-15). He describes the preacher’s own role in 2 Corinthians as one who speaks for Christ himself: “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20).⁶

The book of Acts narrates this proclamation in both individual and public settings. Philip explains the gospel to the Ethiopian eunuch from the text of Isaiah he is already reading (Acts 8:26-39), while Paul reasons from the Athenians’ own altar “to the unknown god” to the resurrection of Christ before the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34), appealing first to the hearers’ natural knowledge of God the Creator before declaring what God has done in Christ.⁷

Historical Development

The doctrine of a real but resistible outward call, distinct from the Spirit’s effectual work within the elect, traces to Augustine and “was borrowed from him by Calvin, and thus made prominent in Reformed theology.”⁵ On this account the gospel call is genuinely addressed to every hearer through the preached word, even though it becomes savingly effective only where the Spirit applies it to the heart.

The hyper-Calvinist controversy and its resolution

Among mid-eighteenth-century English Particular Baptists, several influential ministers drew the doctrine of election into a denial that the unregenerate have any duty to repent and believe, a position later called hyper-Calvinism.⁸ Andrew Fuller answered this directly in The Gospel of Christ Worthy of All Acceptation (1785), reasserting that faith and repentance are commanded of every hearer regardless of ability.⁸ Fuller’s recovery of this “duty-faith” cleared the theological ground for William Carey’s 1792 Baptist Missionary Society, the founding event of the modern missionary movement within a Calvinistic Baptist context. Hyper-Calvinism resurfaced in the following century in James Wells (1803-1872) and was again answered within Baptist life, this time by Charles Spurgeon.⁸

Opposing Views

Arminian theology holds that the universal proclamation of the gospel is accompanied by a universal, sufficient grace enabling any hearer, of their own will, to respond, rather than a call that becomes effectual only for the elect.⁹

Hyper-Calvinism denies that the unconverted have any duty to repent and believe, and on that ground has historically discouraged addressing the call to repent and believe indiscriminately to unconverted hearers.⁸ That article treats the position, and the Fuller-Carey-Spurgeon response to it, at greater length.

Objections and Responses

If God has already elected who will be saved, evangelism serves no real purpose. The Reformed answer is that God ordains the means together with the end: the preaching of the gospel is itself the appointed instrument by which God brings his elect to faith, not a redundant activity alongside an already-settled outcome. Loraine Boettner states the principle under the heading “The Means as Well as the Ends Are Foreordained.”¹⁰

A sincere, universal offer of salvation is inconsistent with a particular call that actually saves only the elect. Scripture holds both without collapsing either into the other. As Matthew Barrett puts it, “Scripture simultaneously affirms four truths: (1) man’s inability, (2) God’s well-meant offer, (3) man’s duty to repent, and (4) God’s sovereign, effectual grace only for the elect,” a tension he frames as one Scripture maintains rather than resolving toward either side.¹¹ The Canons of Dort state the same point confessionally: the promise of the gospel is to be “declared and published to all nations, and to all persons promiscuously and without distinction,” even though its effect follows God’s own sovereign purpose.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 580: “The duty of the Church to preach the Word is plainly taught in many passages of Scripture, such as Isa. 3:10,11; II Cor. 5:20; I Tim. 4:13; II Tim. 2:15; 4:2; Tit. 2:1-10.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), First Head of Doctrine, art. 3. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Second Head of Doctrine, art. 4. ↩ ↩²
Berkhof, 443-444: the external call “is presupposed in the great commission, as it is found in Mark 16:15,16… The parable of the marriage feast in Matt. 22:2-14 clearly teaches that some who were invited did not come, and concludes with the well-known words: ‘For many are called, but few chosen.’” ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 88-171, at 121. ↩
Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 144. ↩
Barrett, “Reclaiming Monergism,” 129, including n.153, citing Andrew Fuller, The Gospel of Christ Worthy of All Acceptation (1785). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Berkhof, 444: Arminians held that “the universal proclamation of the gospel is accompanied by a universal sufficient grace… This marked the beginning of a rationalistic return to the Pelagian position, which entirely denies the necessity of an internal operation of the Holy Spirit unto salvation.” ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1932), sec. “The Means as Well as the Ends Are Foreordained.” ↩
Barrett, “Reclaiming Monergism,” 142-143. ↩