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Photo credit: Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez Merino (1928-2024), O.P., who is regarded as the father of liberation theology. Photo courtesy of Notre Dame/Matt Cashore

I want to talk to you this morning about two rather charged topics in the Christian faith: evangelism and conversion. In my 20s, I spent some time coaching soccer camps in the Lower Mainland with an organization called Athletes in Action. We ran day camps for kids all over Vancouver and the greater Vancouver area. I had a lot of fun; it was a great summer job. Athletes in Action is an Evangelical Christian organization. It’s a “proselytizing” organization, meaning that a big part of its mission is to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in order to convert people to the Christian faith, a mission popularly known as “winning souls for Christ.”

I was an Evangelical at the time; I don’t know that I would call myself one anymore, that’s a sermon for another time, maybe. For a long time, though, I understood and was able to get behind this model of evangelism. Once a week at the soccer camps, we would tell our stories to the campers of how we came to accept Jesus into our hearts as our personal Lord and Saviour. For the most part, these were positive experiences—sharing in a kid-friendly way what it was that compelled us to be Christians. That was until it all started to fall apart a little, until there were some cracks in our method where the light was getting in, exposing the limits of our approach.

One of the other coaches, let’s call him Tom, he said to me one week after I had shared my story how amazing it was that I was a Christian even though no one in my family was. I kind of stopped and looked at him, because I hadn’t actually said I was the only Christian in my family. I said to him, “But my mum is a long time member of the United Church of Canada, and my auntie is a minister, and my other auntie is a New Testament scholar. What do you mean no one in my family is a Christian?” 

He said, “But are they Bible-believing Christians?” 

I had actually asked my family this question many times throughout my teen years when, instead of smoking pot and drinking, I rebelled against my parents by becoming an Evangelical. I had asked members of my family if they were Bible-believing Christians and they had been very patient with me and tried to explain that the phrase ‘Bible-believing Christian’ was a relatively modern convention from a particular strain of Christianity; it didn’t tell the whole story.

As outrageous as it seems now that my fellow soccer coach Tom would have had the gall to say who was and wasn’t a real Christian in my own family—or in anyone's family for that matter—looking back, I actually feel compassion for Tom. I understood him, I think. I knew what it was like as a young adult to try really hard to make yourself fit into this one version of being something (for me, it was this one version of being a Christian, of being a woman). 

I think Tom also reminded me, in a way, of Peter and the disciples who had a really hard time understanding that the message of Jesus might be interpreted or lived out differently than how they understood it or claimed it for themselves. I love Peter’s vision in our reading from Acts this morning. Peter sees all of these animals that he’s been taught his whole life are unclean and shouldn’t be touched, and it’s this metaphor for the Gentiles, the different nations and ethnicities his community have been deliberately setting themselves apart from for centuries. I reckon it’s like if Elon Musk were to fall asleep, and having gone to bed dreaming of the white Afrikkaaners who would soon join him in the United States, found instead that his dream was filled with refugees of every race and nation. 

There’s a video on the Internet that’s gone viral about a boy living amidst the conflict in India and Pakistan. A reporter is interviewing the boy, the boy is 12 or 13 years old, and the reporter is pressing him to say whether he’s for India or for Pakistan. The boy says, what’s the difference, there are Muslims in India, there are Muslims in Pakistan; there are Hindus in Pakistan, there are Hindus in India. People are killed here; people are killed there. The reporter continues to press the child, what’s his name, his full name, where is he from. When he learns that the boy is Indian, the reporter says, “Don’t you feel even a little bit ashamed that you’re living in India and supporting Pakistan?”

The boy says, “No. Everyone has a right to live.”

The reporter says, “Tell me, who taught you this?”

The boy says, “Bro, I have a brain, man!”

Everyone has a right to live. Anyone with a brain ought to understand this. Or, to put it in the words of our scripture reading this morning: “God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

How, then, might we begin to think through what evangelism and conversion means for Christians today? In a recent article published in the Victoria Times Colonist, Lutheran pastor Lyndon Sayers talks about how “spiritual communities have an opportunity to build up leaders to serve others.” He talks about how “[c]ommunity-centred spiritual movements” like churches, for example, teach us that what we really need is the Other and each other, that “[m]utual flourishing is made possible through cooperation”.

He goes on to quote the late Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Roman Catholic theologian from Peru. Back in 1971 in A Theology of Liberation, Gutiérrez wrote: “A spirituality of liberation will centre on a conversion to the neighbour, the oppressed person, the exploited social class, the despised ethnic group, the dominated country. Our conversion to Christ implies this conversion to the neighbour…Conversion means a radical transformation of ourselves; it means thinking, feeling, and living as Christ—present in exploited and alienated persons. To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed . . . .”

I wonder what it would look like to think of winning souls for Christ, to think of evangelism not as conversion of our neighbour, but conversion to our neighbour? Amen.