Puritan Evangelism by J.I. Packer

In the report of the Archbishop’s Committee on Evangelism, published in 1945 under the title: Towards the Conversion of England, the work of evangelism is conveniently defined as follows: “so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Savior, and serve Him as their King in fellowship of His Church.”

 

Did the Puritans tackle the task of evangelism at all? At first sight, it might seem not. They agreed with Calvin in regarding the “evangelists” mentioned in the New Testament as an order of assistants to the apostles, now extinct; and as for “missions,” “crusades” and “campaigns,” they knew neither the name nor the thing. But we must not be misled into supposing that evangelism was not one of their chief concerns. It was. Many of them were outstandingly successful as preachers to the unconverted. Richard Baxter, the apostle of Kidderminster, is perhaps the only one of these that is widely remembered today; but in contemporary records it is common to read statements like this, of Hugh Clark: “he begat many Sons and Daughters unto God;” or this, of John Cotton, “the presence of the Lord…crowning his labors with the Conversion of many Souls” (S. Clarke, Lives of 52…Divines, pp.131, 222, etc.) Moreover, it was the Puritans who invented evangelistic literature. One has only to think of Baxter’s classic Call to the Unconverted, and Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted, which were pioneer works in this class of writing. And the elaborate practical “handling” of the subject of conversion in Puritan books was regarded by the rest of the seventeenth-century Protestant world as something of unique value. “It hath been one of the glories of the Protestant religion that it revived the doctrine of Saving Conversion, and of the New Creature brought forth thereby…But in a more eminent manner, God hath cast the honor hereof upon the Ministers and Preachers of this Nation, who are renowned abroad for their more accurate search into and discoveries hereof.” (T. Goodwin and P. Nye, Preface to T. Hooker, The Application of Redemption, 1656).

The truth is that two distinct conceptions and types of evangelism have been developed in Protestant Christendom during the course of its history. We may call them the “Puritan” type and the “modern” type. Today we are so accustomed to evangelism of the modern type that we scarcely recognize the other is evangelism at all. In order that we may fully grasp the character of the Puritan type of evangelism, I shall here set it in contrast with the modern type, which has so largely superseded it at the present time.  Continue at Refocusing Our Eyes