Evangelistic effectiveness is largely an empirical question. When we see sinners passing from death unto life and from the power of Satan unto God, then we won’t have to write forum posts alleging that this group or that best fulfills the conditions “that the world may believe.”
I’ve never seen a Catholic organization conducting an effective soulwinning campaign and I doubt I ever shall.
I do admire, however, your medieval cathedrals.
How I Solved the Catholic Problem
by Kristine L. Franklin
This realization was earth-shaking. I saw that evangelicalism had become, by its “Bible alone” principle, a religion of the literate elite. As a missionary taking the gospel to illiterate people, I realized I had to be absolutely sure, before God, that what I was telling them was, in fact, the Christian Faith, free from error. It had to be 100 percent Truth with a capital T. The problem was, using the “Bible alone” principle I had been taught, I had no way to be absolutely sure.
I witnessed among Guatemalan Evangelicals a cacophony of conflicting teachings. Pentecostal television preachers railed against the devil and cast out demons right and left. Fundamentalist non-Pentecostal preachers were just as busy railing against the Pentecostals for speaking in tongues, which was, they warned, a sure sign that they were in cahoots with the devil.
Some preachers were teaching a “health and wealth gospel” in one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nations. Many preached American-style democracy as the “biblical” government God wanted to see in Guatemala. Baptists preached that infant baptism didn’t count and that those who practice it aren’t “true Christians.” Lutheran missionaries were busy baptizing babies. Quakers told people they didn’t need any outward symbols of Christianity.
In place of the “One Faith,” I saw in Guatemala hundreds of “faiths,” hundreds of competing preachers. When there was One Faith, Christianity swept the world like wildfire. At no time in the history of Protestantism has an entire pagan nation turned to Christ. I thought of all the many pagan groups to whom the Catholic Church came and preached the Gospel and who were converted to Christ as a result: the Slavs, the Irish, the Gauls, the Saxons, the fierce Nordic races, the Japanese, Indians of South America, Africans, the list was endless. And here we were in Guatemala as “missionaries,” making Catholics into Protestants. These people had been Catholic for five hundred years. All we were doing was “converting” Christians to our way of understanding the Bible. Not a very impressive thing when you compare it to the 2000 years of Catholic evangelization.
The most astonishing discovery came when it dawned on me through long hours of reading and studying Scripture and conservative Evangelical commentaries on biblical sufficiency that Scripture doesn’t even teach that it alone is sufficient for knowing all Truth about the Faith. Protestants presuppose sola scriptura, without giving the slightest thought to the possibility that the “Bible alone” is an incorrect view. If that presupposition were erroneous, I reasoned, then everything which was built upon it would be dubious as well.
I knew I couldn’t stay where I was as an Evangelical. I had been sharing my struggles with Marty, and he had been doing similar study and soul searching. We decided to resign from our mission board and return to the United States, where my husband took a job teaching in a public high school. Upon arrival back in the States we didn’t know where we were headed theologically, but we did know that Evangelicalism was behind us forever. From the time we made this difficult decision to the time we entered the Catholic Church, six months went by.
envoymagazine.com/backissues/0.1/solved.htm
