The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori discusses the new communication strategies and how they relate to one of our primary ministries of evangelism in the current issue of Episcopal Life Online:
You will read this as our news coverage of the Episcopal Church makes a major transition from a print-primary presence to publishing primarily through electronic media. This shift has been in the works since before the last General Convention. Some of you will find little difference as this change works itself through, continuing to receive a diocesan and churchwide newspaper delivered through the U.S. Postal Service. In other cases, a diocesan paper edition may shift to online media and/or cease paper production altogether.
In part, this shift recognizes the financial and ecological burdens of producing a monthly newspaper that is mailed to subscribers. In part, this shift recognizes what is happening all around us, as information sharing becomes far more rapid and immediate than the capabilities of print media. More and more people receive their news electronically rather than in the morning newspaper – though I must admit I haven’t yet figured out how to conveniently read an online morning paper over breakfast!
…
This has significant connections to evangelism – the ways in which we tell the good news of Jesus. Similar changes are needed in the ways in which we tell good news in our own communities, to those who know little or nothing of the gospel. We can no longer think we are doing evangelism simply by waiting for people to come to church on Sunday morning – that isn’t adequate in most of the contexts in which the Episcopal Church exists, if it ever was.
Increasing percentages of the population around us don’t know who we are or why we exist. We need to find new ways of telling the old, old story – ways that are congruent with the joys and challenges of the people and societies around us.
This kind of recontextualizing of the gospel is (and has been) necessary in every age, since the first apostles. The Samaritan woman went home from her water break with Jesus to tell her friends and neighbors about the person she had just encountered (John 4). She didn’t hang around the well waiting for them to show up. She didn’t write a tract and post it next to the bucket. She didn’t even produce a drama to tell the story. She went and found her friends and told her own story.
The Diocese of Bethlehem, during a recent visit by the PB, tells more about how communications and evangelism work together:
The Evangelism Commission shared our story, our process and our dreams as well as our accomplishments and our sometimes-successful-and-sometimes-not experiments. I thought that she engaged us the most when we began to talk about “effective communication of the Good News of Jesus Christ” to those outside the church. Bishop Katharine asked questions of us, wanted to know what worked, and was very interested to know about our work with Unbinding the Gospel. (Our gift to her was a copy of that book with a bookmark placed in Chapter Eight, which is where I think that every clergyperson should read first before going into the whole series.)
We were very cheered to hear talk about the things she learned about us when she preached and answered questions. She spoke of the joys and challenges of “telling what we have seen and heard” and we heard her talk directly about evangelism, putting it square into the context of mission. Her words and example went a long way towards “de-toxifying” the dreaded “E” word in the Diocese of Bethlehem.