Aaron Edwards has written here about “When the State bans Street preaching”. I agree with him that such a ban is possible and likely to happen, not so much through directly anti-Christian legislation but by action, as we are currently seeing in Birmingham in the name of public order and protection from nuisance.
Now, I’m a little bit more optimistic about the potential response to such attempts from evangelical leaders and that perhaps reflects some differences between him and me on how we should have responded to other issues and maybe a misunderstanding about the reasoning.
“Once Christian street preachers refuse the aforementioned “advice”, they will start getting arrested for non-compliance. When this happens, these evangelical leaders will not only not come to their aid but will more likely dissociate themselves from them, opposing them with all the fervour of a street preacher.
They will denounce them as bad citizens (therefore, bad Christians), saying how they tried to warn them against such foolish antisocial behaviour, decrying how such people are “spoiling the Christian witness for the rest of us”, “setting us back another twenty years”, and “undoing all the careful work of local churches faithfully sowing seeds in their local area”, etc.
Meanwhile, they will continue to publicly affirm the good work of the local police who will continue to send several officers at a time to dramatically arrest yet more brothers in Christ on the street, online, and in their homes.
I suspect, though I could be wrong, that this is a reference to what has happened in relation to abortion clinic buffer zones and at the Keswick Convention, the other year. I don’t want to revisit the arguments concerning those matters in too much detail, except in so far as they relate to the issue now. There may also be a bit of a nudge here at disagreements over COVID.
First, with regards to abortion buffer zones, my own primary concern here is not about whether or not people should have unhindered freedom to protest, I think they should. I think we have to respect that there is a difference between the freedom to protest and the freedom not to be harassed. We may even think that in certain cases, that should not be so, we may also disagree with the use of PSPOs to achieve this but we can still say that whatever we might advise, that freedoms should be protected. My own issue here has been with Christians engaging in protest under the cover of “silent prayer”. This is, I would argue, a misuse of prayer.
Secondly, with regards to Keswick, what we clearly saw there, was not an issue in terms of Christians failing to support other Christians in their right to protest and speak in the name of Christian witness but rather, that some Christians for the purposes of a dispute with other Christians created a nuisance to the wider public.
Linked to this, I think we have to pick up on Aaron’s shrewd observation when he says that:
“The reason street preaching remains especially relevant today is not necessarily that it is the most fruitful or effective form of public witness. Lots of street preaching really isn’t. It’s often wildly ineffective, even if we should never write off what God may be doing even in the hearts of those who walk by, apparently despising it.
Some street preachers who revel in the Christlike call to be “despised” by the world (because no one wants to hear them) might also reflect that there are better and worse ways of doing it when seeking to communicate to apathetic passers by who did not necessarily request a sermon on their way through town that afternoon.”
I would go a little bit further and say that such approaches are frustrating because in the desire to become martyrs for their own ends, some preachers have contributed to the kind of culture where legal restrictions can be presented as necessary. They have hindered the work of others seeking to get out and tell the Gospel. If a preacher in Birmingham ranting all day via a megaphone leads to clamp downs not just on loudspeakers in the city centre but on giving out literature in the rest of the city, then they haven’t just become a martyr and no doubt will be the ones who quickly gain Christian media attention when they are arrested but they will have put obstacles in the place when others like me start to experience restrictions on our activities too.
In any case, primarily here, I want to highlight and agree with much of Aaron’s concern. Street preaching/street evangelism matters. It matters because as he argues, Christian faith is a public matter and so cannot just allow law and cultural norms to create a society, or rather a population of individuals living in privatised bubbles.
It is perhaps ironic, that many of the people who bristle so much at Margaret Thatcher’s famously misunderstood, out of context statement that “there is no such thing as society” have allowed that statement to come true in ways that she never accepted. Her full speech made it clear that we are not individual islands but are connected to one another through families and neighbours. Yet, if we are just individuals living in bubbles with our responsibilities to one another subcontracted to the state then we have killed off society.
The other point is this, that whilst some forms of street preaching are ineffective and counter productive, street/public evangelism is not. Indeed, I would argue that one of our problems is that much of the Evangelical Church has deserted the public space. Evangelism happens best when it is a corporate activity of the church. Effective witness from street evangelism is not about a few random words caught on the wind but rather when members of the public get to see Christians worshipping, get to clearly hear, or receive Scripture to read and have the opportunity to talk and pray with believers. Many of the measures we see coming into place now actually make such efforts harder. However, the church has already evacuated that space already. In so doing, we’ve left the space to a mixture of parachurch organisations and individuals, sometimes out there on the streets because we would have questions about their gifting and approach so would not have them preaching in church.
For those reasons, I think we need to do more than just oppose reactively examples where Christians find their freedom impeded but we need as the church/local churches to reclaim and renew public evangelism.
Faithroots 