WHEATON, Ill. (BP)–Jews who believe in Jesus have been the perennial Rodney Dangerfields of evangelical Christianity — they get no respect.
Their nonbelieving Jewish brethren have long denied their very existence. In recent years, as their growing numbers have been impossible to deny, they have been excoriated as Jewish heretics. Gentile Christians for years have assimilated Jewish believers into non-Jewish churches, essentially erasing their cultural heritage. More recently, in the spirit of interfaith tolerance, some Christians have gone so far as to decide the sons and daughters of Abraham don’t need to believe in Jesus to be saved.
But thanks to last summer’s resolution by the Southern Baptist Convention affirming the validity of evangelizing Jewish people, Jews and Gentiles have been forced to face the issue anew: The SBC’s “Resolution on Jewish Evangelism” urges renewed Southern Baptist efforts for “proclamation of the gospel to the Jewish people.”
Jim Sibley, with the support of messianic Southern Baptist congregations, was the resolution’s author. Sibley, formerly a Foreign Mission Board church planter in Israel, began serving as coordinator for Jewish ministries for the Home Mission Board last June. The position had gone unfunded and unfilled the previous eight years. Sibley first submitted the resolution to the convention in 1993, but it did not get out of committee until last year, when the HMB interfaith witness department became a cosponsor.
Reactions of the Jewish community have often been sharp, with words such as “spiritual genocide,” “a great disservice … to Christian-Jewish relations,” and “intolerance” generating more heat than light.
Moishe Rosen, founder of the San Francisco-based Jews for Jesus, estimates about 60,000 Jewish believers in Jesus worldwide. He commended Southern Baptists for sticking their necks out. “I think they need to be encouraged, because the strategy of the Jewish leadership is to manipulate through indignation,” Rosen said. “In a sense, they choose to be offended.”
“Nonbelieving Jewish communities have expressed a great deal of fear and dismay,” Sibley acknowledged, “because they believe we intend to convert them from being Jewish to being Gentiles.” Rather, “Our purpose is more to convert them from being Jews who do not have a relationship with the God of their fathers to Jews who do,” he said.
In contrast, Hebrew Christians have been some of the most vociferous backers of the resolution. “What Jewish community leaders are calling a ‘great setback’ in Jewish-Christian relations,” explained David Brickner, a fifth-generation Jewish believer who last year became executive director of Jews for Jesus, “is really a great leap forward in crystallizing the issue that Jesus is the Messiah for everyone, including Jews.”
Phil Roberts, director of the HMB interfaith witness department, said some in the denomination have been outspoken in their opposition to the resolution, the 11th such resolution in the convention’s history (but the first since early this century). One pastor in San Antonio visited a synagogue in San Antonio and apologized. The president of a key Baptist university wrote a letter to a newspaper distancing himself from the resolution. A group of pastors in Houston proposed modifying the statement almost beyond recognition.
Even Billy Graham has been a disappointment to some. The international evangelist said in a prepared statement, “I have never taken part in organizations or projects that especially targeted Jews. I preach the gospel to any and all who come to our meetings — whether Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, Christian or people of no faith — they are all welcome.”
Graham’s response was particularly galling to groups involved in the Lausanne Movement, which Graham helped found. An offshoot of the movement, spearheaded by various Jewish Christian groups, is the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism. The LCJE formulated the Willowbank Declaration on the necessity of witness to Jews; it was incorporated into the Manila Manifesto at the Lausanne II conference in 1989. The LCJE, which produces a journal and holds regular meetings, has brought Jewish believers into the evangelical mainstream, according to Arthur Glasser, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission in California.
In the first century one of the key debates was whether a Gentile had to become a Jew to embrace Christ. Today it’s whether a Jew must become a Gentile to be a follower of Jesus. Said Glasser: “During the last 20 years, there has been something of tremendous significance that has taken place within Jewish mission work. Among Jewish believers in Jesus, there is no longer a desire to just become assimilated members of Baptist churches and that sort of thing. They want to be Jewish through and through. The Lausanne Movement stressed the validity of culture and cultural identification. You had the beginnings of messianic Jewish congregations.”
Jewish congregations, which observe feasts and other Jewish cultural traditions while maintaining their Christ-centered focus, are now the preferred means to reach out to Jewish people for many organizations. Sam Nadler, former CEO of Chosen People Ministries, Charlotte, N.C., ticks off cities such as Washington and Berlin where congregations of Jewish believers are having an impact.
According to Glasser, there are about 100 messianic congregations in the United States now. Thirty of them have ties to the Southern Baptist Convention. Israel is home to 40 such churches and somewhere between 2,200 and 4,000 believers. Glasser said members in Israel want to take a visible stand for their faith, which they insist is Jewish.
Messianic churches have altered the terms of the debate, Brickner said. “I would say that prior to the 1970s, Jewish evangelism was seen as a fairly fruitless endeavor. The Jewish community leadership could say, … ‘Jews don’t believe in Jesus.’ That was the only answer that was needed when someone would proclaim the gospel … . Now they just try to cast a cloud over our identity and try to excommunicate us, which they have to do. If they were to say, ‘It’s OK for Jews to believe in Jesus,’ the floodgates would open. I believe there’s a great deal of curiosity among Jewish people concerning Jesus.”
As evidence, Jews for Jesus reports that 1.1 million people accepted gospel tracts during a summer witnessing campaign in New York City last summer. The theme of the campaign was “Be More Jewish — Believe in Jesus.” A counter-campaign by Jewish community groups had its own slogan: “NO WAY.” When the dust had settled, more than 700 people publicly received Christ, including 57 Jews, and 7,500 more gave their names and addresses for follow-up.
Estimates vary as to the number of Jewish believers in the United States, with an upper limit generally of about 50,000. Larry Lewis, former president of the Home Mission Board, noted how strategic the oft-overlooked United States is when it comes to Jewish ministry. “There are more Jews in New York City alone than there are in the whole nation of Israel,” Lewis said. “(Yet) here in the United States we had no one working with Jewish people.”
Rosen voices a blunt reaction to trends he finds among some evangelicals, who promote “love for Israel” or hold an eschatological view as a means of lessening their responsibility to evangelize Jews. “You can comfort my people all the way to a Christless eternity,” Rosen said, “and bid them goodbye when they come to the door of hell.”
Among the rationalizations commonly advanced for not preaching to Jews is the Holocaust. Glasser finds this excuse lacking as well, noting that in 1948, when memories of the genocide were still fresh, leaders in the World Council of Churches were calling Christians to “return to our task of evangelizing Jewish people. Here we are in 1996, and they’ll have none of it.”
Nadler and others encourage Gentile Christians to buck the inclusivist trend and continue reaching out to Jews without timidity. “Wherever Christians share their faith openly and lovingly, there are opportunities,” Nadler said. “Jewish people need to know that the gospel is for them.”
Art Glasser, whose interest in Jewish ministry was sparked when he began distributing Scriptures to Jews while a student at Moody Bible Institute in 1938 and 1939, concurred. Glasser pointed to the continuing prominence of the Jewish people on the world stage, the increasing numbers of Jewish believers worldwide and to the state of Israel itself.
“I’m no person for charts,” he said. “(But) you and I live in significant days. Things are happening today that haven’t happened for a long time.”
–30–
