Proselytism and Church Relations

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Veli-Matti Karkkainen

The Catholic dialogue team offered several examples of what is the opposite to this, namely proselytism, following the above cited Common Witness and Proselytism.(23) They also underlined the fact that if Pentecostals ask Catholics to define the phenomenon of proselytism in concert rather than apart from them and for them, Pentecostals would do well to define salvation together with Catholics. For Catholics, salvation means koinonia with the Father and the Son and the Christian community. Although there are signs which indicate whether koinonia is present, ultimately only God can judge whether it is actual in a given believer.(24) The purpose of this point is obvious: it seems to Catholics that Pentecostals are too quick to decide whether given faithful are true believers or not, sometimes using their own criteria rather than criteria worked out together.

Catholics, further, maintain that every Christian and every church has the right to evangelize even those who belong to other churches, but the thrust of the evangelizing should be on bringing converts back to the pastoral care of their own churches. Interestingly enough, the example of Billy Graham evangelistic campaigns as well as those of Youth with a Mission are singled out as positive cases.(25)

Pentecostals have rarely addressed the issue of proselytism,(26) and to date they have not participated directly in the development of any ecumenical documents that address the problem of proselytism. They have been, however, targets of proselytizing charges.

The Pentecostals in dialogue were very frank about the issue of proselytism: "They (Pentecostals) are, at times, guilty of the charges. They share what they believe to be the gospel, even attempting to convert people who say that they are part of another tradition."(27) But they also underlined the fact that there must be a reason or a series of reasons for Pentecostals' behaviour. Some of these reasons come "as a result of Pentecostal understandings of ecclesiology, of spiritual discipline, of Christian discipleship, of fruit in the Christian life which points to the transformation which has taken place or is taking place in the one who claims to be Christian".(28)

Charges that Pentecostals proselytize merely in order to increase their members at any cost,(29) or that they do so to further some (North American) political agenda,(30) have been largely discredited in recent years by non-Pentecostal scholars looking at the growth of Pentecostalism.(31)

Whatever distorted motives there have been in Pentecostal evangelization -- as these are also found in any other Christian proclamation -- for the purposes of ecumenical dialogue the record must be clear: "In a very real sense evangelization is the self-understood raison d'etre of the Pentecostal movement."(32) In other words, to speak about Pentecostals is to speak about evangelization.(33) What some other churches regard as proselytism is for most Pentecostals the urgent passion for the fulfilment of their mandate. The early Pentecostals regarded missionaries without passion for the salvation of souls as "abnormal" and themselves -- within the power of the Spirit to carry the message to the ends of the earth -- as "normal" Christians.(34)