Tim Downs asserts that there is a crisis in our communication with people outside the Christian Church today and that we have created that crisis ourselves. Rather than seeing the work of evangelism as an ongoing process, our results-oriented American mindset has focused too much on “the harvest” while tragically ignoring our responsibility to “sow”. Remember Downs’ syndicated comic strip Downstown? I don’t recall any explicit talk about sowing and reaping in Downs’ creative work on the funny pages, but looking back now I can see how he has been committed to what he calls “sowing” for many years. I also remember hearing Downs and his colleague from the communications center, Tim Muehlhoff, speaking at a Campus Crusade-Sponsored Spring Break Evangelism conference that I attended with a group of students from St. Louis in the late 1990’s. This book must have been in process then, because I as I read this book recently, I found myself thinking, “Haven’t I heard that illustration somewhere before?” Then I remembered that I had, while listening to Tim Downs and Tim Muehlhoff speak at the Big Break conference!
The thesis of the book is built upon Downs’ interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the soils.
“This book is a kind of soil analysis of the American Culture at the beginning of the third millennium. It’s a warning that our spiritual soil is being depleted to the point that it may be soon incapable of supporting life. It’s a call to a new generation of sowers to come and help reclaim our eroding soil and begin to prepare the harvest of the future. And it is a rebuke to the Christian world for encouraging the erosion to happen.” [19]
Downs’ warning, call and rebuke are helpful and needed. I’m not sure the parable of the soils should be stretched into a book of “soil analysis” but I think I learned a lot anyway, especially about the importance of balancing the biblical values of justice with love and truth with tact.
Downs is most helpful when he delivers a “wake-up call” to Christians, exhorting them to realize that:
- The greatest attacks on Christianity now come through art, not science.
- The most devastating blows to Christian belief are indirect, not frontal.
- The most damaging assaults on the Christian worldview are gradual, not immediate.
Downs is an incredibly creative verbal communicator and is often extremely clever in his use of illustrations. Reading this book as an ex-Campus Crusade staff member, it appears to me that much of Downs’ argumentation is directed particularly toward the errors that he has observed in the philosophy of evangelism that Campus Crusade has adopted and promoted among evangelicalism over the past 50 years. Campus Crusade is an organization called to a ministry of evangelism and basic discipleship. It has an efficient organizational structure built for transferring ministry strategies in a consistent manner around the world and it measures its organizational success by criteria that focus on evangelistic presentations, professions of faith and new students and staff joining the organization. The organizational values of Campus Crusade are at odds with the values that Downs expresses in this book. Sadly, it’s not surprising that Downs influence within Campus Crusade through the Communciations Center seems to have faded. Happily, even while Downs remains a CCC staff person, his recent work in the world of the arts though the publishing of a number of novels provides us a great example of what he teaches in Finding Common Ground (see http://www.timdowns.net/ for more info).
In his later chapters, Downs stretches the sowing metaphor a bit too far, making the sower’s goal the same as a vine-tender. The Biblical parable speaks of the seed that the sower sows being the word of God in Mark 4 and the word of the Kingdom in Matthew 13. Downs overreacts a bit too much to the harvest-only culture of Campus Crusade and others. The work of evangelism involves communicating God’s words about the good news, which at its essence is propositional, verbal, knowable content about the work of Christ and not just our efforts to build bridges of goodwill.
I loved and learned much from Downs’ references to the puritans and his rebuke of our pragmatic, results-oriented understanding of the harvest.
“To most evangelicals, who are very action-oriented people, the true sign of God’s presence is results. Where God is, things happen, and when there is no action, God is obviously at work somewhere else…Was God at work in the life of John the Baptist, or did the real work only begin when Jesus arrived on the scene? Was God more at work in the life of Isaiah, who saw results, than in the life of Jeremiah, who saw none?”[178]
In his concluding chapter, Downs’ says “a basic maxim of ministry is: If you work in ministry, you must be willing to accept the fact that you will never know exactly what you are producing.” [187] In this and in many other ways, Tim Downs gives us a helpful lesson in sowing and trusting the Lord of the Harvest with the results of the harvest.
Finding Common Ground: How to Communicate with Those Outside the Christian Community…While We Still Can, Tim Downs, Moody Press, Chicago, 1999
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