Evangelization Is Critical Now

June 5 2025   John 17:20-26  

“I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe through their word... so that the world may believe that You have sent Me.”  John 17:20-21​

“So that the world may believe….”

The witness of the disciples, and our own witness, is “so that the world may believe.”

Jesus said it twice so that we wouldn’t miss it (17:21 and 17:23): “So that the world may believe….” Jesus had the evangelization of the world in mind from the very start.

There are at least four reasons why the evangelization of the world is of critical importance in our time. One is that it can no longer be confidently argued that we live in a self-contained universe, where questions about the existence or non-existence of God can be ignored without any consequences for our understanding of nature or history. Developments in theoretical physics and Big Bang cosmology indicate that the universe has an edge, and is not infinite in the past. That means the universe began to exist, and like all other things that begin to exist, it must have a cause. In the case of the universe, that cause must be outside of space and time, and that makes propositions about God intellectually significant. We can’t understand why the world is, or why it is the way it is, without considering God.

For another thing, the Enlightenment project of founding morality on reason has spectacularly failed. Every century since the 17th has grown more depraved even as they have grown more technologically clever. The 20thcentury was the bloodiest by far in all of human experience even while absolute rates of poverty and hunger declined. While Christians have never argued that faith is necessary to recognize the good, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the very idea of Goodness is incoherent apart from God.

For a third thing, the belief in inevitable progress has crumbled. Every step forward in technology has brought with it at least at least one step backward, sometimes more. The chipper belief of the 1990s and early 2000s that a computer in every student’s hands would inevitably lead to more and better learning has never materialized. Instead, computers in children’s hands have led to social media induced loneliness and anxiety, and plummeting competencies in reading and math. Reason, science and ingenious marketing have not been able to keep things moving forward, or even enabled people to be able to see in what direction forward is. Some are beginning to think, again, that Progress is fundamentally a religious category because the very word “Progress” is ordered toward the Good, which is incomprehensible apart from God.

A fourth deteriorating pillar of the modern era is the belief that knowledge is inherently good. In an age that has seen Tik-Tok, fentanyl, Hamas and OnlyFans, it would take credulity of stupefying proportions to believe that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and its beneficial use. The connection is still possible, but it starts with the recognition that there is an ultimate and objective Good that defines that connection, which is one of the things it means to talk about God.

“So that the world may believe….”

It is beginning to appear once again that all of the things that matter most in our world – Science, Knowledge, Progress, Benevolence of every kind – involve us sooner or later in conversations about God. The world doesn’t know the language of that conversation, and so is helpless and lost. Evangelization is the announcement that we do know the language and are happy to teach it to anyone.