Misquoting St Francis

Did Saint Francis really say: “preach the gospel always, if necessary, use words”? And is that even a helpful sentiment? 

Words: Mark Woods

St Francis of Assisi is famous for trying to convert Sultan Malik-el-Kamil, Saladin’s nephew, during the Fifth Crusade; and, of course, for preaching to birds. Of all his sayings, though, there’s one that hits the 21st century zeitgeist with an accuracy which, when you think about it, is a bit suspicious: ‘Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.’ 

Who isn’t drawn to such a lovely – and above all convenient – phrasing of the Great Commission? Most of us, if we’re honest, are rather embarrassed by street preachers who warn of the approaching End. We block the more strident voices on social media, even if they’re notionally on our side. We even wince at the ‘gospel’ message in church, and are rather glad we didn’t invite our friends along to that one. How much more congenial to us it is to witness by our deeds! If we’re nice to people and not jerks, perhaps people will – well, you know where this goes. 

There are, though, a couple of problems with this approach. The first is that St Francis never said this; and if you think about it, it’s vanishingly improbable that he ever would have done. Niceness wouldn’t cut it with the Sultan. Francis didn’t just leave out high-grade birdseed for his feathered friends, he preached the gospel to them. The closest to “if necessary use words” he comes is in his Rule of 1221, “Let none of the friars preach contrary to the form and rules of the Holy Roman Church … But let all the friars preach according to their example” – and this is not particularly close. 

Second, though, is that if we think we don’t need to be able and willing to talk about what we believe, we’re guilty of a using a bait-and-switch tactic – practically the definition of bad faith. In one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Carpe Jugulum, the fearsome witch Granny Weatherwax is arguing with a particularly wet specimen of evangelicalism, a priest of the Great God Om, and she’s having none of it. 

Then Granny said, ‘It’s no use you trying to make me believe in Om, though.’

‘Om forbid that I should try, Mistress Weatherwax. I haven’t even given you a pamphlet, have I?’

‘No, but you’re trying to make me think, “Oo, what a nice young man, his god must be something special if nice young men like him helps old ladies like me,” aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Really? Well, it’s not working.’

I doubt if it often does, to be honest. More often than not this is a way of comforting ourselves with the idea that we don’t actually need to articulate our faith because we can just, you know, live it. And this avoids the arduous task of working out what it is we actually do believe, and why, and of potentially having to defend it against people who might not share it. 

Now, in many of us a statement like that triggers an instant reaction, and not only because we just aren’t wired to be controversialists (a ghastly trade). Our faith, we feel, is a private thing which we share publicly in controlled settings, among like-minded people. We’re far more wary of speaking about it to people who might scorn it, and us; and there is a biblical warrant for this from Jesus, who tells us “do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs” (Matthew 7:6, NIV). 

And it’s complicated! Not necessarily theologically, but from the depth and texture of faith itself, which is so inseparably intertwined with our identity and our very humanity. Ricky Gervais, the comedian who so much enjoyed the New Atheist era a few years ago, once said: ‘I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas – ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.’ This is a superficially good idea that would land better from someone who wasn’t a specialist in the art of punching down, and who hadn’t excelled in the comedy of cruelty. But in any case, it doesn’t work. Faith isn’t an idea that you can pick up or put down like a piece of cheese. It’s not just what a Christian thinks, but who a Christian is. Our faith is as integral to us as our veins and sinews. 

So how on earth are we to articulate something as subtle, as sensitive, as chaotically simple and elegantly complex as that? People come to faith for all sorts of reasons and along all sorts of routes, but an intentional act of evangelism involves communicating the essence of one person’s being to another – or at least, enough of it to lay a trail of breadcrumbs for the earnest seeker. St John Henry Newman took as his motto “Cor ad cor loquitur” – heart speaks to heart. That, rather than just an argument or an exposition, is precisely what evangelism is. 

But here we come back to the Bible, and those ‘in the beginnings’ that set the context for the Old and New Testaments. “God created” in Genesis 1, when “God said”. In John 1, “In the beginning was the Word.” Speaking, articulation, is at the very core of revelation. God is by nature a communicator. What we have in the Bible are words, about 783,000 in the King James version, a blizzard of them whirling around a central question: what is God like? And this is another reason to doubt whether someone as orthodox as St Francis (and still less Newman) would ever have implied that words were unnecessary. At the core of revelation there are non-negotiable realities, hard-edged truths, unignorable facts about God and human beings. We use words to make sense of things; without words they’re just things. Of course heart should speak to heart, because the Word became flesh – but head should speak to head, too. Jesus was the most cerebral of evangelists as well as the most human. How do we square this circle and share our faith with content as well as with kindness? 

Here's my suggestion. Fundamentally, the Bible is a story. So instead of reciting an evangelical formula, why not spend some time reflecting on your own story? Be absolutely honest about what your faith (if you have one) means to you, why you show up Sunday by Sunday, why you submit to counter-cultural rules of conduct and are patient with the irritating people sitting by you in the pew when frankly you’d rather be talking to someone else – what, for you, is it all about? 

And here, for what it’s worth, is what I’d say myself if anyone were interested: that Christianity offers me a world of ideas and imagination, of aspiration and rebuke, which I find endlessly fascinating and deeply satisfying. It’s a story I inhabit rather than a philosophy I understand, at whose heart is a figure whose character is perpetually challenging and entirely adorable. If my imaginary interlocutor were to press me further, I’d read some of the parables with them, and share some of their extraordinary insights into human nature and divine grace. And I wouldn’t expect it to ‘work’, in evangelistic terms, but I’d hope they would tread softly, for they’d be treading on my dreams; and perhaps they’d dream along with me. 

 

Mark Woods served time as a pastor before moving into religion journalism. He’s edited or written for more outlets than he can remember, but he does remember writing and Does the Bible Really Say That? Mark is either the sweetest grumpy man or the grumpiest sweet man in the world. He currently works in communications at a Christian charity.