evangelism

This Kids in the Hall sketch is a good reminder to us all. Two guys going door-to-door sharing the Lord, but they’re so consumed by their own agenda, they’re unable to see the needs in front of them.

Sometimes we can let evangelism (sharing Christ with others) become either a scripted cardboard pitch or a steamroller shove-it-down-your-throat assault.  Either way these approaches become all about us. It becomes a missions for “us” to save “them.” The key element we forget about in evangelism is the purpose of evangelism. We’re not spreading religion. We’re not out to prove a point. We’re offering help and healing to those in need. Jesus wasn’t about a speech or a forced system or conformity. He offered hope, healing and change. If we don’t offer that, then we’re missing the point and might as well be selling Amway.

I saw this over on Joe Martino’s blog, it’s Penn, from the group Penn and Teller and a proclaimed atheist, talking about a man who gave him a Bible. In the course of his story he says this: 

” How much do you have to hate someone NOT to prosetylize. How much to have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that.”

He gives a really articulate and thought out account of how he as an atheist views Christians. I really gleaned a good perspective from it.

This Sunday night were putting on an evangelistic concert. But this just isn’t an concert, we’ve talked our local coffee shop/tarot card/psychic healers spot if we could host it there. And to my surprise they said ‘yes.’ They’ve been incredibly gracious with us and absolutely willing to accommodate us, evangelism and all. It’s a really exciting time to be able to share Christ’s hope and love with a crowd we don’t usually get to interact with.

We have three bands playing. Between the first two sets, we’re having an open Q&A with me and 2 other youth pastors. Anyone can ask anything about Jesus or spiritual matters. This could be really amazing or be really painful, but I like to get myself into these situations. Then after the second band play, we have a guy sharing the gospel with the crowd.

So keep us in your prayers. Pray for the bands and the rest of us!

There’s this Scientology promo video circulating around the net. It has Tom Cruise rambling on about a higher beings, aliens, finding purpose, and a bunch of other wacky stuff. And yes, like a car crash, it’s hard not to watch.

But think of this from the perspective of a follower of Christ. Listen to Cruise, most of his ramblings are so vague he could almost be a Christian talking about their faith. Am I saying Cruise is a Christian? No way.

I want us to watch that and think about how we articulate the gospel and who Jesus is to us. Do we ramble on using vague terms or do we speak from the depths of our souls? Can we explain our faith in biblical and personal context? Sometimes we resort to being vague and end up sounding not much different than Cruise. Or we go on the other end of the spectrum and are a walking tract. Our relationship with Christ is a personal one driven by experience and grounded in the Bible.

So my challenge for you is this. Know who you are in Christ. Practice what you’d tell someone alone at first, then try it out on a friend. This needs to be something we’re constantly work on and hone. It’s so simple, but we so easily botch it. If being a follower of Christ is so important to our lives… why can’t we articulate it?

Watch the Cruise video here.

[This is a ramble continued from here...]

Are we, as Christians, connecting people with Christ?

Some of us can become worshipers of the Word (i.e. the Bible) and suck the life right out of it. I believe the Bible is the divine inspired word of God. But I also believe that without God the pursuit and reading of the Bible is boiled down to mere words on paper. Many may argue this, but it isn’t as if they words put in a correct order that make up the book create a mystical union of spirituality. God illuminates scripture, God breathes life into it. Think about the Trinity. Is the Bible part of the Trinity? It’s not the Father, Son and Holy Bible.

There are those who are unwilling to leave the safety of the church and walk amongst the sinners. They would rather pour over the Bible, but never live it. What have you gained if you know the words, but are unwilling to walk it out? If your love of the Bible and fear of “sinners” keeps you hidden away from the world, you’ve missed the point of why Christ came in the first place. You’ve forgotten that he didn’t just die for you.

Evangelism isn’t about being right when others are wrong. It’s not about proving a point. It’s about investment and a relationship. It’s about us showing the love of Christ to an unbelieving world. It isn’t easy, but it’s what we are called to do.

If we don’t mirror Christ, nothing we preach will matter.

I’ve written over the past few weeks about evangelism. And I’ve gotten a bit of flack back about it. A few stones have been cast my way, which I really like. It always leads to conversation and thought. Here’s my question for my current stone throwers:

When was the last time you were face to face with a non-believing person, invested your life in theirs and shared the Gospel with them?

Often times I feel like I’m arguing theory or theology with people who have no practical knowledge of it at all. Much of what was argued was my method. I believe that for people care to know about Christ, they must first know what Christ has done in your life. Otherwise we are talking about mere words, facts, and theory. So first of all what is the Gospel. The Gospel as I believe it is the good news that Jesus Christ, God’s son, came to this earth, lived a sinless life, and died to pay the penalty for our sin so that we might become the children of God through faith alone in Christ alone. If we accept and follow Jesus we are become a people ransomed and redeemed from judgment. Secondly we have the Great Commission (take the Gospel to others). So this message goes for all of us. We have the Gospel. We have the Great Commission. What are we doing about it?

Are we out and amongst the people? Are we offering a remedy to a hurting and broken world?  Are we sharing not just the message, but also our lives? There is a cost to this. It’s not easy. But I can promise you one thing… it will never be boring.

I’m off to Men’s Roundup this weekend and I’m so excited. Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz) is the main speaker. It’s going to be awesome. Man food. Frisbee golf. Donald Miller. It doesn’t get any better than this.

So in honor of Mr. Miller, I give you some of his world of wisdom:

Thirteen Paradigm Shifts we encountered doing Christian ministry in a pagan environment…

1. Other People Exist: Simply coming to the understanding that the world does not revolve around “me” but that everybody is having an experience, created by God, loved by God, and that we needed to repent of showing partiality…

2. Nobody will listen to you unless they know you like them: We began to understand that people, subconsciously, merit a religious or philosophical idea not on logical conclusions, but on whether or not the idea creates a “good person”…the definition of a good person being whether or not a person is kind to them, tolerant and understanding, able to listen without arguing and so on.

3. Nobody will listen to God unless they know God loves them: We came to believe there was usually a hidden pain behind hostility, that many people have been hurt by the church, or people or perspectives they believed to represent God. Many times it’s as simple as an interview they saw on CNN, but an apology and kindness went a long way in helping people understand God was loving.

4. Other people have morality and values: We came to understand that Christians do not own morality, that everybody lives by a moral code, not always informed by an ancient text, and yet it is there. Calling people or even thinking of them as immoral was, then, inappropriate. In fact, we often found that people who did not know Christ lived a morality close to his heart in many areas we had ignored, ie;  community, tolerance, social justice, fairness and equality, freedom, beauty and so on and so on.

5. Find common ground: Often the morality of others overlapped Christian morality, and we came to understand that in these cases, we would focus on the overlapping issues. We came to see this as kindness, just as though we were on a date or making friends, we did not focus on what we didn’t have in common, but rather on mutual feelings about life. We would not say or do anything to combat people unless they knew we loved them, and this takes a great deal of time.

6. Define terms in their language: We were careful about Christian sayings and phrases that might be offensive: Crusade, sin, immorality….we came to understand that concepts were more sacred than terms…

7. Telling somebody about the gospel is about them, not us: We were careful not to try to “build our organization” and respected peoples freedom and space. Sharing the gospel became an exercise in friendship, rather than an attempt to grow a machine. Often, people feel used if they feel they are being recruited. The gospel, we learned, is really about them, their feelings about God and truth, about sin, about life.

8. Don’t let spreading the gospel feel any different than telling somebody about a love in your life, about your children or a great memory: We realized that in telling somebody about Jesus, we were telling them about somebody we have come to love and need, and about something that had happened to us, an encounter. This keeps us from sounding preachy, and allows us to share part of ourselves in a friendship.

9. Include lost People in Your Community: Our organization was not exclusive. We invited non-believers into the community if they wanted to be invited. We were careful not to not be ourselves with them, but they were certainly invited and enjoyed being a part of the group. We explained terms that we used, what we believed, but other than that, continued as normal.

10. Apologize for what you represent: We discovered that many people have been offended or hurt by what they perceive Christianity to be. We allowed ourselves to stand in the place of “Christianity” and apologize whenever necessary.

11. Be authentic: We discovered the need to be as honest about our lives as possible. We did not feel the need to sale Jesus, as much as share what He has done in our broken lives. We had no problem sharing our doubts and fears about faith, along with our commitment and appreciation for what God had done.

12. Pray for the Salvation of others: We discovered the need to pray for others. This would insure God was working in peoples lives, as we asked Him to. We discovered the work of evangelism is something God lets us watch, but very little of it is what we manipulate. We repented of not believing evangelism was a spiritual exchange between a lost person and God, rather than believing it was a series of ideas we were supposed to convince others of. 

13. Ask people if they would like to know Christ: We decided to initiate, whenever the relationship called for it. We were not afraid to ask people if they would like to know God.