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.

The other day I posed a quote by Rob Bell, “When people think about changing the world, they do not think of the church.“ Then asked the follow up question, “Why do you think that is?“

Virgil had a great response:

“My guess would be that it is because the church has decided to only care about the afterlife. The mentality is that you get as many of em in as you can” - who needs to change the world?”

You know, I really think he’s on to something here. I had a conversation with a student who told me, “Do I care about where I go when I die? Why should I? That’s for old people like you to think about.” Evangelism has changed. The message hasn’t, but what matters to people has. Americans never want to think of themselves as old. Death isn’t something that’s thought about very often - it’s just not sexy.

And is eternity the only message behind the gospel? Isn’t there a here and now to Christ? Why is that so hard for us to convey? Here’s the one thing that you can do to evangelize effectively everyone you know: tell them what Christ has done for you. That’s what they want to hear. We are the “what’s in it for me” society. Really think and articulate what having Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior has done for you. Don’t give them the, “he’s forgiven my sins!” answer.

How has knowing and walking with Christ changed your existence in this world? Answer that question, honestly and from your heart… and people will listen. That is what evangelism is about. Not saving souls. Not packing them down the aisles. It is our job to simply share the good news of what Christ has done for us. It’s about changing the world one life at a time. That is what people need to hear.

So we’re loaded and actually leave on time. 9 students. 4 leaders. Good ratio for investment. We spent lots of one on one time with students. Over the weekend we camped, went whitewater rafting and rock-climbing.

Rock-climbing was amazing. It’s one of my favorite things to do. For something that really pushes students out of their comfort zone, this is the thing to do. Most of the kids we work with are never pushed to be more. And that point was so evident on the rock. You’d see them climb half way up, get frustrated or scared and try to quit. But ‘ah ha!’ this time was different. I’ve spend enough time with all of them to know where their limits are. So I instructed them to not let the kids down if there was any doubt that the could keep going.

It happened over and over. They’d start going and want to quit. But then something happened… they weren’t allowed to. Once they realized the only way they were getting down was going up to the top, their demeanor changed. They hit adversity and kept going. Every time we saw it, they pushed past where they thought they could go. They accomplished more than they thought was possible. They began to believe in themselves.

After a morning of victory, they were a different group in the afternoon. More confident. More assured. They approached every climb differently. It is amazing what what kids can do when they actually believe in themselves.

This has been one of the great hurdles of sharing Christ with them. They balk at challenge. Accepting Christ seems easy. Following Him is a different story. Accepting and following is a HUGE challenge. It’s so big, it’s beyond them. Living for Christ is living outside ourselves. And for a moment in time, these student got to step out and feel what it is like to live beyond what they thought was possible.