Tuesday Morning Thoughts
Jun
29
This week Jay and I are immersed in the Challenge Conference with nearly 5,000 youth from all over the country. Please pray for the conference – namely, that the students grow in their love for God and others. Also, please pray for them to be a radical blessing to the city because city renewal is something we care dearly about.
In the meantime, I’d like to share a couple of news articles with you that I’ve found interesting so far this week. The first of which is called, “How to sell Christianity? Ask an atheist.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the article.
Gabe,
The article is pretty much spot on in my opinion. The traditional way of evangelizing is not necessarily as culturally relevant as it was in the past. The article definitely hit on the motivation of evangelism. Why are we doing it? Whose interest are you really representing or pursuing?
Of course, the next question is: what is working and what is not? Using atheists as evaluators is a pretty interesting idea and it makes sense from an evaluation standpoint. In general, outside parties may be better evaluators than inside parties due to bringing a (hopefully) independent and unbiased perspective to whatever is being looked at. That doesn’t work in all cases, but since I do evaluation for a living (primarily as an outsider) I can see the benefit to this kind of activity in general if the independence of the evaluator can be assured. However, the hard part in being an evaluator is having proper “criteria.” What is the standard or benchmark of what should be and is it generally accepted or considered a best practice? I think this is a very important question and not everyone will agree on what the universal body or church should be doing.
But after any evaluation, it is what you do with what was found that is important. If there need to be changes or problems were found, something needs to be done otherwise the evaluation was worthless. So as Christians and believers, we generally know what America thinks of us, what are we going to do about it?
As the article mentions, using your life as an example is great.. theoretically. Its in the practice of using your life as an example where I believe we all fall short of the mark and it’s simply because we are human. We get tired, we get angry, we have bad days, and sometimes… we just don’t care or we only care about ourselves or other things.
I agree that the answer generally is to use your life as an example. However, as someone famous once said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” So what does that mean and truly entail for a believer to “use their life” as an example? I think that it would involve a lot of hard choices that only the individual in the circumstances God has allowed around them the ability to determine.
It may sound trite, but wasn’t it some saint that said we should, “preach the good news wherever we go, and use words only when necessary.” If I live my life in a way that may seem attractive to someone else, or they wonder why I do the things I do, then a relationship can be built. If I come at someone with what they should be doing, what reasonably should I expect but rejection and possibly anger, especially if I have no relationship with them or show that I do not care about them except for maybe what I can get out of them (again, motivation).
Again, as the article seems to point out, the problem is not necessarily Jesus, but his followers.
If you haven’t seen it I would recommend “Lord Save Us from your followers” — I saw the DVD (there is also a book) and it opened my eyes again, just like UnChristian did a few year ago. If you do see it or read it, let me know what you think.
~M
It sounds like Jim Henderson is trying to remind the church that we need to treat all people and their questions with respect and authenticity. I like that and am reminded to listen more than I debate.
On the other hand, the title of this article bugs me – “How to Sell Christianity.” God never asks us to be salesmen. He invites us to reap the harvest He’s already planted. Furthermore, I’m becoming more and more convinced that we don’t need “better methods” for evangelism. We need deeper belief in the gospel we proclaim. When we ourselves are truly grateful for and transformed daily by faith in Jesus death and resurrection, we will authentically share that truth with those around us. May God open our hearts to see that we are more sinful than we ever imagined but He is more gracious than we ever dreamed.
I agree w/ Nate. I don’t think we need better methods, but I do believe we need better education for believers. The biblical illiteracy and anti-intellectualism in the church is appalling. Most atheists and doubters I encounter are thinkers rather than feelers (in Myers-Briggs typology), and the American church is run by and for feelers.
The reason we don’t attract thinkers, i.e. atheists, is we put the feeler value of “relationships” at the top of the value heap and have neglected “truth” which is the primary value of thinkers. Interestingly, the Bible has much more to say about truth than relationships. Perhaps we need to get our values sorted out and then we’ll attract the other 50% of the population that is wired for truth.
So the bottom line is I disagree with the premise that we just provide bait with no switch. We need to provide Truth that is compelling and answers that make sense, not just relational anchors.