The Evangelistic Community
Today I’m talking to church families, but everyone is welcomed to listen in.
If you take your faith, those beliefs about God, those ideas that sustain you, that hold you up in tough times, seriously; and you care about others, not as concepts or ideas, but as living breathing human beings, with struggles and fears just like the ones you have, then it naturally follows that you want to share your faith with them. You want them to have the indescribable peace, joy, love, and other attributes that hopefully fill you with meaning. You should remember only too well what it was like when those spiritual gifts were absent, and how, at one of your lowest times, others, possibly even strangers, stepped in and helped you see what you were missing. And you have never been the same.
But here’s a small observation.
Personally I find the most precious treasure of my own soul, that God and heaven are real and there is a way to live a better and unending life after death, is hard to share effectively with both friends and strangers.
Why is this?
Thankfully, it is not my responsibility to convert anyone. That isn’t the job of a witness. All I need to do is share my faith story. Whether or not it changes the human heart is a spiritual matter between each of us and God.
But this does not remove the ache we may feel for those around us who we worry are going toward the bad forever place of no return.
So, even though conversion is not our responsibility, none the less we want to do everything we can to bring as many as we can to the eternity we are looking forward to ourselves. It’s the universal dream of a big reunion.
So here, for what it’s worth, are my current thoughts on the matter of evangelism.
The physical and emotional needs are usually of greater importance to people compared with any spiritual questions they may or may not have.
Not original with me but true nonetheless — No one cares what I know about matters of eternal life, until they know how much I care about them personally.
How much I care is demonstrated by how I might first be able to meet another’s physical and emotional needs here and now.
I don’t have a lot of time or ability to meet the physical and emotional needs of others outside a few closest to me. It turns out I have a lot of physical and emotional needs of my own.
Attempting to boil the Bible down to a few proof texts is a nice idea that doesn’t work for me. It is a way of showing someone with little to no knowledge of the Bible that there are a few out of context interesting passages in there. There is a time and place for topical bible studies. I just don’t think it is with unbelievers.
It seems the default idea of church people is that strangers need to believe what they believe as evidence that they would be safe to be friends with. I think this is backward thinking.
Why not make evangelism a community project? This means I can invite people to come and hang out. That’s what Jesus did. Check out John 1:35-39. Getting people to hang out with my group of friends invites them to observe crazy Christians in their natural habitat. It allows them not to be the center of attention but instead to just be with others who enjoy being together. And it has the ability to effortlessly begin to meet their physical and emotional needs. We all need hugs, food, friends, and laughter. We need to be welcomed in and included, regardless our fuzzy beliefs about God.
Let God work out his relationship with others in his own way and in his own time. In the meantime, let everyone who wants to, hang out with us. We can love them as they are. Now that, frankly, sounds like a lot of fun. And I’m always up for a good time, especially when it gives me a taste of heaven.
Last observation. I know homes are great and people who have the gift of hospitality are highly favored, but churches need to always be this welcoming as well. Fortunately for me, I happen to attend one of these amazing places where people are happy to see one another AND have a heart for welcoming and involving visitors into their circles. I have been to other churches where this wasn’t the case, where it seemed up to the visitors to give it their best shot to meet people. I don’t think that’s fun or evangelistic.
Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash
Check out The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis for a wonderful description of how real heaven is compared with the lives we are living right now.