Conversational Conference Podcasts

I've been listening to one or two of the podcasts from the Conversational Evangelism Conference I mentioned a few posts ago. 

I fall into that group within church life who would identify themselves as not having the gift of evangelism, but who are desperately concerned about being more effective in evangelism all the same. I've always understood that as a follower of Jesus I am part of his missionary task force, equally valued alongside the heroes of outreach, but not gifted in the same way as they are. 

So, the three podcasts I downloaded include Todd Hunter's opening session and Rick Richardson's session on reimagining evangelism, and another Todd Hunter session on Three is Enough, an idea he is pioneering (and for which there is now a website/blog).

So far I've listened to two of the three, but sadly was too tired to sustain my focus through both, but fortunately I can re-listen to the one that got away from me. Todd Hunter's first session was really interesting. He spoke about the image problem we have as Christians. Now I know that some folk see our image problem rather positively. We must be doing it right if people don't like us or understand us might be their argument. 

But that's not the point. The point is that, as Todd Hunter put it: They (the non-Christians) are not put off by our doctrine, they are put off by us. In other words, evangelical spirituality isn't the problem, it's the way evangelicals express and practice their spirituality that is the problem. People may be confused about what we believe but they are probably more confused by how we live in the light of what we say we believe. 

So how do we address the problem? Part of the answer lies in something I read in Mark Driscoll's Vintage Jesus. He argues that Christians need to know Jesus as prophet, priest and king. As prophet he tells us the truth about our sin and our need to so something about it. As priest he holds out the grace of God as the answer we need. As king he rules over and in our lives. 

Todd Hunter says that what we need to do is to move from belief-ism to following Jesus in the ordinary routines of life. To do this faithfully we need our lives to be grounded in the prophet, priest, king understanding of Jesus.