Lost along the way but still looking!

A number of years ago I got very excited about the emergence of something called conversational evangelism. Alongside things like servant evangelism and ordinary people doing ordinary things, it seemed to me that we were on the verge of recapturing the simplicity of evangelism as an act of sharing our lives and stories with others. No complex spiritual laws to apply and no carefully crafted answers to the 7 main objections or whatever it was.

That conversation appears to have moved on given the quick internet search I did this morning. Conversational evangelism seems now to be defined as pre-evangelism and even appears to have drifted into the old area of apologetics. Now I don't have a problem with apologetics as such, I just wonder how you can effectively argue a logic, reasonable case for faith in a post-modern world. does post-modern man or woman really want to be convinced about absolute truth?

Perhaps I'm doing the journey a disservice, but I'm concerned that as evangelicals we still only have a single way of measuring our kingdom effectiveness and we can't see the bigger picture of a person's move towards God in any other terms than those of a prayer of commitment. I'm all for people putting their lives into the hands of God and acknowledging their need, but does that mean that any other conversation, i.e. conversation that doesn't lead to conversion, is nothing more than the preamble to the real thing? I hope that's not where we are headed.

As I continue to struggle to work out what it means for me to live a kingdom life in partnership with God o his mission, I often find myself wondering about the value of the things I do. But do I really want to return to the guilty life of failed attempt to turn the tables in witnessing.

Somewhere along the line there is a place for an intentional conversation, but knowing when and how to do that is never an easy task and ought not to be the determining factor in how good or bad I am at evangelism. At the very least let's acknowledge that there are many links in the chain that leads someone to faith and sometimes we are privileged enough to be there when the final link is added. But often we are just one link in many, and our goal should be to make sure we don't leave behind anything that blocks the next link in the chain.

So, if apologetics has become the defining factor in describing conversational evangelism, then so be it. I will need to look for a new term. On the other hand  it might just be that we can rescue a potentially significant thought and recover the idea that reaching others for Christ is a process not an event and all our conversations matter. For me conversational evangelism remains a process of sharing and hearing stories and exploring the kingdom links within them. The truth is that we don't all have all the answers and our evangelism ought not to be passed on any assumption that we do.

Of all the numbers he could have called...

So, I'm sitting in the lounge doing nothing in particular when the 'phone rings. So far so normal. But then the conversation starts and I'm caught off guard by what happens next.

James, not his real name, tells me he's a non-practising Christian but wonders if I can answer a question for him. He goes on to tell me that he watched a documentary on TV last night about Africa and Christianity. There was someone tracing his roots and apparently there was some discussion about the church in Ethiopia being older than the church in the West, having a different Bible and a few other things. He told me about the conversation he'd had with a work colleague about it all and how fascinated he was to learn that the church was actually growing across the world rather than declining.

So we talked for a few minutes about how the gospel might have made it's way to Ethiopia through the events of Acts 8 with Philip and the eunuch and about how Eastern and Western Orthodoxy developed differently. I never thought my Church history course would be useful for evangelism!

It was a whirlwind conversation and it ended with James saying that watching the programme really made him think again about his faith.

I don't know what drew him to my 'phone number apart from something God was doing. Maybe I was the only Christian minister in the 'phone book who wasn't busy at the time he wanted to make the call. Who knows.

What I do know is that it's really exciting to suddenly come across evidence that God is at work in all sorts of places and lives about which I am wonderfully unaware until they interrupt my day.

I wonder if James will ever call back, or start going to church. He said he knew lots of non-practising believers. Maybe God will start a new church where he lives through him or for him. Maybe he'll turn up at church sometime. Whatever happens I hope I've left him ready for his next spiritual encounter, that whoever he connects with next is someone who can help nudge him towards faith, and that I'm also ready in case God wants to use me again.

I wonder what my next 'phone call will be?

Heroes

Must be the day for finding stuff about Christians and compassion. Here's another video that came via an email from Jim Henderson of Evangelism without Additives

Unfortunately the code doesn't work to embed the video in this blog post, so you'll have to follow the link and watch the video there. Just click on Maria Ruiz. All the people nominated are great adverts for selfless commitment to others, the kind of thing you'd expect more of the church to know for.

Maria has been nominated as a CNN hero and you can vote for her if you want to via the CNN website.

Christmas CD

Okay, so I may be jumping the gun here, but I received an email today from someone called Eddie with an offer that looks very interesting and I wanted to pass it on. If, like, me you tend not to open unsolicited emails, then you may have had the email but rejected it. I don't blame you, I normally do the same, but this time I took a chance and read it.

The idea appealed to me straight away. 

I'm always looking for something to give away, especially around our village and especially at Christmas. This year I'd thought about doing little notebooks for shopping lists, but this CD at 53p a copy, might be a really good alternative. Looking at some of the comments on the website (I'll do a link in a minute), a lot of people have been impressed. That's why I'm posting this now before I've had the chance to even listen to the CD.

So. please forgive me if it turns out to be a dud, but I just get excited when I see an opportunity like this. I quite like Celtic music, so I'll probably like the CD anyway!

Here's the link to Beacon Music

CompassionArt

I read recently about Compassionart in an interview with Martin Smith, but wasn't really paying attention to release dates but a friend sent me the link to the site this morning and I wanted to post it here.

Probably a good idea, but mock with caution

Christians welcome Atheist London bus campaign

So reads the banner headline for an article on Christiantoday's website. 

Whilst it's good to see Christians taking a positive and dare one say humorous view of the proposed campaign, I fear that we are in danger of going over the top. The more we ridicule atheism, and who doesn't find humour in the proposed wording that  there "probably" isn't a God as if even the atheist can't be sure, the more likely we are to alienate them from meaningful discussion.

Personally it looks to me like a great opportunity, in the right circumstances, to actually ask people what they think. I just hope we don't add fuel to the fire by getting drawn into some great debate and, heaven forbid, a series of special prayer meetings to pray against the campaign. Some of us remember the calls for prayer about the EU and the beast!

Simon Barrow suggests that the campaign slogan: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" is the unbelievers equivalent of "God may very well exist. Now have a nice day" in case anyone is short of an idea for an answer or an alternative publicity campaign.

Sobering thought

If you are going to reach the people other people aren’t reaching, you will have to do things other people aren’t doing.

In order to do the things other people aren’t doing you will have to stop doing what other people are doing.

These two comments from Craig Groeschel seem to cut to the heart of one of the biggest questions facing the church today. The simple truth is that the church doing what it has always done is simply not reaching the vast majority of the people whom we say we’re trying to reach. In fact one might go so far as to say that given that more than 90% of the general population doesn’t come to church, most of what we do must be wrong if the goal os to reach people, all people, any people, for the kingdom of God.

Sobering thought isn’t it!

Two events of interest

A couple of events came through my inbox this week. Both look quite interesting. The first is a workshop from CAP (Christians Against Poverty). Looking at the information this is an opportunity to both find out about and learn how to deliver a money management seminar.

You can get more information here.

With debt and "credit crunch" being the flavour of the month (albeit a rather unpleasant flavour), it might not be a bad time for churches to connect with their community using tools like these.

The second event is a Spring Harvest one-day conference to be held at King's College in January. The focus of the day is the issue of how we learn. The advertising says:

In the church we’re forever discussing ‘good teaching’ but when was the last time you heard a discussion about ‘good learning’?

Both look quite good, sadly I can't make the first but I may go to the second one.

Benedictions (2)

I found the benediction from Brian MClaren. I first read it in his book More Ready than you Realize.

“May the Spirit of Christ empower you to love and serve your neighbours, welcoming them into your lives and homes and schedules and hearts, so that through belonging they may discover the joys of believing and becoming. You are more ready for this than you realize. Go in God’s grace and peace!”

Benedictions and blessings

I've noticed that we rarely say a benediction in church these days, and I think there are some good (-ish) reasons for that. In the first place, if we're going to be an open, welcoming and unchurched friendly community, we need to make sure we avoid using language that leaves visitors with a sense of our being like a secret society.

I remember the first time I went to church as an adult and as the service began everyone stood to their feet and sang two verses of a hymn from memory. I later discovered that they always sang the same two verses at the beginning of every morning service and two more in the evening. Fortunately I had someone with me who showed me where to find the words in the hymn book.

The same is probably true, at least in Baptist churches, when we get to the end of the service and announce the grace. It must be quite unnerving to suddenly have all these unknown faces staring at you and reciting words with which you are unfamiliar like some sort of incantation.

So it's probably better to end with a simple prayer.

On the other hand a blessing from the worship or service leader can be simple and doesn't have to follow the well-worn track of the same two verses every week. The end of Jude is always popular and then there's the two verses from Ephesians 3 about God being able to accomplish more than we can imagine. 

A few years ago I came across a benediction Brian McLaren uses that focuses on living our lives in a way that includes others in our journey. I'll look it up and blog in in the next few days. Meanwhile here's a blessing from Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians:

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal comfort and a wonderful hope, comfort you and strengthen you in every good thing you do and say.

Happy Monday!

To Twitter or not to Twitter...

At the request of my daughter, Ally, I've signed up to Twitter to see what all the fuss is about. I've added it to my sidebar, but I'm not sure for how long I'll actually use it.

It's quite simple to set up and I've set up my 'phone so that I can use the SMS service to update my status. 

No Master Plan

I was at a prayer event last night with a few folk from church and some friends from another local church. As we began I shared some thoughts which, in a nutshell, focused on the desire to see what God is doing in our communities and then seeking to connect with and become involved in that. Quite simply it's about asking the question: Lord, what are you doing and how can we help?

It can't be a coincidence then that this morning a post from the Doable Evangelism blog should pop into my feed reader. Here are a couple of quotes from the post.

Quite frequently, when doing a DE Seminar, I get asked how a church can become more “user friendly”. My initial response is that the church is people, not a building or program, and so the solution at the core is to get your people to become user friendly, which is what OA’s can help do. Once people start seeing evangelism as a spiritual practice (instead of a program) and actually celebrate ordinary attempts at it, the whole atmosphere in the “building” begins to change. Your people begin to see everything through the eyes of “outsiders” who now matter to them deeply. That will affect how you do business in the building eventually.

Whilst this does not connect directly with the question about what God is doing and how we can help, it does make the point that evangelism should be a  spiritual practice (instead of a programme). The thing I love about doable evangelism is that it is just that, doable. It's uncomplicated and therefore ordinary. When I ask, "Lord what are you doing, and how can I help?" I'm not looking for a programme, I'm looking for ordinary points of connection where the kingdom of God is breaking into the present reality of ordinary lives.

The second quote is a description of one church's attempt to build these values into their mission.

I and a hand full of mavericks here are in the process of spilling some ‘new Kingdom wine’ into a neighborhood where a lot of kids we are mentoring in a public elementary school live. Lots of needs. We are going organic, so there is no master plan.

This is exactly the kind of church of which I want to be a part.

The Passion

The BBC's retelling of the last week of the life of Jesus begins on Palm Sunday at 8:00pm. It looks fascinating and runs through the week. There's an outline of the running order on both the BBC website and Premier.

Unlike Mel Gibson's film and unlike the release of The Da Vinci Code, this series doesn't seem to be getting hyped up in the Christian media as the greatest opportunity the 21st century church will have for evangelism. That, for me, is a very positive thing. I found all the emails and publicity that came my way about the other greatest opportunities just too much. Every Sunday is a great opportunity, every day is a great opportunity to share the life and death and resurrection of Jesus with those around us.

I remember going to see the Gibson film and wondering if any of my unchurched friends would actually comprehend it; whether they would simply come out of the cinema shocked and bewildered by the whole thing. Good as it was, it didn't produce a rush of interesting conversations. And, if the truth be told, I'd rather have sat down with a group of friends and watched Bruce Almighty and talked about our images and understanding of the nature of God than try to use Mel Gibson's Passion.

I hope there will be many opportunities for conversations, many opportunities for pointing people toward Jesus. I'm certainly going to watch it carefully so that I can use what I can on Easter Sunday. But I also hope that we will learn how to be Christians in plain view, how to share our faith in positive ways and how to engage our friends in conversations that might nudge them towards Jesus.

And my prayer? It's very simple: "Lord use this drama in ways we cannot imagine to make yourself known in our nation."

Seeker Small Groups

Sitting on my pile of books to read has been Garry Poole's Seeker Small Groups. I've been meaning to read this book for quite some time, and a gentle prod from the author via a comment on a blog entry I made spurred me on. I'm very grateful for the prod, because it finally made to the top of the pile and I discovered that it's a great book.

I've still got about 100 pages to go, but I think this is a book that deserves to be read, especially by all those Christians who embark on running Alpha courses without doing the training. The reason for this simple: most people don't listen enough and tend to talk too much. This is especially true of evangelical Christians who lead small groups of any kind. Too many times I've heard a small group leader talk about "the curriculum" as if it's something they must deliver to group. What I like about Garry Poole's perspective on Seeker Groups is that they are a safe place for a seeker to be heard. That's very much the position that should be taken when running Alpha. It's an opportunity to explore not an opportunity to be lectured.

This is how Garry describes the purpose of a Seeker Small Group:

We want to give our seeking friends an opportunity to identify their toughest objections and obstacles to faith in Christ–and, by thinking out loud, process them within the safety of our group. We want to provide a forum in which our seeking friends can safely address their toughest spiritual questions and investigate the claims of Christ at their own pace...

Important in this process is our determination to listen and to listen well. Describing the progress of one small group towards the point of being ready to hear spiritual truths explained, he makes this observation:

Looking back, I feel I didn't talk any of them into the kingdom; I listened them in!

... my role of doing more listening than talking, more facilitating than teaching, and being more relational than intellectual, played a crucial part in the process where they were ready and willing to learn spiritual truths from the Bible.

These truths are just as valid whether you're running a long-term small group for seekers, whether you are looking to start such a small group, or whether you are using a tool like Alpha to help you engage with spiritual seekers. That makes this book worth reading.

Going Public

One of the things I love about blogging is the unexpected relationships that form through the comments and feedback you get. I don't get that many comments, but then again I don't blog in order to get comments, I blog as part of my ministry and as aprt of my personal process of reflection.

Anyway, a recent post about sharing faith produced a comment from one of the authors, Bill Peel, of the book Going Public with your Faith that gets mentioned. That set me off on a search and I discovered 24sevenfaith.com, the website associated with the book.

Bill's blog is here and is worth a look if you are involved or want to become involved in helping people live out their call in the workplace.

What I like about the book are the four big ideas that are developed. You can read more about them on the blog or in the book, but here they are in headlines:

• Big Idea One: The workplace is the most strategic place of Kingdom influence for most Christians.
  
• Big Idea Two: Evangelism is a process, not an event.
  
• Big Idea Three: Our job in evangelism is to discover where God is already at work in people’s lives and join him there.
  
• Big Idea Four: Being a person of spiritual influence is every Christian’s calling, not just the responsibility of a gifted few.
  

How to share your faith?

I was talking to Anne as we went for our Saturday morning walk around the local wood. She's recently discovered the Christian Group at her workplace and she was telling me all about their plans.  Apparently they've been discussing how they can share their faith more effectively in the workplace and are about to embark on a training course to that end. I mentioned a book I read a little while ago (kindly sent to me by Mike Olsen who I got to know through the Ordinary Attempts blog) called Going Public with your Faith. 

What interests me is that when Christians think about how to become more effective in sharing their faith, they tend inevitably to gravitate towards a method of presentation. It's as if we've grown accustomed to a diet of words as the key. Get the words right and effectiveness will increase. Now I know that getting the words right is important, we all want to make the most compelling presentation of the truth that we can. But I can't help thinking we keep missing a trick or two. I remember the 1990's when we had the decade of evangelism in the UK. Millions of pounds were spent on new initiatives, new training programmes, new "How to share you faith" seminars. The nett result was that over a million people left the church. 

My current reading is a book by Garry Poole called Seeker Small Groups. In the book he develops a strategy for launching small groups for spiritual seekers. He talks about the phases seekers go through and he sets out some key principles for making invitations. One point that sticks in my mind is this: Hang out with seekers.

If we are going to win friends and influence people for the kingdom, then we need to spend time with them. All the training in the world won't make any difference if we are not in the world rubbing shoulders with hurting people and letting them into our lives to see the difference Jesus makes.

Back-track to the post about Sunday lunch and the way Christians are despised in the restaurant business for being difficult and stingy. How can we sit and listen to the narrative of grace for an hour and then go and be so ungracious afterwards? It doesn't make sense! We should be learning to live out the grace we've experienced not just talk about it. As Eliza Doolittle so rightly said, "Words, words, words. I'm sick of words, show me!"

So, while we learn how to verbalise our faith, let's learn how to share it through our lives, our generosity, the time we give to others. Let them know they matter to us and maybe we will earn the right to tell them how much they matter to Jesus as we go.

Tip for the joy of it

I'm always intrigued in a restaurant when people start trying to work out what tip to leave. So, further to my last post pointing to the piece about how the "Sunday crowd" are perceived by those who serve, let me share with you something I picked up from a friend of mine.

I have a card the size of a business card when folded with a simple message of thanks in it. The point is not the message or the card, but the thank you. I've always been taught to be polite, and anyone who knows the British at their best will know that we even apologise when it's not our fault, and say thank you even when there's not much to say thank you about. I grew up being polite. I still open doors for other people, mainly because I can hear my mother's voice telling me to hold the door for someone.  

So when it comes to leaving a tip after a meal, I really want to be generous. In an odd way my little thank you card helps me to do that. It's a useful way of reminding myself that while this might be their job, they are serving me, and I want to honour that.

So, if you are going out for lunch on Sunday, or dinner on Saturday, or maybe for Valentine's, then be a generous if not extravagant tipper and put a smile on a waiter or waitress's face. 

Grace at Sunday Lunch

Do you ever wonder what the world makes of us as followers of Jesus? Ever wondered what the waiter or waitress makes of you in the restaurant? If you are planning to go out for lunch after church this Sunday, you might want to read this first:

How have the people entrusted with the amazing message of grace, forgiveness, and love been reduced to being known in the serving world as demanding, obnoxious tightwads? As someone not only making a living in that world, but also trying to incarnate Jesus to my co-workers, this leaves me deeply grieved.

Read the rest here.

Interesting welcome message

Click here to visit the Worship House Media website and watch this video. 

Might not to be to everyone's taste, but it got me thinking about what kind of message do we present about what it means to come to our church.

Goals for reaching others

I was wandering around the internet this morning and decided to revisit the Withreach website to see if there was anything new. I began to read the article about an example of a withreach strategy. What caught my attention was this list of goals:

• My first goal is to create meaningful conversations.
  
• My second goal is to create meaningful friendships.
  
• My third goal is to discover the treasures and God-given dreams in those friendships (I see them as prime community assets) and to find out how God is already at work in their lives, and work alongside Him, rather than pre-judge what should come next.
  
• My fourth goal is to see how God incarnates the conversation and the dreams of this small group in a way that brings creative transformation to the community.
  

This struck me as a good starting point for any approach to reaching the missing (that is, those formerly known as the lost). That it doesn't start with looking for an opportunity to share the gospel isn't a problem for me. If I'm in the right place at the right time, that opportunity will come, of that I'm sure.

What I like is the intentional relationship building that is at the heart of these goals. Caring about a person's eternal destiny must begin with caring about the person. They must matter to you if you are ever going to help them see how much they matter to God.