[Insert warning from last post. Thank you.]

Back to the list of ways to evangelize positively…

Enough on evangelism!

Conversion
This might just be representative of the blogs I read (as I am after all one of the mods for [shameless plug]Blogs4God[/shameless plug] and read probably 150 blogs for my weekly cache) but I see a lot of talk about evangelism from people who have been in the church their whole lives. I also see a lot of people talking about how they can’t understand how people could possibly *NOT* accept Christ when they hear the Gospel. As this makes me want to bang my head against my keyboard and as I really can’t afford the pain meds to deal with that, I thought I might ummm…. “enlighten” people as to how difficult conversion can be.

My Story
If I haven’t said this enough times, I am a convert. My family is not Christian (and yes, I have tried witnessing to them). I accepted Christ when I was 14 and the seed got planted when my neighbor (who I later worked for in middle school, high school, and college) read me the *real* Christmas story when I was 6 and continued on to read to me about Jesus’ death on the Cross and His resurrection. There was a period of 8 years before I formally accepted Christ and my attitudes definitely changed during that time. When I was 9 or 10, I imagined that one day they’d discover that the Bible had been a hoax and that everything (the Church, theology, etc.) fell apart. The problem: in my mind’s eye, I would then see my friend Emily (who took me to church camp with her when I was 10) and her family as well as my neighbor’s family *still* worshipping and believing as if nothing had happened. This kind of belief in something that could not be proven absolutely puzzled me because there was apparently something I just did not understand about faith. I mean, Christianity could not be proven with science (and the Institute for Creation Research does not count as a scientific body in my humble opinion) — the existence of God could not even be proven conclusively. To my scientifically-trained ears, this was a definite quandry. I half-heartedly gave my life to Jesus at church camp when I was 10 — more to please the counselor I was with than because I actually believed. I pretty much left that behind for a few years until I started thinking about the fact that if there *were* a God and all that resurrection stuff was true, I’d be in deep trouble. So… Jen learns the Lord’s Prayer and says it every night and Jen attempts to learn how to blend in as a Christian. I dug out my book of children’s Bible stories and read it and was amazed at what I read.

I’d rather not go into the full account of my conversion moment (as there are some things I don’t discuss on here and I’m sure my family would prefer this — if you want to know, ask me and I might tell you if I trust you enough), but basically after I accepted Christ, I sought to learn everything I could. My friend Jason used to give me copies of Our Daily Bread and I started getting familiar with the Bible through those. I started attending church when I was 16 and was officially baptized when I was 19 at my Conservative Baptist church in college. The rest is history.

Problems Converts Face In The Process
I hopefully have established that there was some difficulty in my acceptance of Christ. If things were as easy as people make them out to be, I would have been in the Church 8 years earlier. These are some problems that converts/seekers face. These are from my experience and from stories told to me by others who are also not life-long believers.

My aim is to explain why people don’t convert as easily and hopefully I’ve done it. I know that my experience is the tip of the iceberg and others might have had different ones. I also know that many people who have been in the church all their lives have changed positions and had mini-conversions on those fronts and that I can’t assume that all life-long believers think one way. I have, however, just seen too much on blogs lately that really scares me on this issue and I felt like I needed to address it.

Comments are always welcome — just please be polite and keep them succinct. If it’s long, respond in your own blog and leave a link. 🙂

**WARNING** Jen is venting on some things that have been ruminating in her head about evangelism and conversion and a whole lot of ministry schtuff. She has very few people to talk to about these things and uses this blog for the purpose of creating discussion and working things out. Unless you want to hear about how the Church really isn’t addressing certain things, you really might want to skip this one. If you are also mortally afraid that I will try to evangelize/convert you, be assured that I love you for who you are and this entry is not to force anyone’s conversion. That is all.

Evangelism
OK… here’s a hypothetical situation for y’all to consider:

You are a businessperson selling a computer system that is the framework for the computer architecture of large Fortune 500 businesses. You are in charge of going into these companies and selling them on your product. This product is a huge part of what your specific company does and you believe strongly in it. Would you go into a potential client company without a.) learning about the history of a company as well as their missions and values; b.) developing a relationship with someone in the company so that this company had a human face; c.) discerning how to provide adequate support for any problems they might have; d.) believing that your product is really the best thing for this client company; and e.) developing a pitch based on the fact that you care so much about the work of your product that you would want to see this client company benefit from it?

I’m really hoping that the answer is a resounding NO! No businessperson would go blindly into a sales situation like this without the proper information. All of the things I’ve listed are imperative for the success of a business deal.

OK… here’s the application of my analogy: The businessperson is a Christian. The company for which this person works is the Church of Jesus Christ which embodies all Christian churches on earth. Your “system” is the Gospel which changes lives and liberates people from the effects of sin. So… *WHY* for the love of Cora do people not realize that it *MIGHT* be more effective to *LEARN* about other people and their beliefs before attempting to witness???? I’m not talking about missions agencies like the ones you’ll find at conventions like Urbana — I’m talking about churches who send their members out to witness, preparing them only by telling them to tell people that they “need Jesus”, telling people that they can convict someone of the Gospel simply by that person hearing it, telling people that the Qur’an (or other holy text) is evil and a book full of unspeakable violence, that Catholics/Orthodox aren’t “real Christians”, or that they should “win souls for Jesus”. Perhaps it’s just the California climate or something (and the fact that I grew up within 2 miles of 2 megachurches who were competing for members) but I encountered these people frequently before I accepted Christ, and it really turned me off to the Gospel for a number of years. Those attitudes I listed are wrong for the following reasons:

1.) You are not qualified to tell people what they need unless you know them. For all these people knew, I could *be* a Christian and utterly offended that they were judging me on my appearance. It also made me feel like they only cared about me for the purpose of converting me. One of my neighbor’s co-workers did that to me and it made me really angry and really defensive, which made him accuse me of “hardening my heart”. Well… of course I’m going to do that if I feel like I’m being attacked!!!

2.) You don’t just automatically believe in something like the Gospel because you hear it from someone once. I am not going to believe in the resurrection just because someone tells me it is true. The Gospel *is* life-changing… but that also means that to believe it, you’re changing something pretty significant in your life. (See my ranting remarks on conversion below or in the next post.) Doug’s domain is called “contact26.com” because it takes 26 contact points with someone (the last one being discipleship) before they might actually accept Christ. It takes time and it takes people giving God the room to work and not being pushy. From the time my neighbor read me the *real* Christmas story at age 6 to the point at which I fully accepted Christ, 8 years passed. During those 8 years, my neighbor and her family were very open to my questions and they made sure I knew that Jesus would be my best friend if I wanted Him to be. They invited me to church, but never took it personally when I said “no” — they knew that it was the Lord who would change my heart, not them. I listened to them because they weren’t pushy and they didn’t throw it in my face every time I saw them. Their example is good. Follow it.

3.) The Qur’an or Vedas or [insert holy text] do not give off an evil presence unless you are expecting them to do so and have a very active imagination. As someone who studies Islam and who has spent time in the Muslim community, this one tends to *really* piss me off. Between my husband and I, we have probably 3 copies of the Qur’an in the house. To my knowledge, none of the copies have spontaneously burst into flames, tried to conquer any of the other books, caused anything to levitate out of order, given off an evil force that has expelled me from the room, or anything else one would expect a demonic book to do. (OK… that was flippant but seriously… it’s ink on a piece of wood.) We also have copies of the TaNaKh, the Vedas, and assorted other writings — nothing bad has happened (though that wouldn’t happen with the TaNaKh because it’s the Hebrew Scriptures). Get the point? As for the Qur’an being a book of “unspeakable violence” (a la Franklin Graham, Jerry Vines, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell), people who say that *really* need to read Joshua and Judges, especially the parts where Israel is ordered to kill every living thing in the the Promised Land. “But that’s in the context of cleansing the land of the evil Canaanite peoples” you say. Well… conquest = conquest, no matter who the group being conquered is. Fundamentalist Islam is just as bad as fundamentalist Christianity or Zionism.

4.) Just because they aren’t white/male/Protestant/KJV-loving/American, it does not make them “un-Christian”. HUGE pet peeve: those who say that Catholicism/Orthodox Christianity is a cult. Quoting the Bob Dylan song “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, “don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” For example, I cannot count on one hand the number of people on and offline who I have heard call Catholicism a “cult” because of the veneration of saints. OK… I understand the argument from the Catholics/Orthodox that it’s like asking a friend to pray for you and it’s JESUS giving the saint that power and they’re praying to the Father, etc. This doesn’t mean I agree — it means that I respect the argument and can deal with the fact that people believe it. This *DOES NOT* threaten their salvation (provided they understand that the saint is not magically making things happen, which 99% of them do) and they understand that Jesus is their Lord and Savior. Another major pet peeve: the people who say that liturgy is an example of why the Catholic Church/Orthodox Church are cults. This is puzzling to me because Christians worshipped for *centuries* in a liturgical fashion. I mean… if you want to know what early Church worship looked like, go hang out with the Armenians — their service hasn’t changed in 1500+ years. Liturgy is also based on Scripture. (There’s a list of those Scriptures and the parts they correspond to in “This Far By Faith”, the African-American hymnal for the .ELCA for those who are interested.)

5.) You do *NOT* win souls for Jesus because that implies that you, a mere mortal, can change hearts. Let’s look at some words of wisdom from Luther’s Small Catechism, shall we? The answer to the question on the 3rd article of the Apostles’ Creed is the following: “I believe that I cannot come to my Lord Jesus Christ by my own intellegence or power. But the Holy Spirit calls me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as He calls, gathers together, enlightens and makes holy the whole Church on earth and keeps it with Jesus in the one, true faith…” In other words, the Lord is the one who changes hearts, NOT us. Another problem with the “soul-winning” philosophy: it becomes a numbers’ game and it takes the human face away from the person to whom you are explaining the Gospel. If you are so obsessed with “winning my soul to Christ”, you obviously don’t know Christ yourself; and I am probably not going to listen to a word you say, because the Christ depicted in your Gospel cared about peoples’ needs. You obviously don’t.

So… how can one evangelize effectively? Well… as a convert, I could probably suggest these things (based on my conversion experience and all..):

Part 2 will be up later…