In his book, Becoming a Contagious Christian, Bill Hybels writes, In their heart of hearts, I think all true followers of Christ long to become contagious Christians. Though unsure about how to do so or the risks involved, deep down they sense that there isn’t anything as rewarding opening a person up to God’s love and truth.
I believe Hybels is right. We want to see God use us in others’ lives to bring them to faith in Christ. Yet, most of us would say there is no part of our mission from Christ where we fail more than in sharing our faith. In the Mission Focused Men for Christ podcast/blog we will return, repeatedly over the months to the task of being equipped to be more effective in our efforts to share Christ with the lost. Today’s article is devoted to overcoming one myth about sharing our faith. Many view the process of sharing our faith this way:
It is having the courage to overcome every piece of emotional intelligence we’ve learned about relationships, and intruding into the life of a co-worker to tell someone, who doesn’t want to hear it, the gospel message that they are a sinner and need a savior, being willing to suffer criticism if we are accused of being preachy.
This understanding of evangelism may come from our reading of Acts 8:4. After the church is scattered because of persecution (8:1), we see the whole church evangelizing. EUANGELIZO, from which we get evangelism, is the Greek word in Acts 8:4 describing what the scattered church did. However, Acts 8:4 is translated, Now those who were scattered went about PREACHING the word. In other words, EUANGELIZO is erroneously translated, “preach.” John Leonard observes that the traditional view of evangelism is very shaped by the word, preach, which focuses on delivering content.
Traditional evangelism only takes place when we drive home our point over and over again—when we do all the talking. We have gotten the impression that on every page of the New Testament we are commanded to preach the gospel. We know what preaching looks like because we see it in church. The model for traditional evangelism looks a lot like what preachers do on Sunday mornings, (John Leonard, Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day).
Leonard then identifies two problems with this mistaken view of evangelism:
1) Linking evangelism to preaching in our minds raises the bar so high that most of us feel unable to do it. How can we talk intelligently for thirty minutes about any subject, much less the Bible! 2) We don’t share our faith because preaching is seen negatively in the culture. We have all said, “Don’t preach at me!” or “Preach to yourself!” The one-way communication style of preaching doesn’t communicate that you care much about the person you are speaking to. Instead, this style is associated with a holier-than-thou-attitude.
So, this understanding of how to share the gospel actually closes the hearts of people to Christ. But, as we’ve seen, this misunderstanding of how to share the gospel is based on the mistranslation of Acts 8:4. The word mistranslated “preach” by the ESV is not the word KERUSSO, the normal word for preach meaning to herald, to proclaim, to announce. Rather, the word is EUANGELIZO, which means “to bring good news.” Later in the same chapter, in Acts 8:26-40, the same word, EUANGELIZO is used not to refer to preaching but to describe Philip’s interactive conversation with the Ethiopian Eunuch, which began with Philip asking the Ethiopian Eunuch a question.
Here is the point: faithfulness to your call to share your faith is not preaching, and it is not primarily seeking an opening to push the content of the gospel into another’s life! Nor does faithfulness to the call to be sharing your faith require you to violate everything you’ve learned about relationships! Jesus wrote the book on emotional intelligence. Jesus spoke harshly to the scribes and Pharisees! But that is because Christ, the Anointed One, filled the office of Prophet—God’s prosecuting attorney to convict his people of their sin. John the Baptizer filled a similar role. That is not the way Jesus interacted with others in his everyday relationships. Instead he lived out the commandment to love others and modeled the pattern for communication given in verses like:
Prov 16: 21 The wise of heart is called discerning, and sweetness of speech increases persuasiveness.
Prov 16:23 The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips.
Prov 16:24 Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.
The idea that sharing our faith means ignoring everything you’ve learned about appropriate behavior in relationships and finding an opening to intrude into someone’s life to deliver the gospel message is NOT Jesus’ idea of sharing him with others. He wants you to wisely impact your coworkers for him.
FOUR WAYS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR INFLUENCE FOR CHRIST WITH YOUR COWORKERS
Young Life calls this “winning the right to be heard”
A. Be FOCUSED. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost, and as his follower we are to be like him. I don’t know about you, but I have lost this focus. I too easily walk right past lost folks without caring that they need Christ. This past week, I read the account in 2 Kings 7 of the Syrian siege of Samaria. There were four starving lepers by the city gate who reasoned they could either starve to death in the city or go over to the Syrian camp in the hopes of their lives being spared, which they decided to do. When they went into the enemy camp, they discovered that unknown to the Israelites, the Syrians had been spooked and had left in the middle of the night to return to Syria; leaving behind all kinds of food and riches. The lepers gorged themselves and carried piles silver, gold, and clothing to hide for themselves. But eventually one of the men came to his senses. He said, “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news,” and they went back to the city to share their good news. I am like the leper who has been eating lavishly, enjoying the blessings of knowing Christ, including tremendous blessings for my family, and my selfish heart just doesn’t care enough about the lost to be devoted to sharing the good news with them. For me, effectiveness in sharing Christ, begins with asking Christ to give me his heart for the lost.
The second reason we need focus in our outreach efforts is that people who need Christ are everywhere around us. So, when we are motivated to do a better job of sharing our faith, we don’t know where to start. Here is a strategy for staying focused that works:
1. Consider four spheres of influence, your workplace, neighborhood, extended family, and non-Christian friends. Prayerfully ask God to put two or three from those categories on your heart.
2. Put them on your prayer list and regularly pray for opportunities to talk about spiritual things. This is crucial because the biggest impact in sharing Christ comes over time from little conversations that open a person’s heart to Christ. Without putting them on my prayer list, I lose focus and go months before thinking about them again. So, little progress is made.
3. Find a brother to be supporting these efforts in prayer: Our ministry helps men get connected over a series of wheat we call Check 6 questions. The fifth question is: Who are the non-believers you are building relationships with and how can I pray for your strategy to share Christ with them? That is a prayer I have seen that God loves to answer, and wish I had the time to share some of the stories.
B. Be AN INTERESTED LISTENER. We often think that effective evangelism requires looking for someone to share the gospel with. But a wiser approach, especially in the 21st century, is NOT looking for people to talk to but looking for people to listen to. Listening to them well will open a window to their soul. Listening is the starting point because listening well to another lets him or her know we care. All it takes to let another know we care is to say, “Hi, how’s your day going today?” in such a way that they know we have the time and are willing to listen to an answer longer than “fine.” John Leonard writes:
We listen more than we speak not only to communicate real care and concern, but because listening will hep us know what the Lord wants us to say to the person that he has brought across our path…. The gospel begins with the person you re speaking to. We must listen more than we speak so that we might understand the person God has brought into our lives. As they speak about the immediate problems they’re facing or questions they have, we should be listening and praying, asking our Lord to hep us…Our entire response should be based on the information we heard from the people we are listening to (Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day).
Here is a very practical way to be interested in other people. When you notice that someone has tattoos, you might say, “I like your tattoos. I bet they have special meaning to you.” Behind every tattoo there is a story and wearing this story on their skin presents a great opportunity for us to express an interest in the person God has brought across our path. A friend of mine, Al Dayhoff shares the story of a conversation with a waitress in a Silver Diner in Pennsylvania. He had asked whether her tattoos had special meaning.
“They all have meaning,” she said with a soft voice. “These are the names of my two children,” as she rolled back her sleeve and pointed to her left shoulder. She stopped and now returned the same still gaze as if to say, “I can say more if you want me to.” There was a baby wrapped in a blanket with just her tiny face showing below those two names. “And the baby?” I asked. “I miscarried her in the eighth month, nine years ago, I didn’t want to forget her.”
Tattoos are almost always an open invitation to get beneath the surface in conversation with someone Christ might want you to share him with.
Another great opportunity to be an interested listener is to notice when a person shares a medical concern or death in the family. This is a great opportunity to ask, “Would you mind if I prayed for (the surgery) or comfort for the bereaved. Of course we need to follow through, remembering to pray and ask about how things are going. It may be trite, but it is true of our non-Christian friends and associates: They don’t care what you know until they know that you care. Care begins with good listening.
C. Be WINSOME. Randy Newman, a staff member of Cru was leading a weekend retreat on how to share your faith. The students yawned their way through the first two sessions, “How to Make a Clear Presentation of the Gospel,” and “Clarifying Misconceptions About the Gospel.” But his third presentation, on how to be winsome got their attention. They listened alertly to Randy share his story of reaching out to David. David had not been responsive to Randy’s presentation of the gospel. So, Randy changed his tactics:
I shared what I now call my “so-what testimony.” I talked about my experience of being a Christian—of how I now sense a purpose and meaning to life, of how I never feel alone, and how—because I feel accepted by God—I more willingly accept other people. I told how being a Christian makes my marriage better, gives me a clear conscience, and fills me with a sense of optimism and hope. Then I asked how he was adjusting to his new environment. I was genuinely concerned. I listened. Through his rambling answer he indicated that he hadn’t made many friends, that he liked classical music, and he hated the cafeteria food…Then I invited him to play volleyball with us the next night. He could meet some people, eat some watermelon, and have some fun—and we wouldn’t do any preaching…David came to the volleyball night and shortly afterwards started attending a Bible study.
Randy turned to his audience on the evangelism retreat and said to them: “The things I learned from Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, did more to move David closer to the cross than anything I’d learned from evangelism seminars.” In today’s world, Carnegie’s nine principles would be called emotional intelligence. Think of them as general revelation about being winsome:
1. Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain
2. Give honest, sincere appreciation
3. Arouse in another person an eager want (what Randy did in his testimony)
4. Become genuinely interested in other people
5. Smile
6. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language
7. Be a good listener
8. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests
9. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely
I believe that the gospels show that Jesus exhibited most of these characteristics in his personal encounters with others (though not in his prophetic role.) Evangelism is not violating what your relational radar is telling you about what is appropriate. To the contrary, it is expressing interest in one Christ has caused to cross your path in order to win the right to be heard.
D. Be REAL. Most Christians wrestle with the fact that they are not the example of Christ that they should be, and they know how much hypocrisy is despised in our culture. We feel like if we were better Christians, people would see the Lord in us and they would give their lives to Christ. Our failures make us reticent to share our faith. But what we don’t realize is that despite our failures, the opposite is the case. Many non-Christians don’t believe they can be Christians because they are not good enough. The truth is that seeing our imperfections and owning them actually gives hope to others that they could be Christ-followers like us.
When we are not honest about our failures and doubts about Christianity, we actually create barriers to others coming to faith. A Christ-follower is one who knows his abject spiritual poverty, who constantly cries, “I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.” As John Leonard is profoundly correct when he observes, “We want people to see Jesus in us when it would be so much better if they instead saw someone in need of Jesus. As someone has said, evangelism is one blind beggar sharing the good news with another blind beggar where he can find bread.
