(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “How To Share The Faith”, originally shared on November 15, 2023. It was the 285th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
It’s hard to talk about Jesus in a way that
leads people to receive transformational faith from God. Today, we’re going to
find out how.
I read a story years ago about an older
woman who lived by herself.
She woke up one night to the sound of
breaking glass and went to investigate.
She found an intruder in her living room.
She picked up her Bible and yelled, “Stop! Acts 2:28!”
The intruder froze and stood there while she
called the police.
When police came and arrested him, they
asked the woman, “What did you do to subdue that guy?”
She said, “I wanted him to repent, so I
yelled, ‘Stop! Acts 2:38’!
“That stopped him?” asked one of the
officers.
“Well,” said the older woman, “Acts 2:38
says, ‘38 Peter said to them,
'Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that
your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’ So,
I guess it did.
Then they went to the intruder and asked
him, “What happened?”
“Well,” he said. “I thought it would be
easy. But that crazy lady waved something at me and said, “Stop! I’ve got an
axe, and two .38’s!”
The law of unintended consequences says that
we can’t always know what our actions will accomplish.
For example, those little carrots you buy at
the grocery story are the marketing work of a pair of Lutheran brothers near
Bakersfield, California. Their carrot peeling machines peeled a lot of carrots,
but they also left a lot of small pieces behind. One day, one of the Grimm
brothers (yes, that is their name) got the idea that those little pieces, like
cheese curds before them, might be transformed from waste into money. And it
did. That’s where “baby carrots” come from.
The 3M Corporation had, and maybe still has,
a policy that gave every employee a certain number of paid work hours to pursue
ideas for new products. They could form work teams if they found any other
employees willing to use their hours developing that product. And, if a
saleable product came out of it, the inventor could rise in the company to
become the manager of the division that manufactured that product. One day, an
employee had a problem. He sang in his church choir and marked pages in the
church’s hymnbook with scraps of paper. The problem was that when he turned to
one page, the markers in the other pages would fall out. Meanwhile, another employee
had tried to invent a super glue, but it was a failure. It was only slightly
tacky. Paper that had been coated with it didn’t even pull the ink off a page
when it was removed. They worked together to produce hymnbook markers and
thought that the product would have a very limited market. Until the office
secretaries saw what they were doing and asked for some. And that’s how Post-it
Notes were developed.
Good things can happen when we are trying to
do something else. But lots of bad things can happen when we do nothing.
Hockey great Wayne Gretzky once said, “You
miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Dwight L. Moody, the 19th Century
Evangelist, school founder and publisher, was once told by a critic that she
didn’t like his Evangelism methods. He replied, “I agree with you, I don’t like
the way I do it either. Tell me how do you do it?” The critic replied, ‘I don’t do it.’ Moody said, “I like my way of doing it better
than your way of not doing it.”
That’s the dilemma, isn’t it?
How do we share our faith? Our message is
always the same, but how do we find creative ways to solve new challenges in
communication? How do we find words for what is real to us to communicate with people
who don’t know things that pass human understanding? How do we communicate our convictions
in a world that doesn’t understand our spiritual vocabulary?
We don’t want to lose friends over this. We
don’t want to be the office weirdo. We
don’t want people to misunderstand, or to judge us, or to think that we’re like
those other people who call themselves Christians. We don’t want to alienate
family members; “I have to pick my battles,” we say.
All of which is to say that, to some degree,
faith isn’t as important to me as my status, my popularity, or my reputation,
or what my family thinks of me. I need those things.
“Let’s make a deal.” That’s the arrangement we
in the Western world have made with the societies and secular governments in
which we live. We get a certain level of freedom as long as we agree to a
certain level of restriction on what is an acceptable public conversation. Your
beliefs are your personal business. Otherwise, you’re weird, disruptive or intolerant.
We rarely even talk about our faith in our
churches. We mostly use religious language in our worship services. We may talk
about our faith in our Bible Studies or prayer groups.
But, for the mainline churches in
particular, we talk about social services and social justice and social groups,
sometimes using religious language. Leaders have become less shepherd and more
community organizer.
Listen to what people talk about before or
after a worship service. Mainly we talk about ourselves and our interests. We
build organizations of like-minded people.
There’s a significant difference between
building an organization and building a Christian community that is formed to
proclaim the Kingdom of God and is calling people to receive the transformed
life that is the result of a living relationship with God for which we were
created.
Rev. Richard Halverson, who was a
Presbyterian minister and Chaplain of the United States Senate, once said,
“In the beginning the church was a
fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church
moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it
became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture.
And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”
For many of our churches, being successful
by worldly measures is all that matters.
There is a growing group of people in my
denomination that want to take the word “Evangelical” out of our name because
they believe that its meaning has been irredeemably lost in the United States,
while in the rest of the world it is synonymous with “Lutheran”. But that is not
our biggest problem with being evangelical.
“Evangelism”, being the means through which God
works to lead people to a transformational relationship with God that becomes
new life, isn’t even on many, perhaps most, church’s radar screens. I read a
60-page recap of a self-study of our synod’s strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats (a SWOT study) a few years ago that didn’t mention
words like “evangelism”, or “outreach” or “sharing the gospel” one time. Not
one time.
How can we overcome that? How can we become
evangelical without choosing the government over God? How can we share our
faith where it is not welcome? How can we become, as Rev. Halverson points to,
“a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ”?
The first step is to be that
fellowship. To focus less on buildings and church culture and on maintaining
the power of those in power, and to focus more on Jesus and the
transformational relationship He gave to all who believe with his death on the
cross.
Second, I think that it’s more
important to work on ourselves than on what we’re going to say. I don’t mean,
“I don’t tell people about my faith, I show them by my deeds.” I mean, that the
new Creation that God makes for all who ask means that the Holy Spirit will
speak through us when we get out of His way. Programs don’t lead people to let
God work in them. People do.
The popular ‘70’s-80’s Jesus music Christian
rock group, the “2nd Chapter of Acts”, describes not only the formation
of the Christian Church by the Holy Spirit in verses 1-21 of that
chapter, but the Christian proclamation that came as the result, where the
apostle Peter speaks hard words of Jesus’ crucifixion that could be said to any
one of us.
And then he writes in verse 24,
24 But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was
impossible for him to be held in its power.
And in verse 32,
32 This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.
The good news he proclaims is the
Resurrection of Jesus. And then this happens in Acts 2:37-39,
37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter
and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” 38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven;
and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your
children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God
calls to him.”
The good news is for everyone,
including children. The first converts come to newness of life in the promise
of life in Jesus Christ. Sharing that news requires effort. God works through
Peter’s arguments and exhortation to lead the people to receive God’s gift of new
life. We see it in verses 40-42,
40 And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying,
“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” 41 So those who welcomed his message were baptized,
and that day about three thousand persons were added. 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’
teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
Peter begins sharing the faith at a point of
commonality. He shares the bad news before
he offers the good news of the Resurrection. He shares something important. What
happens to us after we die is no less relevant to human beings today than it
was 2,000 years ago.
Third, talk about Jesus. Talk about
what He means to you. Talk about our hope in Him. Talk about what Jesus talked
about: the already but not yet reign of God for all people. Talk about
forgiveness and new life in Jesus. Talk about what Jesus did for human beings:
he gave his life, and then He took it back again so that we might live forever.
He died on the cross, and then he rose from the dead! That is the heart of the
Christian message.
Tim Keller, who was the Christian author and
pastor of a large Presbyterian church in Manhattan, once wrote, “When people
tell me that they once were believing Christians but now have rejected it all-I
often ask them (after long, close listening) why they originally believed Jesus
rose from the dead and how they came to decide that he now didn't. They usually
say it's a helpful question.”
It is a helpful question, because whatever
else the Christian faith is and however it is expressed and lived, it is built
on three words, “He is Risen!”
Someone may ask you what you did last weekend,
and you may say, “On Sunday morning I went to church, and this was what
happened that was important to me…” But something must have happened that is
important, something more than social groups using religious language. People
need transcendence, they need to be a part of something bigger than themselves,
they need to know that they have hope, they need to know that death is not the
end, they need to hear the Gospel of Jesus. And they are longing for it, even
when they can’t quite put that longing into words, because all human beings
were created for a living relationship with the one true living God.
Fourth, talk about reality. It’s hard
for people outside the Christian faith to understand what Christians actually
believe. As with stained glass windows, who Christians are only makes sense
when the Light shines through.
When I try to explain what I believe I tell
people that, when I talk about my faith, it’s not a random belief. “Faith” is a
synonym for “reality”. It’s not something that we made up. God created me and
then re-created me. God would exist if nothing else did. It’s not something that
“works for me”, it’s reality. And that seems to help them understand.
You may ask someone, at the right time,
“Have you heard about Jesus?”, because believe it or not, increasing millions
of people right here in the U.S. have not, or what they have heard is not at
all connected to reality.
There are tons of ways to share the faith.
Google it and you’ll find the ways. The challenge is to find the will.
Let me modify what I said above about, “The
first step.” The first step is to take the first step.
When
I was in college, Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Power movement in
the ‘60’s, spoke at a nearby school. One of the things he said that I still
think about is, “If you have something that’s really good, you don’t have to
cram it down people’s throats. They’ll steal it from you.”
Christianity is the really great good news. So, why aren’t
people clamoring for it, demanding it, stealing it? Partly, I think, because we
have turned toward ourselves and all but given up on the transforming goodness
of God, and we have turned our attention away from proclaiming it.
It’s hard to share our faith at any time,
especially in a world that increasingly doesn’t see it or want to hear it. A
world that naturally rebels against God and resists the truth.
We are instead a new Creation. We are
called, equipped, and sent to share the faith because it is the joy that is in life
itself. It is a relationship with God given to us by God.
Franciss of Assisi is reported to have said,
“Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if
necessary.” But he never said that. He never made an unnecessary distinction
between words and actions.
Words are necessary. Our words
are necessary to share the faith. God has made us God’s evangelists in proclaiming
the good news of Jesus Christ to the lost. As Paul wrote in Romans 10:17,
17 So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes
through the word of Christ.
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