May 12, 2009
Nurturing What is True… Part Three on Sharing the Gospel
I used to challenge and debunk what people believe about God if it didn’t line up with what I understood to be biblical truth. I don’t do that so much anymore.
I’ve run into Christians who have tried to convert me to their version of Christianity and have found such an aggressive approach more of a turn-off than an effective way to win someone over. In fact, I have begun to wonder if the aggressive proselytizing done by Christians is actually turning more people away from the faith than to it.
We don’t have statistics for that.
However, we can talk to people, and that’s something I’ve done. The vast majority of people find our methods very closed-minded, unappealing, and even dangerous to society.
So what should we do? What should we say? How should we say it?
For starters, I’d like to suggest that we drop the pressure down a notch, viewing each conversation as part of a process, trusting God to the ultimate results. The Holy Spirit is at work, we have something to contribute to the process, but we may only be the ones planting some seeds and ideas.
And if we take the farming idea further, we could think of ourselves meeting with people who have some correct and false notions of God. Our job is to help them weed out the false ideas and to nurture the correct ideas. We’re pointing them to the truth, perhaps gently pointing out the issues with some false notions of God, and encouraging them to nurture that which best reflects God.
My goal after speaking with people is to leave them eager to find out more about Jesus. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with the love and grandeur of God, and I want as many people to experience that as possible. When I speak with someone who doesn’t have that kind of relationship with God, I do what I can to help them see the possibilities, to help them see how badly they need God.
Nevertheless, I firmly believe that I don’t serve a manipulative God who forces himself upon us. He often describes himself as a lover who is jealous of our affairs with false gods. That should give us pause and help us think about how we tell others about how we share God with others.
I liked what you wrote about speaking to others about Christ in these three articles. My response turned into a blog post on my blog. I think you are right on…I’m finding this an interesting site. Thanks for posting this series.
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I’m glad to hear that! This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Thanks for the follow up post.
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As long as we are pointing to Christ rather than our own brand of Christianity, you just almost can’t be aggressive. Pointing to Christ is an easy sell…pointing to a particular church takes great argumentative/debating skills to convince why yours is best.
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Summer, that’s a great point. Directing people to Jesus really shouldn’t require pressure or manipulation.
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