:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

Today we continue my Christian Survival Guide series focusing on the topic: Sharing the Gospel.

Why do we share the Gospel?

Last week I talked about our motivation for sharing the Gospel. In brief, Jesus commanded us, and we have experienced the love and freedom of Christ. However, there may be another reason driving us.

We also fear what may become of those who resist the love of God.

Hell can be a powerful motivator, driving us to tell everyone we know that they need to follow Jesus or risk missing out on the life he offers in this world and in the world to come.

Do our beliefs about hell shape how we share the Gospel?

Do our beliefs about hell make us more up-tight when sharing the Gospel? With so much at stake, especially if we believe that hell brings eternal, conscious torment, I think it’s very possible that the love of God can be lost in the process. We can turn into messengers who only warn of a coming flood with a message of how to find safety.

That does not mean we should ignore hell. The Bible makes it quite clear that there are consequences for rejecting the love of God. However, sharing the Gospel is more about whether or not we will be with God, not whether or not we will be eternally punished. The former is relational and consistent with a Messiah who calls us his friends and his children, while the latter is a transaction.

And then there’s another possible response to thinking of hell as eternal, conscious punishment. We may block out the negative images from our mind. Is it perhaps so terrible that we cannot deal with it? In other words, can our view of hell drive us to the point that we fail to think about it?

I personally have wrestled with this. I almost can’t bear to think of hell and what it could mean for anyone, let alone someone I know. Hell has been a terrible abyss that I’m afraid to stare into, to consider, to wonder if it really is so.

Will a less terrible picture stop us from sharing the Gospel? Are there any possibilities for hell beyond eternal, conscious torment?

Can we know what is hell really like? Does it matter for sharing the Gospel?

At the most basic level, hell means separation from God. I think hell essentially can begin on earth as we make choices to move away from God’s caring rule. Being outside the Kingdom of God, as depicted in the Gospels, is a place of weeping and regret.

For the sake of argument, I’m going to rule out Purgatory and Universalism. While I know that some Christians believe in them, I’d rather focus on the ones that I and the majority of my readers here are likely to find more plausible. The traditional view of hell says there will be fire, darkness, and torment for eternity. The metaphorical view of hell states that hell exists but the details of New Testament are viewed as metaphor and hyperbole. Lastly, the conditional view proposes a hell where those within it are annihilated.

Will there be torment, suffering, and fire? Are we reading the scriptures as intended? A plain, literal reading does not work for poetry, metaphors, and hyperbole, and if we are mistaking metaphors and hyperbole for hard facts, we could be misrepresenting God and his plans for humanity.

It has been my suspicion that a real hell exists, but that the majority of references to fire and eternal suffering range toward metaphor and hyperbole ( I don’t have time to get into all of the arguments, but I’ll post links to other resources below to follow up). Jesus often used this Rabbinic teaching method (eg. “cut out your eye”), and many of the references to hell occurred in parables and stories. In addition, keep in mind that the Old Testament doesn’t speak of hell all that often. The dead go to Sheol, though a few later books like Daniel and the end of Isaiah make references to hell, which makes sense since the Intertestamental books of the same period also began to mention hell.

All that to say, we should be very, very careful when speaking of hell and using it as a motivating force in our evangelism. I think it is quite accurate to warn people about being separated from the love of God, but telling others they risk eternal, conscious punishment in flames and darkness (which when you come to think about it, doesn’t go together) may stray from the point. Will there be suffering in a state of separation from God? I have no doubt about it. But focusing on the nature of it, pulls us off course.

God desires that all people will come to know him. If we have also shared in the life he offers, we have two very good reasons to tell others about the good things God has done for us and to live differently because of the impact he has had. The consequences of rejecting him offer a third reason, but we should carefully consider the way hell impacts our evangelism.

For further reading on hell, see:

Four Views on Hell

Two Views of Hell

Wikipedia on Hell

Religion Facts on Hell

Yesterday I kicked off my survival guide series on evangelism by addressing the anxiety it causes.

Now, before you have a panic attack with me, we should move on to some basic Christian principles that tie into evangelism. Let’s begin with a story about panic attacks, but panic attacks about something other than evangelism.

My friend Billy had a crush on a girl named Jenny from our college. After we’d graduated, he managed to keep in touch with Jenny and so whenever we hung out he’d turn into the Jenny newswire. He saw her at the store, she replied to his latest e-mail, and there was a slight chance she may actually talk to him on the phone before the next solar eclipse. If he managed to speak with her in person the residual anxiety seemed to make him dizzy.

And then one day Billy pulled off a coup. Under the banner of a “reunion,” he managed to convince Jenny to come over to his place for a party with a few friends who came in from out of town. He had all kinds of time to hang out with her, and those of us subscribed to the Jenny newswire made sure we kept the other guests entertained while the two of them caught up.

Billy didn’t need a lot of coercing to hang out with Jenny, to talk about Jenny, or to organize an event around Jenny. He was smitten with her, loopy beyond the bounds of reason, and willing to organize his day around her if he could spend more time with her. That’s what love can do to us.

It’s easy to talk about someone you love.

I love this story because I’ve had my own Julie newswire when I’m visiting friends and Julie isn’t there. Love prompts us to talk about the beloved. And that’s the most basic first step in evangelism: fall in love with God.

It’s actually not that hard to do if you think about it. The problem comes when we don’t think about it. Christianity is built upon the work of Christ, dying for us, rising from the dead, and sending his Spirit. As we embrace what these events mean for us today, we can worship him in gratitude and appreciate the selfless love he has given us.

Keep in mind that Jesus literally spilled his blood on our behalf. This is not just a mystical other-worldly reality. Nails and a spear were literally driven into his body, killing him. It was horrible, violent, and painful, and yet he was so head over heels in love with the people on earth, his treasured creation, that he suffered and then defeated death so that we could live with him.

That’s a love worthy of throwing a party.

Our next post will sort out some of the biblical teaching behind the way we share the Gospel.

The thing we don’t want to know about evangelism is that we tend to preach to people just like us.

If you’re in a well-off church, you start thinking of billboards and gimmicks to draw people in. You talk about purpose and fulfillment and the emptiness of life without Christ. In one sense, I am very sympathetic to such thinking. I applaud the genuine desire to share the love of Christ with others.

However, such thinking is limited in scope and does not take into full account the ministry of Christ that began with a declaration of good news to the poor. When I look at these evangelism strategies, I now see one thing that I haven’t wanted to see all along: I want to share the Gospel with people who are just like me: the same social standing, background, and goals.

If we preach to people just like us, then we’ll know a thing or two about how to relate to them. They won’t question our values or our choices. They won’t rock the boat in our congregations and in our lives.

When such a critique is leveled, the automatic response is to point out the effectiveness of a particular evangelism strategy. Someone can be paraded out to show that it worked and if we had not hosted this event, plastered this billboard around town, or handed out tracts to people on the sidewalk, Jimmy would never have been saved and if we dare question the method that reached Jimmy with the Gospel are we saying that we wouldn’t want Jimmy in our church or worse yet, in hell?

The methods worked, back off.

With all due respect to Jimmy, my greater concern is that we may be working extremely hard to save people like Jimmy with expensive advertising campaigns and resource hungry gimmicks to reach a relatively small portion of the population. And truth be told, this portion of the population may not be all that interested in the Gospel or God for that matter, making them a particularly tough nut to crack.

Thankfully, I don’t think we are faced with an either/or situation with respect to brother Jimmy and his affluent colleagues who want nothing to do with God. We can become a strong witness to the Kingdom of God and the Good News of its coming while also reaching the people that our advertising campaigns and evangelism tricks pass by.

This isn’t anything all that new. Lately there are a number of people who are suggesting the feasibility of such an approach. From Richard Stearns of World Vision to Shane Claiborn of the Simple Way, Christians can maximize their Gospel-preaching by giving away their resources, caring for others, and preaching the Gospel to the poor.

Wouldn’t that say volumes more than a billboard? Wouldn’t people respond to that?

While visiting a church plant in one of America’s poorest cities I stood outside chatting with a friend before the service. This guy I’ll call Raul walked up to us and asked my friend if he could bum a cigarette off him. We soon got into a conversation about himself, his family, and his church background. We told him about the church, and he asked, “So where is it based out of?”

“Right here,” my friend replied.

“For real?” he asked in unbelief.

Why would a group of otherwise well-off Christians embody the Kingdom of God in a neighborhood that has been abandoned by our government and written off by society? Why would Raul be so surprised to find that a group of Christians would set up shop in his neighborhood?

That is the kind of message that a billboard, event, or tract can never communicate: the immediate power and presence of God’s Kingdom among his people.

UPDATE:  I forgot to mention that I began thinking up this post after reading Bill Kinnon’s thoughts the other day.

I recently had a number of conversations about Christianity and the Gospel with some folks who would most likely not self-identify as followers of Jesus. In fact, they may have been a tad suspicious of Christianity and evangelicals such as myself. However, I had a chance to talk about not only my beliefs, but my practices—how I join in God’s Kingdom work on earth.

I can’t recall how the conversation went down exactly, but I mentioned things like protecting the environment, visiting prisoners, and supporting ministries that serve others as well as sharing the Gospel. I talked about the ways that God wants to restore and heal our world.

When sin becomes a problem infecting all of us, rather than just this thing that separates YOU personally from God, there’s a lot of room for conversation. We all feel the effects of sin in this world, both personally and corporately, and so speaking of a God who wants to reconcile us and the rest of the world makes good biblical and common sense.

After chatting for a while about these things, the person I spoke with said, “Well, if that’s what it really means to be an evangelical, then I suppose you could call me an evangelical too.” 

In that moment I realized something:  Living out the Gospel makes Jesus more accessible for others. When they realize they too share something in common with God, they no longer view themselves as alien to these evangelicals trying to “save” them.

Don’t get me wrong here, I certainly made it very clear in the course of the conversation that Jesus must be Lord of our lives and that we must make a commitment to follow. I’m not sure where this person ended up with all of that. However, I was encouraged to see the light go on, to find that God isn’t so distant and foreign, and that the people representing this God may not be so strange after all.

I’m far more interested in entering conversation by fostering commonalities, showing people where they are close to God’s Kingdom. In the process of discussing commonalities differences will no doubt be unearthed and discussed. We can’t afford to gloss over sin and the evils of this world, however we can still engage in discussions about common ground, and then move from there to the places where we are different.

We all know this world is screwed up.

We all have felt the effects of sin.

We all want to do try and do something about it, whether for ourselves alone or possibly for others as well.

We need to talk about solutions and the ways forward.

As an evangelical, I believe the way forward is through the loving rule of God in our lives.

Here are some thoughts I’m currently processing. I’ll paste below my rough draft:

We don’t have any measure for the effects of poor evangelism, to say nothing of Christianity’s terrible reputation as a religion for the judgmental, hypocritical, and homophobic. These matters need to be viewed through the lens of evangelism, much like our actual efforts to share the Good News. Evangelism isn’t concerned only with what we say, but also with what we do because what we do can easily undermine whatever we say.

That really should be a no-brainer.

Evangelicals are so entrenched in our Gnostic bubble that keeps salvation by faith separated from the Lordship of Jesus and the resulting good works that must flow from truly saving faith (see the epistle of James) that such critiques don’t appear on our radar. If what we’re saying is true, then we assume we’ve done our part: communicated the truth.

We now know that is not enough. The majority of the younger generation and countless others think evangelicals are the problem in the world, not the solution. Can we expect to argue and reason our way out of this mess?