- [Matt Smethurst] Don and Rebecca, one thing that we all encounter in our own
hearts and with people that we're trying to lead is a fear, a fear of sharing
our faith. So, how do you go about leading someone to share their faith when
they feel intimidated, they feel like they're not yet ready to do it?
- [Rebecca McLaughlin] The first thing I'd say is join the club.
I've been trying in various ways to share my faith for almost 30 years now.
And if being ready to share your faith means having your Christian life
all together, I'm not ready. If it means not being fearful,
I'm not ready. If it means having all the answers, I'm not ready.
So there's one sense in which I think no Christian is really ready to share
their faith in that sense. On the other hand, anybody who knows of Jesus and has
the gospel is ready to share. And that can look different ways for different
people in different circumstances. But I think we're either all not ready
or all ready so long as we know who Jesus is and what he's done for us.
– [Don Carson] There's a book by Mack Stiles called Marks of the Messenger,
which is one of my favorite evangelism books. It doesn't tell you how to do it,
it doesn't make you feel guilty because you don't, but makes Christ
and bearing witness so unquestionably attractive
that you want to go out and share the faith with somebody.
- Kind of like hanging out with Mack himself.
- Yeah, exactly right. It's very difficult not to want
to evangelize when you're with Mack. And, what that means is that ideally,
you need to spend time with a person or with a book that makes Christ so lovely
in your eyes that you can't easily shut up. Now, there are lots of things to be
said beyond that. But an awful lot of the initial fear has got to be overcome
by a superlative gratitude to Christ.
I don't know any other way of getting around the challenge.
- I find another great tip is spending time with small children.
So I was at the park a few years ago with my daughter who was then five
and she struck up a conversation with an older Chinese-speaking lady.
And she asked her what her name was. And she asked her where she came from.
And then she asked her, did she trust in Jesus.
And I was mortified, and the lady didn't properly hear her.
So she asked her, you know, "What did you say?" And my daughter said,
"Do you trust in Jesus?" And she didn't hear her again,
and my face was redening. And eventually, I thought, "I'm just going to have
to say this." I said, "Well, we're actually a Christian family.
And sometimes my daughter likes to ask if other people trust in Jesus too."
And I was ready for the ground to swallow me up. And this other lady said,
"Oh, do I trust in Jesus? Yes, I trust in Jesus. It's the most important
thing in the world. And I'm so glad you do as well." I thought,
my five-year-old had a natural boldness at the park that made me embarrassed.
And it turned out to encourage this lovely older Christian lady in her experience
in her faith, I would never have struck up that conversation. So I think there's
something about learning from other people's joy and boldness or just lack
of inhibition that we can grow out of sometimes.
- So often we think of sharing our faith in terms of having answers to people's
difficult questions. Whereas, an awful lot of the most effective
evangelism is literally sharing our testimony. And that can be practiced,
edited, written up. It's something that can be taught.
- And you can have the one minute version, the five-minute version.
- Correct, and to get people to have that sort of thing prepared,
I think is a huge advantage. And then, if they're afraid of questions that come
along that they don't know how to answer then you need to train people to say,
"I don't know, I don't have a clue. Sorry. I'll try and find out.
But I can't answer this. It sounds like a good question to me."
And to walk with a little humility and admit what you don't know while still
talking about the joy of the Lord and the forgiveness of sins and your own
experience and so on, is far more effective than having
even excellent answers for any question that might come along.
- Earlier you mentioned that if we truly know Christ, then there's a sense in which
we have all that we need to share our faith or we don't have anything.
I mean, if we don't know him, we don't have anything. But I think,
an old preacher in the UK once said that we may not have a watertight argument
but we do have a watertight person. And it's Jesus Christ that...we may have
any number of reasons for being theists but ultimately we only have one reason
for being Christians and that's Jesus Christ. We've met him,
and we want to introduce him to others. And I think that sometimes we,
I know in my own life, it's the times when I have been most cold
toward the things of God that I have not felt that compulsion to share with others,
as you were mentioning earlier, Don. It hasn't been that overflowing joy.
And I think that Satan, he has the gift of discouragement.
He, I think we can underestimate how much the evil one wants to convince us that,
"No, you're not quite ready. You're not going to have an answer
to that objection. You're just going to make a fool of yourself and actually
put the car of Christianity in reverse by trying to have this conversation."
But it's helpful to remember that is in no way the case. What are some of the fears
that you all have particularly encountered over the years in terms of evangelism?
- I don't know about you, but I find that speaking about Jesus to a
stranger is quite easy because if they walk away and never want to see me again,
I haven't lost anything. Speaking to somebody I care about,
and I'm going to be in a relationship with longer term, or who I could lose
that relationship with by sharing my faith, and that's happened,
that's where I become afraid. And I think sometimes we need
to recognize that, if we don't have any fear, in the sense of recognizing the risk
and the vulnerability of speaking of Jesus, and frankly, expecting rejection
as often as anything else, maybe we're not actually putting our heart into this.
Maybe we're not really loving people as we seek to share the gospel with them.
So, rather than seeing fear as an inhibition, I wonder if we should
start seeing it as a signal that we're maybe in the right place to vulnerably
share our faith in Jesus with somebody who we love. And that's not to say,
evangelizing in the street isn't a wonderful thing. I think it is,
and something that we probably could all do more of. But that fear,
at least for me, is always about relationship and that is a place
where I want Jesus too and have been my conversations the most.
- Yeah, I've been convicted before just by the thought that, you know,
it's probably not the presence of fear that is the number one thing keeping me
from opening my mouth and bragging about my Savior, it's probably, I mean,
that's up there, the presence of fear but the number one thing is probably the
absence of love and the absence of joy. Because if you really love God
and love the person, then you will overcome that fear. What about you, Don,
in terms of fears that you've encountered or still do?
- An awful lot of the evangelism that I do over the years
has been in university context, university missions.
I could tell you what university missions I've done in this calendar year.
And that, it shouldn't, but it can bring its own, I don't know what to call it.
A fear of academic...academically being despised.
In one west coast university, I was at earlier this year, the topic meant
that probably 10% of those who came were dons, they were lecturers, professors.
And so the…and then we are always open up to Q&A.
And so the level of discussion was sophisticated. I was not with a bunch
of first-year students, where I've heard all their questions. So that can
engender a certain kind of fear as well. And I have to remind myself,
"If I get stumped, it's not the end of the world. You say sorry, I don't have a clue.
I'll look it up." Send them some something by email, keep the conversation going.
So, that is a fear, at the end of the day, it's a fear that stems from pride.
You don't want to lose face. And that's not healthy,
it's not wise at all. So you just have to work
through those things. And it's what John Owen would have called
the mortification of sin. You have to deal with it and confront it,
and keep going anyway, seems to me.
- I think one of my most terrifying experiences of campus evangelism
was when I was an undergrad. And, we had a system whereby we would
give out gospels to every undergraduate once a year. And we'd split the
undergraduates up between the little Christian body so you get a list of people
who were your people to go and knock on their door, give them the gospel
and invite them to a mission talk. And on my list was probably the coolest
girl in my year. And she was beautiful, and trendy, and amazing, and socially
here while I was socially here. And I put this girl at the absolute bottom of my
list because I was frankly terrified of going and knocking on her door
and embarrassing myself. And finally when I worked through all the other people,
I went up to her door, I knocked on it. And I said
in the least expecting the answer, "yes," way
you could possibly imagine. "Here's the gospel. We're having some talks
about Jesus next week. And I wondered if you wanted to come?"
And she said, "Oh, yeah. I'd be really interested actually."
I could not have been more shocked because if I'd had to tell you who is the least
likely person to respond to an invitation, it was her. And actually she was
one of the people who came for multiple nights. So, it's just been a reminder
to me through my life, that often the people we are most afraid
to speak to for all sorts of bad reasons turn out to be the people who
are really ready to hear about Jesus.
- You don't know, you just don't know.
- You don't know.
- Yeah, and not only whom, but you don't know when, that moment.
One verse that really encourages me is Jeremiah 23:29 where God says,
"It is not my word like fire and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces."
We never know what hard hearts are going to be melted, are going to be broken.
And we never know when. God loves to surprise,
He loves to show off.
- I think the mental framework that you bring to evangelism when you're
dealing with people in this country, very often in the south where they have
some sort of biblical background and refer to the Ten Commandments,
and there's a rising percentage of genuinely secular people.
There are an awful lot of people who have some sort of biblical formation.
It's different from when you're evangelizing on the coasts and there isn't
a single theological word they used with the same theological meaning
as I used. They don't know the Bible as two testaments and so on.
And the questions that are bound to come up are way out there.
They're on another planet. And I think that part of the fear that
many Christians have is the fear of passing like ships in the night.
They don't know how to talk with secularists who buy
into philosophical materialism, and the other side doesn't have a clue
what you're talking about. It sounds so ridiculous.
And, so there are fears that are bound up with the challenges of communicating
on some sort of common ground. So that is a person who has done
evangelism only in sort of the Christianized corners of the world
may feel a quite different fear when you land on the streets of New York City.
And that's another one that has to be addressed, I think, by training.
- Yeah. And Rebecca, I've heard you mention that, you know,
we often think about evangelism just in terms of what we need to do in relation
to the people outside the church, but I've heard you talk about evangelism
within the church. What exactly do you have in mind?
- People stumble into our church buildings every Sunday for a whole range of reasons.
I see this at the church that we are part of in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And one of the most meaningful evangelistic things that any of us can do
every week is go and sit with a new person, particularly a new person
who's there by themselves. It's a low bar in terms of how equipped
we need to be. Nobody's asking us to deliver a sermon or cold-call somebody
out of the blue and ask to talk to them about Jesus, these people have walked
into our buildings. And quite often, they walk out again without anybody
meaningfully connecting with them. And I've seen time and again.
A few months ago, I noticed a woman sitting by herself at our church,
and I went up to talk with her and she said, she'd grown up Catholic.
She hadn't been to church in 15 years and something hard in her life had brought
her to church that day. I didn't know where she was with the Lord but just being
able to connect with her relationally enabled her then to get stuck into that
church and join our community group and to have the opportunities to grow
in faith that she needed. So I think, often, we're so focused on people
out there and worrying about whether we'll be equipped to handle their hard
questions that we don't notice the people who've literally walked into our meetings
and a little bit of love and attention will open them up to the gospel.
- Yeah, Don, you mentioned Mack's book earlier, Marks of the Messenger.
He has a more recent one, Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus.
And I think we can forget the corporate dimension to evangelism
which can be uniquely compelling. It's interesting that in John 13
Jesus said, "By this, all men will know you're disciples. By the way,"
he doesn't say, "By the way, you love them," though that's true.
But he says, "By the way, you love one another."
So there's something in our life together as a church that is not itself the gospel
but certainly embodies and adorns that good news of Jesus.
Thanks for this conversation.