Lessons on Interfaith Evangelism (part one)
Recently on the blog, I have written posts on personal evangelism and assessing the evangelistic health in churches. When many think of evangelism, they simply consider it to be sharing Christ to those who do not know Him as Savior. While this is true, we should not neglect sharing our faith with those following other religions.
For my book The Unexpected Journey, Nellie Jo and I spent several weeks interviewing Christians who had been previously devoted to non-Christian religions. It made an indelible impression on both of our lives. In today's article, I will share some of the lessons we learned from our conversations with those who had journeyed from other gods to faith in Christ. I'll complete the list in a future post.
Know what you believe. Most of the interviewees told us that they were amazed at the biblical ignorance they witnessed when they were not yet Christians. Several times we heard them say that they knew more about the Bible than Christians did. We cannot expect to defend the faith if we do not know what we believe. And we cannot know what we believe unless we spend time in the Bible.
Know what they believe. While we cannot expect every Christian to know every detail about every other religion, we can train ourselves to know enough to have conversations with people of a specific belief system. Quite frankly, Christians often do more harm than good in our conversations with those of other religions. We cannot expect to have their ears unless we have done our homework to find out as much as possible about what they believe. And that means we must be willing to listen to them, which is the next lesson.
Listen to them. Sometimes Christians are just too eager to talk and unwilling to listen. Listening means we are willing to learn from others. Listening means we are not threatened in our own Christian beliefs by hearing what someone else believes. Listening means we really care for the person.
Pray for them. Some of the most "hopeless" persons became followers of Christ through the persistent prayers of Christians. How many churches actually set aside corporate prayer time to pray for those who do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?
Invite them to church. I've done a great deal of research on this. In every instance, data has overwhelmingly shown that many non-Christians will come to church if we would just invite them. What are we waiting for?
Learn about their home lives. Many of those we interviewed shared with us some very sad stories of a difficult childhood or home life. If we listen with sensitivity to learn about others' childhood and youth, we can relate to them better.
Get them to look closely at their own documents. Not all belief systems have specific documents, but many do. Many times, people of different religions will be open to discussing Christianity because of the doubt raised by their own documents once they start to study them. Of course, this apporoach presumes the Christian has also studied his or her belief system well.
How have your evangelistic efforts benefited from these lessons in the past? In what areas do you need the most work?
