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by
Sam Chan
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January 26 - August 7, 2023
And that brings me to lesson number two on how not to evangelize: If we’re not listening to our friends, then they won’t be listening to us. They will tune us out. If we want to tell our friends about Jesus, we must first learn the art of listening.
James told me his technique for practicing the third type of listening—real listening—is simply to not talk. If there’s a long, uncomfortable pause in the conversation, take a sip from your drink. This is a nonverbal signal to the other person that it’s their turn to start talking again. I was on the receiving end
I like to joke with my male friends that it’s everything we were taught in pre-marriage classes on how to manage conflict with our wives. For example, my wife says to me, “You’re not doing the dishes enough.” I can repeat her words to her: “From what I hear you saying, I’m not doing the dishes enough.” Then I should summarize her words to demonstrate that I understand the bigger issue: “I understand I’m not doing my share of the house duties.” Finally, I should empathize by speaking her emotions back to her: “Oh, that must make you feel disrespected. Have I heard you correctly?” A final step
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When they’re finished, we might find ourselves saying, “From what I hear you saying, you’re very much for same-sex marriage. I understand how for you this is a matter of justice and equality. So you must feel angry when you hear that Christians might not share your point of view. It’s going to take a lot before you trust Christians. Have I heard you correctly?” When we actively
And sometimes what I say matters a lot less than how I act.
When I give a public talk, there will be a lot of logos and pathos but little ethos. But when it comes to talking
to close friends and family, ethos becomes a huge component.
important. But the more closely someone knows us, the more they will be persuaded by our way of life rather than merely by what we say.
For Sophia, who comes from a pre-Christian culture, Jesus offers freedom. But for Amy, who comes from a post-Christian culture, Jesus means the loss of freedom. This is one of the reasons we’re seeing such an influx of converts to Christianity in Asia and a decline in Western countries.
Perhaps it’s time we rediscovered the Jesus of the Bible. Let’s forget about the Jesus we think we know or grew up with. Let’s go to the Bible and discover the Jesus the rest of the world is coming to know. And if we have any problems with the Bible, maybe they are our Western cultural objections, which the rest of the world just doesn’t have. If we think Christianity is a tool of oppression, that is also probably only our Western presuppositions, because the rest of the world is discovering a freedom that comes from knowing the Jesus of the Bible.
During this period of Christendom, it was a better story of freedom. But to people in the post-Christian West, this same story sounds like one of power, oppression, and enslavement. It’s the same story, but our post-Christian friends don’t hear it the same way our Christendom ancestors did.
No matter where your friends are—culturally, emotionally, and existentially—the Bible has a story about Jesus that will connect with them.
Our culture praises doing my own thing and rebelling as good, brave, and noble things to do! And we associate words like submit and king with oppression. So when we use these words to describe our Christian experience, we’re portraying Christianity as an oppressive institution that will impose its artificial constructs on you and take away your freedom.
Our post-Christian friends are misunderstanding what we’re really trying to say—so we need to find a new way to communicate the Christian truths in which we believe.
But what is this exactly? It’s this: There’s a God who loves us, made us, and saved us. And now we get to be part of his story. Every day is a day when I live for Jesus because he lives for me. Every day is a day when I can journey with Jesus and bring his love, mercy, and justice to this planet. If this is true, then we are set free from our empty and self-absorbed lives. We are set free to admit that everything is not okay right now. The person you see on the outside is not the person on the inside. I’m not the person I pretend to be. But that’s okay. Because Jesus is perfect, so I don’t
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When I listen to my friends and hear where they’re coming from—culturally, emotionally, and existentially—I can appropriate their language and show them that Jesus is the one they’re looking for. I’m using their heart language to show them that Jesus is God’s better story for them.
It’s exactly what Jesus did for the woman at the well when he offered living water (John 4). It’s what Jesus did when he offered light to the man born blind (John
I explained that this story shows what life with Jesus will be like both now and in the life to come: It will be a full and fulfilled life. Then, to show her I had been listening when she talked, I said, “You told me earlier that you enjoy beauty. Where do you think beauty comes from? It comes from God. He deliberately made this world beautiful so we can enjoy it.”
Both of these conversations began with me listening and asking questions to give the other person permission to talk. But they ended with them asking me questions about my faith and giving me permission to talk. They were inviting me to tell them the gospel message.
If I only see the friendship as a means to tell them about Jesus, then I’m overfunctioning. I’m trying to make something happen that might not be there. And I am using them as a means toward an end. Instead, I need to enjoy the friendship just for what it is—a gift from God.
On the other hand, if I don’t try to tell them about Jesus, I’m underfunctioning. There will be times when I could have and should have tried to tell them about Jesus. These opportunities are given to me by God! I need to be a good steward of them.
Do you have a faith? • What religion did your parents raise you with—and what was that like? • What’s the best thing about being an atheist (or Muslim, Buddhist, etc.)?26 If they’re ready to talk, they will.
What can I control? (2) What am I responsible for? In other words, don’t get anxious about what we’re not responsible for. Don’t stress about things we can’t control. Instead, focus only on what we can control, and bear only the burden of what we’re responsible for.
In the same way, if we come out and tell our friend we’re a Christian, their response is out of our control. It’s something out of our area of responsibility. The way they react is not our assignment.
Don’t just learn the names of those you need to know. Learn the names of the people whose names you don’t need to know. When you do this, people will realize that you care.
Ask why they chose the names they did for their children. Most parents spend a long time choosing a meaningful name for their child, so this is often a fruitful question. Plus, it will make it easier to remember their names.
What do I mean by nonanxious? I mean that we are not anxious about the things we can’t control. We calmly submit these to God’s power. God has these things under control. If we do this, we will have a calmness about us that we don’t even realize.
So all of us are putting on a brave face and pretending that everything is okay when everything can’t possibly be okay.
Our job as a de facto chaplain is to invite our friends to share how they are really doing at work, health, and home. We become the safe space for them to talk out loud, and
then we listen and show that we understand and fee...
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Give your friends permission to talk about how things are—really. Show them you understand. Acknowledge and affirm their feelings. Offer to pray. Then follow up on it the next time you see them.
But here’s the thing. In order to tell our friends about Jesus, we have to make ourselves vulnerable. Not so much vulnerable to attack, but vulnerable to disagreement. When we do this, we’re following in Jesus’ footsteps.
Jesus shows us that allowing for disagreement in relationships and being willing to engage with people we disagree with is a way of demonstrating inclusiveness and showing unconditional love. Jesus practiced inclusion by eating and drinking with those who disagreed with him. When we make room for disagreement, we also show that we value inclusiveness. After all, if we only eat with those who agree with us, we’re practicing exclusion by turning away those who disagree with us.
Jesus also demonstrated unconditional love by telling his followers to love and bless those who disagreed with them. When we engage with people we disagree with, we also demonstrate unconditional love. You see, if we only love those ...
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Another advantage of this approach is that it places the basis of our belief on Jesus. We don’t believe what we believe because this is what we prefer to be true; we believe what we believe because this is what Jesus himself tells us is true.
If we’re disagreeing, it’s over what Jesus tells us is right or wrong. Again, this shows that my views on sex and morality are not centered around what I prefer to be moral or immoral, but around what Jesus teaches me is moral or immoral.
We need to move beyond responding to defeater beliefs (practicing negative apologetics). Instead, we need to give reasons that promote belief (practicing positive apologetics). We need to show our nonbelieving friends why they need or want Christianity to be true.
You disagree about needing the God of the Bible for this to be true. Challenge your friend to prove, based on any other reason, that a human being has an inherent dignity, value, or worth apart from what they achieve or acquire in this life.
This allows you to point out that unless there’s a God who created us as inherently worthy—in his image—and confers dignity on us by becoming one of us and dying for us, it’s very hard to believe in such a thing as human rights.
In this book, Keller shows how much of what we believe to be true—e.g., meaning, satisfaction, freedom, self, identity, hope, morality, and justice—are nonsensical unless the God of the Bible is also true. They cannot exist without a transcendent God who made us, loves us, and saves us. I believe we can use this approach in the art of positive apologetics.
show them that it’s not “us versus them.” It’s not “I’m right, and you’re wrong.” Instead, we’re both after the same thing—we’re just coming from different starting points.
The beautiful thing in our post-Christian age is that the gospel is wonderfully foreign again. The gospel is foreign to any and every culture. This is its strength rather than its weakness.
Our friends are more skeptical than ever. In much of the Western world, we are now post-Christian, post-churched, post-reached, and post-millennial. But these are also exciting times. Jesus promised his followers that one day we would have to speak up for him (Luke 21:12–13). What we may think of as threats to our witness are actually God-given opportunities to speak on his behalf.
Much of evangelism occurs the same way. Often we go out looking for opportunities to evangelize, but they just don’t happen. Instead, we should just go out there and be Jesus to the community—and the opportunities to evangelize will find us.
Maybe we can do the same thing. In addition to our deliberate efforts to do evangelism—to create opportunities for evangelism—we just need to be Jesus, and evangelism opportunities may well come and find us in unforeseen and exciting ways.
