The Doubters' Club: Good-Faith Conversations with Skeptics, Atheists, and the Spiritually Wounded

by Preston Ulmer

The difference is not in what we experience along the way; the difference is in who is committed to the journey with

It wasn’t just that Jeremy didn’t have a chance in the church; the church was unwilling to give Jeremy a chance. He had experienced church many times over again, and it seemed to be the same thing. The church would put their best foot forward through an invitation to their service and then refuse to use the other foot to walk with him.

These sorts of questions are the natural progression of living the Doubters’ Club as a lifestyle. Remember, it’s not a thing we do. It’s a new way to do everything!

“If God is real, wouldn’t he care about the things that I care about?” To this day, I don’t know if Wesley is what you would consider a “Christian.” What I do know is that we are both way closer to Jesus than we were when we first met.

After impression is intention. It’s a soul check to see whether we have ulterior motives. Does my friendship with this person depend on them deciding to follow Christ within some allotted amount of time? (Ulterior motive.) Or do I intend to befriend this person and share my life with them, regardless of if they ever decide to become a follower of Christ? (Ultimate motive.)

How to Invite People into a Life-Giving Relationship 1. Make seeing them a natural rhythm of your life.

For God’s sake, make your comfortable routines uncomfortable by getting to know the people who are usually serving you. Serve them simply by looking up, asking questions, smiling, and visiting them again. If Jesus came to serve and not be served, at some point we need to do the same.

In an article entitled “Science Has Just Confirmed That If You’re Not Outside Your Comfort Zone, You’re Not Learning,” Inc.com writer Jessica Stillman explains, “Stability shuts down your brain’s learning centers, new Yale research shows.”[5] As Yale neuroscientist Daeyeol Lee put it to Quartz, “Perhaps the most important insight from our study is that the function of the brain as well as the nature of learning is not ‘fixed’ but adapts according to the stability of the environment.

Jesus was intentional about seeing people within his routines. He didn’t overlook anyone. He saw them. If we are to see people like Jesus did, we must do what he did: Learn their names, learn their stories, and learn what they need.

2. Ask to join a natural rhythm of their life.

Have you ever thought about how strange it must feel when unchurched people constantly get invited to church?

If we want to have a relationship with people who do not think like us, we have to love them enough to start where they are. I can’t imagine Jesus was all that concerned with catching fish. I can’t help but believe that he started there because that’s what was important to his soon-to-be disciples.

What I am saying here is to make your agenda them, not you. It would be a paradigm shift for the church. The church is the only institution that exists 100 percent for the good of the people who do not consume the goods of the organization, however. When you ask someone if you can join their life, do so in a way that adds value to them—not you.

The Doubters’ Club lifestyle is for people who are tired of looking like an idiot. Instead of just inviting people to a church service, we have to have intentional invitations that revolve around investing time into people’s interests and needs.

You are inviting them into the next life. Let them climb aboard, and help them cross the river. You both are going somewhere much bigger than yourselves!

INITIATIONHow to Re-examine Our Views through Conversations That Matter A good conversation can shift the direction of change forever. LINDA LAMBERT “Still,” he says, “if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that’s all you’d have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you’ve got all these great jokes.” DANIEL WALLACE, Big Fish: A Novel of Mythical Proportions BACK

These are two outcomes that every meaningful conversation has the potential to accomplish. First, let’s look at how Jesus initiated this heart-to-heart.

Second Star to the Right How do we initiate conversations that matter? Hopefully, by now, it’s clear that relationships aren’t formed so that we can have a conversation about the gospel.

If the impression is right, your intentions are clear, and you’re willing to invite them into your life, how about taking the step that Jesus took by asking them about something they are familiar with?

One of the ways I have done this is by asking my friends which book has really shaped them. (If you’re not a reader, then you must be listening to this through audiobook.) Try this same concept with movies. If you don’t like books or movies, having conversations with people in the twenty-first century might just be a challenge.

Conversations are made up of words, and words are pointless if they don’t make sense to both parties.

Words like sin, testimony, blood of the Lamb, and infallibility may not land well on unbelieving ears. Instead, try defining the terms you are tempted to use. Here is an example: Insider language: “Tomorrow I get to share my testimony with our church.” Universal language: “Tomorrow I get to talk with some new friends about how far I’ve come in life.”

What Now? How should our conversations end?

In the old paradigm of street preachers and tent revivals, it was all about how you close the deal to make a convert. In the even older paradigm of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, it was about creating a craving.

Initiating conversations that matter is not so that we can create converts. It’s so that we can taste the goodness of God with others, leaving us both craving more.

IMITATIONHow to Redefine Progress Coming together is a beginning, staying together is a progress, and working together is success. HENRY FORD My father told me, “Don’t ever miss a good chance to shut up.” DR. PHIL (AND DR. PHIL’S DAD)

I believe we should emphasize a different facet of Christianity. Not a highly intellectual, apologetics approach to finding truth, although this is appropriate in its time. Instead, perhaps you would want to try on a practical, change-the-world brand of Christianity. The hands and feet can be tender where the mouth has been irritating. More and more, my interactions with skeptics are reassuring me that convincing people they are wrong is not as transformative as letting them contribute to making things right.

someone believes in Christ, they should get baptized. If they are not a believer, invite them to imitate Christ with you. Imitation, not immersion, is your next step with the unbeliever.

Since they are not at a place to obey his commands, what about inviting them into the ways of Jesus? The mission. The purpose. The undertaking to change the world by renewing one community at a time. The cause of justice and love. Food for the hungry. Taking care of the widows and orphans. Making meals for homeless shelters and youth drop-in centers. It’s a unique way of constantly keeping Jesus in front of them.

Suffering is where we find Jesus, not where we find out about him.

I think this is why people must join the mission. It awakens their heart to the need of a Savior, and it softens their heart to receive him.

I’d venture to say that the main distinction between an unsaved and a saved person would typically boil down to their habits. You can help people participate in the story of God. Show them how their story weaves into God’s story by inviting them to imitate Christ with you through the way you are bringing healing to the community. In the Doubters’ Club, we have seen time and again when unbelievers’ affections for Christ are stirred because they have been participating in the mission. And you guessed it: Then their habits start to change.

Why is the most cause-oriented generation not connecting with the most cause-oriented organization in the world? We must invite people to participate in imitating Christ with us! If you are already participating in a mission that unbelievers would join, keep going! Extend the invitation. Make them feel empowered by your friendship and inspired by why you do the mission. Trust the process. If you aren’t participating in a mission that would feel like common ground with an unbeliever, I invite you to consider starting a Doubters’ Club.

The Doubters’ Club is proof that sometimes behavior imitates faith before the mind does.

CONCLUDING WITH THE CLIFFSNOTESHow to Get This Party Started! You gotta fight for your right to party. BEASTIE BOYS Anything not saved will be lost. NINTENDO WII’S “QUIT SCREEN” MESSAGE

IN 2019, a study from the Barna Group revealed that Christians are backing away from evangelism. Almost half of those surveyed who were born between 1980 and 2000 said that it is wrong for them to share their faith. Not just socially painful. Morally wrong. To put it in their own words, “It is wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share the same faith.”[1] I wasn’t among the thousands who were interviewed, but had I been, I would have agreed. Sharing my beliefs in order to convert someone feels shallow. Unimpressive. Disingenuous.

someones I know have names, and I don’t call them “someones.” I call them neighbors, coworkers, and in the best-case scenarios, friends. Actually, I don’t call them friends. I call them by their name.

The use of a name directs all the energy of a compliment or statement into one individual. We become the center of the world when our names are used. Statements become wildly personal. Questions become fascinating journeys. Compliments become courageous gestures of kindness.

Evangelism without relationship has its place. Rarely is that place with the skeptic. The skeptic has individual hesitations about the faith. There is a personal reason they are resistant to Christianity. Without their name, we will never know that story. Without that story, friendship with Jesus has no chance. Story wraps flesh around the someones. As long as skeptics merely remain “someones,” the best we can do is give them the CliffsNotes of the Jesus story, while getting the abbreviated version of theirs.

As long as skeptics remain someones to us, we will remain fools to them as we tell an abridged version of the greatest story in the history of mankind! I’m convinced that it’s the CliffsNotes of Christianity that sound like a fairy tale, not Christianity itself.

If we are not careful, we breeze through the powerful Good News like it was something that happened instead of something that is happening.

Instead of CliffsNotes Christianity, what if you lived a go-to-the-edge-of-the-cliff Christianity? A Christianity that believes Jesus is currently waiting to throw a dinner party with the doubters, but he won’t do it until all the guests are present.

Exegete it how we will, they have experienced what it means for their parents or other loved ones to “compel” them back to church. If we don’t know this, we will end up whistling in a graveyard that we helped populate.

Notice the Host doesn’t send out soldiers; he sends out a servant. Servants compel in a very different way. The context of the word compel used here is best understood as insistent hospitality for an extended period.

Listen to their story (chapters 1–3). Look for the questions (chapters 4–6). And learn with them (chapters 7–8).

Whether you start a Doubters’ Club or host the next Thanksgiving meal at your place, why not use the table as a sort of hospital for doubters? A hospital for those skeptics who run, full pace, away from the church. Who have fallen off the cliff. What a surprise it would be to them to find hospitals at the bottom of the cliffs! A group of wounded healers who refuse to give up until the seats are full.

As you embark on the courageous journey of intentionally befriending atheists and skeptics, remember that your way of living is tethered to authors and concepts far older than this book. You are reorienting people to a Jesus-looking-God by adopting a center set mindset (see pages 20–21). You are instrumental in probing spiritual curiosity with those on the negative side of the Engel Scale as they move toward trusting God (see pages 51–52). And if you go back far enough, you are participating in the mission of Jesus by simply seeking those who are lost.