The Myth of the Non-Christian E-Book

Luke Cawley

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 337

Beschreibung

There's no such thing as a non-Christian. Somebody might self-identify as spiritual but not religious. Or they might be a practicing Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim. Or they might call themselves an atheist, freethinker or agnostic. But the one thing that people never describe themselves as is a "non-Christian." So Christians who want to "reach non-Christians" need to realize that they're not all the same. Evangelism is not one-size-fits-all. Luke Cawley shows how Christians can contextualize the gospel in different ways to connect with different kinds of people. Here he unpacks the religious identities of three key demographics: the spiritual but not religious, committed atheists and nominal Christians. Each group has particular characteristics and requires specific approaches and practices to make the Christian faith plausible, desirable and tangible to them. Filled with real-life stories of changed lives, this book is a practical and hopeful resource for helping people to encounter God.

Leseprobe

The Myth of the Non-Christian

Engaging Atheists, Nominal Christians and the Spiritual But Not Religious

    Luke Cawley

For Mum and Dad,

who first taught me what it means to follow Jesus

through their words and example.

Contents

Part 1: Engaging Diverse Contexts

1 Flexibility

2 Plausibility and Desirability

3 Tangibility

Part 2: Engaging the Spiritual But Not Religious

4 The Temple in the Desert and the Mysterious Massage

5 Does Christianity Enable a Richer Spirituality?

6 Inviting Others into an Experience of Christian Spirituality

Part 3: Engaging Atheists

7 Dawkins on a Bike (and Other Tales)

8 Isn’t Faith in God Irrational and Outdated?

9 Creating Safe Spaces for Exploring Questions

Part 4: Engaging Nominal Christians

10 The Pimp, the Planter and Their Friends

11 Don’t You Realize I’ve Been There and Done That?

12 Communities That Facilitate Rediscovering Jesus

Epilogue: Adventures with Ukrainian Comic Book Jesus

Appendix 1: Comparative Statistics for Canada and the United Kingdom

Appendix 2: Did God Command Genocide?

Appendix 3: Suggested Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Notes

Praise for The Myth of the Non-Christian

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

- ONE -

Flexibility

there’s no such thing as a non-Christian. I am more convinced of this than ever. An atheistic journalist and a hedonistic student helped me understand why. One was crying on the phone, the other was skipping down the street.

The Atheist, Crying on the Phone

Tabatha’s eyes flooded with tears as she spoke on the phone with her mother. She was halfway through a six-week introductory course on Christianity that had thrown her into complete emotional disarray. She had not entered as a questioning atheist, or one who was looking for God. She happily hadn’t believed in God, but as a journalist with a sense of curiosity about religion, she had bravely taken the plunge and signed up for the course.

Before Tabatha started she had no particular animus toward religious people. She did, however, think that most religious beliefs were probably “stupid” and that “organized religion is a horrible thing.” So she was pleasantly surprised when she found herself liking the Christians who ran the course. They were friendly and welcoming. They were also willing to be open about their struggles and even about personal issues such as their marriages.

By the end of the course she felt uplifted from being among such genuinely happy people. Why, then, was she crying on the phone to her mother? Was it conviction of sin? An intense sense of her need for Jesus? Some other great spiritual moment?

No, she was crying because she was frustrated. It saddened, annoyed and upset her to be among a group of people who discussed something as profound as God and yet were unable to satisfactorily answer her most basic questions about why she should place her trust in him.

Every week she had raised issues such as the trustworthiness of the Bible, the necessity of believing in God to lead a moral life, the seeming unfairness of God extending grace to murderers, the scientific basis for believing in a creator God, the problem of suffering and religion’s reputation for perpetuating warfare. And every week the leaders simply quoted Scripture to her or described her questions as “something we will never understand.”

So she cried. She was sad for the people leading, that they invested their lives in something they had not bothered to think through or question for themselves. Tabatha probably also cried because her encounter with Christianity had caused the whole thing to seem less plausible rather than more so. She’d hoped for a different outcome.

In the end, although she had enjoyed making friends through the course and was conscious of how it had helped others, she decided that Christianity was not for her. Even if it were true, no Christian seemed able or willing to make a credible case for her accepting it.1 So she moved on.

The Hedonist, Skipping down the street

Not everyone had the same experience as Tabatha. A student named Karen attended the very same course when it was held in a bar on a university campus in the north of England. Before joining the course, Karen was a broken woman. She later said that everything she had been doing at that time was an attempt to fix herself. Drinking and attracting male attention were her two favored methods for attempted self-reparation. Whenever she could persuade a good-looking man to spend time with her, she felt less insecure. Under the surface, though, her anxieties were still there and eventually came back.

God wasn’t even on Karen’s radar. She hadn’t ever given him a second thought and assumed that all religion was a load of rubbish. Who, after all, needs all those rules and regulations? It all seemed so distant from her own struggles. But when two of her university colleagues told her they were launching an introductory course on Christianity, she decided to show them some support. That’s how she found herself in a bar talking with a group of Christians.

The people were so friendly and warm, and she found herself increasingly excited about going back. The weekly gathering was like a warm oasis in the midst of her otherwise troubled and turbulent life. She also began to understand that Christianity wasn’t anything like her previous assumptions about religion; it was, instead, about a relationship with this very compelling person called Jesus.

On the last night of the course someone from a local church came and spoke about the Holy Spirit. After the speaker finished, music filled the room, and a leader invited the people present to sing along. As Karen stood, listening to the singing, she became open for the first time to the possibility of knowing God. At that very moment a woman approached Karen and offered to pray for her. Karen agreed. The woman placed her hands on Karen and began speaking, and Karen suddenly felt light and happy. The weight of her burdens and insecurities dissolved as she welcomed God into her life.

At the end of the evening she found herself smiling uncontrollably and skipping excitedly across campus and back to her home. She knew she didn’t have to fix herself any more. She no longer required the attention of men in order to bolster her self-esteem. Drinking was now unnecessary for her to unlock her confidence. It was the beginning of a life with God that has continued to flourish over the years since.

Two young women attend the exact same course. One becomes convinced that Christianity has no answers and cries on the phone to her mother. The other one senses that Jesus is her only hope and ends up skipping joyfully across campus. Same input, different outcomes.

No Non-Christians

Much of my current ministry with the organization Chrysolis is focused on developing communicators who can speak clearly and persuasively about Jesus in nonchurch settings such as universities, bars and places of business. Prior to that I spent years developing missional communities on university campuses with the Inter­national Fellowship of Evangelical Students movement. In both settings it has been common, after I give a talk to Christians, for someone to ask me, “How can we better engage non-Christians with the message of Jesus?” It’s always a question that throws me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all in favor of rethinking how we effectively introduce people to Jesus. But I am a little hazy as to what is meant by a “non-Christian.” Does it refer to someone, like Karen, who has a deep emotional longing for personal healing but little concern for the big intellectual issues surrounding religion? Or might it refer to a person, like Tabatha, who needs detailed and considered answers to their complex philosophical and historical questions?

“Non-Christian” is a category so broad it is obsolete. It’s not even something people call themselves. Some people I know describe themselves in terms of their sporting allegiances (“Packers fan”), their political affiliation (“libertarian”), their hobbies (“avid reader,” “snowboarder”) or their relationships (“devoted husband,” “struggling parent”). Some might even employ religiously themed labels like “atheist,” “secular Jew,” “spiritual but not religious” or “vaguely Hindu.” I’ve rarely met anybody, though, who calls himself a “non-Christian.”

It’s strange, then, that we Christians persist in treating the label as if it were somehow rich with meaning. Perhaps the time has come to retire the term and to rediscover the rich variety that exists among people who are not yet following Jesus.

Not everybody is the same. Our approaches to sharing Jesus should therefore not treat people as such. We need to move from having a strategy for communicating with all people to having multiple strategies for different groups:

Figure 1.1

Let’s think about Tabatha’s situation again. There is nothing innately wrong with the course material and format she encountered. It has been used to bring thousands to faith in Christ. Even she enjoyed the friendships. But imagine for a moment what would have happened if the course leaders had redesigned or tweaked the content to specifically address Tabatha. They probably didn’t know a great deal about her, but suppose they had made some changes based on these three very basic facts about her, which would have emerged quite early upon meeting her:

She is an atheist.

She is a journalist.

She is a Brit.

Their very rudimentary understanding of Tabatha could be depicted like this:

Figure 1.2

You can see from this diagram that no single category completely summarizes everything about Tabatha. And not everything about each group is even true of her personally. But while none of these groups is homogeneous, members of each one tend to have certain things in common. The course leaders could have made the simple observations that:

Atheists don’t believe there is a God. Therefore they will need to address the question of God’s existence at some point.Brits are citizens of a highly secularized nation and are likely to consider atheism “neutral.” The leaders will therefore need to do more than present the case for Christianity; they should also ask some hard questions of the alternatives (including atheism).Journalists are accustomed to sorting and assessing evidence. Any discussion of God will therefore need to include an opportunity to grapple with the best evidence for the existence of God and to ask hard questions.

These adjustments wouldn’t have guaranteed Tabatha would become a follower of Jesus. That still would have been between her and God. But perhaps she could have come to her decision without the misapprehension that her questions were unanswerable.

Perhaps it would have been difficult to tailor the whole course for journalists—or even atheists—unless they formed a sizable proportion of those present. But the course’s small group discussions could easily have been organized so that participants with similar concerns were wrestling with their questions together. This would have created an opportunity for Tabatha to spend more time talking through, for example, the evidence for God. One of the course leaders could even have arranged to go for a drink with Tabatha and discuss her specific queries. She might have come away with a sense that there is a plausible basis for trusting Jesus. Perhaps she would then have continued her investigation of him.

The more we understand the different groups within a culture, the more appropriate our communication of Jesus can become when we encounter someone from those groups. It is not a substitute for getting to know people as individuals. The case of Tabatha shows, though, that reflection on even the simplest things we know about a person makes a difference.

Contextual Apologetics

The art of formulating appropriate and diverse ways of sharing Jesus, based on a thorough understanding of those with whom we are interacting, is one that has a rich history within Christianity. Strangely, though, even some fantastically gifted Christian communicators manage to overlook its importance.

A while back I heard a story about one of the top university evangelists in Britain. We’ll call him Charlie. He has a long track record of success and several popular books to his name. I respect him greatly, both for his passion and for his personal integrity. A few years ago Charlie was invited by a group of Christian students to spend a week on a university campus in my area. The students organized a series of lunchtime events and evening gatherings in conjunction with Charlie’s talks, which outlined the message of Jesus and addressed major objections to the Christian faith.

At the time of this event a book had just been published called The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, which was stirring up debate on campuses around the country. The book addressed questions such as whether a belief in God was intellectually tenable or morally desirable. Charlie used most of his talks to tackle the erroneous arguments of The God Delusion. He addressed the book’s perspective on science and religion, on Christianity and violence, and on the possibility that faith was simply psychological self-deception. It was great stuff, humbly presented, complete with good humor and illustrations. If someone like Tabatha had been there, I’m sure he or she would have loved it. Strangely, though, attendance at these events plummeted as the week went on. Nobody became a follower of Jesus that week. It took a great deal of convincing for the Christians on campus to run a similar outreach effort again.

When I heard this story, I began wondering why this had happened. How could such a great speaker as Charlie fail so spectacularly?

I asked the university chaplain, Benedict Cambridge, this question. Benedict gave me a simple answer: Charlie hadn’t understood the context. Yes, The God Delusion had been inspiring debates on many campuses around the nation, but almost nobody at this particular university had heard of the book, let alone read it. Students there took classes focused on activity rather than philosophical reflection. Even when they did engage with the kinds of questions discussed in The God Delusion, they only did so in the classroom. Their main interests outside lecture hours were making friends, partying and hooking up. Charlie had given a great series of talks, Benedict affirmed, but they were just not right for this setting.

Charlie had gone one step better than the people running Tabatha’s course. He had, at least, attempted to meaningfully address major concerns about the Christian faith. Unfortunately they weren’t the concerns of his audience.

His actions were not an isolated incident. They reflect a dynamic that is quite widespread in the Christian church—a separation between these two important disciplines:

Figure 1.3

It’s not a division that has taken place intentionally or as the result of any heated arguments. Instead it seems that different groups of people have latched on to the importance of each of these two emphases and have developed a body of expertise and a set of practices around it. The two emphases even have technical names to describe them. The art of commending and defending the Christian faith is called “apologetics.” The term comes from a Greek word, apologia, meaning “a defense” or “a demonstration of the correctness of an argument or belief.”2 The practice of reflecting on a context and translating the entirety of life and faith accordingly is called “contextual missiology,” or “contextualization.”

Figure 1.4

We need to begin cross-breeding the two disciplines. Their hybrid child, which I like to call “contextual apologetics,” combines the strengths of both its parents. It blends contextual awareness with an apologetic emphasis on contending for the plausibility of the Christian faith. Each of these emphases are frequently used to the exclusion of the other, but used together they can have an incredible combined effect.

Breaking Stereotypes

Many Christians picture an apologist as somebody, like the university speaker I mentioned, who has amazing answers to questions few are asking, a person who rattles a sword of logical argumentation at all who draw near. Certainly some apologists fit that description. I hope, though, that this book will give you a fresh perspective on apologetics and open you up to its possibilities within your own life and situation. When apologetics is harnessed to contextual sensitivity it can become quite powerful. It certainly was when I gave my last apologetic talk.

APOLOGETICS IN THE EARLY CHURCH

When Paul visits Thessalonica in Acts, he and his team plant a thriving church in just a few weeks. Paul is described during this trip as “explaining” about Jesus (Acts 17:3). But something more than explanation also occurs. Paul is also recorded as “reasoning” and “proving” that Jesus died and rose from the dead in such a way that his audience eventually become “persuaded” (Acts 17:2-4). He is evidently making a case for the trustworthiness of what he has “explained.” He, unlike Tabatha’s course leaders, never responds to big issues by saying “just have faith” or “it’s a mystery.”

I was asked to speak at a Christmas event in a juvenile prison and found myself alone in the middle of an open area surrounded on all sides by cells. Some of the inmates stared down at me from the balconies above. Others sat very close to me and poured all their effort into looking as indifferent as possible. Many stayed in their cells and were hidden behind thick metal doors with just a letter-box-sized window of reinforced glass through which to stare. When I lifted the microphone to my mouth and began to speak, everybody else in the room raised their voices in response. My words hit a wall of noise, and I pushed hard against it. I was determined to be heard. I began to tell them a story about the worst Christmas of my life, when I felt lonely and far from friends and family, wondering whether God even cared about me.

An aggressive voice thundered from one of the cells above, “Shut up! Who cares?”

I turned to the cell and shouted back, “That was exactly my question: Who does care?”

The noise didn’t subside, but more people seemed to be paying attention now.

I told them that I had given up on God but then read in a book that Jesus said “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” I explained that this meant Jesus was claiming that if you want to know what God is like you should look at him. I then asked them whether they knew the story of Jesus. There was no response. So I said, “Let me tell you some of the basics.”

Then something strange happened. As the next section of my talk began, a stillness and silence fell over the room. This is what I said:

When Jesus was born, there were rumors his mum was a cheap woman who got knocked up by some random guy. He had to live all his life with people making comments about that.

When he was very young the government where he lived decided to have all the kids murdered in his town. The king had some theory about a kid being born who would threaten his power, so he sent the army in to murder the babies. As mothers screamed all through town watching their children die, Jesus and his parents somehow escaped.

He spent years living in a foreign country. He was the weird immigrant kid. Different skin, different language, different food. Everyone looked at him weird. When he eventually moved back to his own country, things were quiet for a while. Then when he was a teenager or maybe in his twenties his dad died. He was left to look after his mum. Be the man of the house. He didn’t ask for this.

He got older. Became well known. Did some lovely stuff like healing sick people, telling corrupt powerful people where to get off, looking after poor people.

But the corrupt powerful people didn’t like this. They paid one of his best friends to rat him out. This friend got him arrested. All his other friends disappeared. They didn’t want anything to do with him now.

One of them used to say he would happily die with Jesus. Now he was telling everyone he never even knew him. What kind of friends were these? He had a trial, which was frankly a pack of lies. People made things up about him. He was mis­represented. Where were his friends now?

Then he was murdered. Stripped naked, nailed to a piece of wood and hung out to die in public.

No dad. No friends. No justice. Nothing. Not even his life.

It was this person. Jesus. Who said that God was like him.

And so when I read that, I thought, “Yeah, if that’s God, maybe I do want to know him. Maybe I want to give it another shot to connect with him. Because maybe there is somebody out there who is not only bigger than me but is like Jesus. Who knows what it’s like to be in the kind of dark place I am in right now.”

And that’s Christmas. At Christmas we sing and talk about baby Jesus because we think that he was God become a human being. And he shows us God: not a God who is out there and can’t understand what it’s like to be you. But a God who gets it. Understands. And is worth your while taking seriously.

It was clear as I spoke these words that the teenage inmates were hearing the story of Jesus in relatable form for the first time in their short lives.

This event was powerful partly because it fused apologetics with contextual sensitivity. I wanted to establish the story of Jesus as a live option for those who might otherwise dismiss it as irrelevant. This was apologetics. But I did so by telling the story in a way that related to the realities of my listener’s lives. This was contextualization. The combination—contextual apologetics—is so potent it can silence a rowdy prison.

WIDENING OUR VIEW OF APOLOGETICS

Renowned apologist John Stackhouse writes that “anything that helps people take Christianity more seriously than they did before, anything that helps defend and commend it, properly counts as apologetics.”3 The word anything is the key. It’s not just about making detailed logical arguments. It also includes approaches like telling stories well and crafting song lyrics that grab the imagination of our listeners.

Jesus the Contextual Apologist

Jesus’ life and actions provide the template for contextual apologetics. Jesus didn’t just study the context; he became part of it. He added humanity to his divinity, and not just a generic version of being human. He chose one rooted in a specific time and place. He spoke Hebrew, attended synagogue, worked in the building trade as a carpenter, wore a tunic and ate kosher food. In a world before toothpaste he probably sometimes had bad breath, and in an age without hair dryers it is unlikely he had the blow-dried hair of the actors who play him in movies.

Since Jesus lived in a culture distant to our own, we often mistakenly assume that everything he did and said was original to him. It wasn’t. Part of Jesus’ genius lay in the way he took things that already existed and used them in fresh ways. Parables, for example, were used for thousands of years before Jesus started telling them.4 The man from Nazareth, though, took this ancient art form and used it to say things we are still quoting thousands of years later.

One of these parables is about two men (Lk 18:9-14). The first (a Pharisee) is a very upright, religious person, and the second (a tax collector) is a corrupt and immoral one. The first man starts praying and sneaks a condescending glance at the other man. He reels off a list of achievements and thanks God for his own awesomeness. He praises the Lord he is not like this awful chap over here. His entire prayer is about himself.

Switch focus to man number two. His prayer is much briefer. He can only hang his head in shame and say, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That’s all he has. No list of achievements. Just a pathetic confession. They both go home, and Jesus pulls out the twist in the tale: it is the second man and not the first who arrives at his house accepted by God.

This is a familiar story for many Christians. You may even think you already know the story. But reflect on it again. It is much more clever than it seems on the surface. It doesn’t just tell us something; it does something to us. I once heard about a Sunday school teacher who taught this parable to her class. She concluded her lesson by saying, “And let’s thank God we aren’t like the Pharisee.”

Do you see what happened with this teacher? Reading that story exposed her tendency to act exactly like the Pharisee. She couldn’t interact with the parable without judging its villain, and so her likeness to him became apparent.

And when you read the story about the Sunday school teacher, what went through your mind? Did you look down on her because you would never make her obvious mistake? Maybe you turn out to be like the Pharisee too.

This is Jesus’ genius. He tells what seems like a simple story and yet, as you encounter it, you find your own self-righteousness coaxed gently out into the open. You aren’t just told about your sin. You are almost provoked to enact the very transgression he is discussing. Such are the shock waves it creates that you can’t even read about somebody else’s response to the parable without uncovering your inner Pharisee.

This is contextual apologetics at its best: convincing and persuading the listener by using forms and methods appropriate to the setting. Jesus didn’t invent parables. He wasn’t the first person to talk about temples, Pharisees, tax collectors or prayer. But he brought all those familiar elements together in a way that makes the truth about our own sin inescapable.

Jesus was an apologist who sought to convince others of what he was saying. He did so through inventive use of the contextually familiar means of parables. The outcome was compelling, sometimes devastating. Nobody who listened carefully was left unconvinced, and they either had to follow him or violently silence him.

APOLOGETICS IS FOR EVERYONE

It’s not just speakers and church leaders who need to be able to outline why Jesus can be trusted. Peter, in the New Testament, writes to a group of ordinary first-century Jesus followers that they also need to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet 3:15). As our interaction with others gives rise to questions, Peter is saying, we will all need to provide thoughtful and persuasive responses.

Three Key Groups of People

In this book we will follow in Jesus’ footsteps by learning to be contextual apologists in our own settings. We will meet three sets of people:

The “spiritual but not religious”Convinced atheistsNominal Christians

These groups include the majority of the people not following Jesus in the West today. Here’s why:5

71% of the US population describe themselves as “Christian”

39% of the US population attend church on a weekly basis6

The details of how these two figures relate can be debated. Some churchgoers are obviously not true followers of Jesus, while some followers of Jesus may not currently be involved regularly in a local fellowship. But however you slice it, it is clear that many people outside the church—about a third of the US population—self-identify as “Christian” despite not being active in a community where they can learn and grow in their professed faith. These millions of people include many of the “nominal Christians” we will be considering later in this book.

Here’s another striking statistic:

23% of the US population are religiously unaffiliated

37% of the religiously unaffiliated in the US describe themselves as “spiritual”7

That means (to save you the math!) that around 8 percent of US adults see themselves as “spiritual” but do not embrace any formal religion. That’s why I chose to focus partly on the spiritual but not religious; they include a full third of those who would not call themselves “Christian.”

NOT FROM THE UNITED STATES?

Check out appendix one, which provides equivalent statistics for Canada and the United Kingdom.

Atheists are still quite a small segment within US society. However, they are a group that garners much media exposure and is also growing quite substantially:

4.0% of the US population identified as “atheist” or “agnostic” in 2007

7.1% of the US population identified as “atheist” or “agnostic” in 2014

So learning to engage with the three groups discussed in this book will aid you in your conversations and interactions with a significant percentage of people around you.

We will learn to be contextual apologists among these three sets of people. As we meet each group, we will hear their stories and begin to better understand them for ourselves. Each set of people is diverse, and we will note both the differences within each category and also their defining common features. Such in-depth listening is foundational to good apologetics and also to effective contextualization. Chapters four, seven and ten are the ones that focus on this intensive understanding of context.

After meeting each set of people, we will begin to listen to their questions and misgivings about the Christian faith. We’ll also think through some of the most helpful answers and responses to address those concerns. No one answer will satisfy everybody, but having an awareness of some possible lines of response to major issues will enable us to be more helpful conversation partners to people in these three groups. Chapters five, eight and eleven deal most directly with formulating such responses and are the most apologetically slanted sections of the book.

ADAPTATION: PART OF THE CHRISTIAN DNA

Think about the last church meeting you attended. Was it in English, Spanish or maybe Korean? One thing’s for certain: it wasn’t in Aramaic, even though that was likely the language in which Jesus did most of his original teaching. Nor was it in ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament.

Almost all contemporary Christians practice a faith translated from its original linguistic and cultural roots. Adaption and flexibility seem to be written into the DNA of the Christian movement. In part this is a reflection of God’s nature. He is diverse (Father, Son and Spirit) and also harmonious (one God). Diversity is therefore intrinsic to God’s very being. He intends his world and also his church to echo his own trinitarian nature by being unified and yet varied.

In addition to considering possible responses to specific questions, we will also discuss various practices that can help us more appropriately engage people with the story of Jesus. We will learn to change the form of our evangelism and not just the words we use. Jesus used parables. What should we do with atheists, nominal Christians and people who consider themselves spiritual? Chapters six, nine and twelve offer a few ideas. Each one focuses on a series of interviews with some of today’s best evangelistic practitioners. They share stories and advice that will help us better approach our own unique settings.

Before we begin exploring these different contexts, though, we’ll delve a little more into some aspects of apologetics and contextualization that are helpful across a range of settings. You’ll find out more about these in the next two chapters. They offer an alternative way of practicing apologetics to the currently popular ones, which focus solely on logic or on engaging with worldviews.

After reading the first three chapters, feel free to skip to the sections that interest you the most. This table may help you to visualize the structure of the book:

Table 1.1

Spiritual But Not ReligiousConvinced AtheistsNominal ChristiansGood approaches for all contextschapters one, two, three and thirteenUnderstanding the specific context we are engaging (“stories”)chapter fourchapter sevenchapter tenResponding to the major questions in this context (“questions”)chapter fivechapter eightchapter elevenDeveloping practices specifically helpful to this context (“practices”)chapter sixchapter ninechapter twelve

Your Setting

There must be people who you wish would take the story of Jesus more seriously: friends, neighbors, family members or work mates. Maybe you are intensely conscious that your current models of communicating about Jesus are not quite right for these particular people. Perhaps you’ve begun to wonder whether either you or your Christian community could ever effectively engage with them.

If so, then it’s time to think again. Just because you or your community have not previously introduced Jesus in contextually appropriate ways doesn’t mean you can’t start right now. There are ways to engage people with his story that can bring peace to a prison and open hostile people up to appreciating his beauty for the first time. We can reach both Tabatha and Karen, as well as a host of other people.

It starts as we discard the myth of a generic “non-Christian” and begin to grapple with the diversity of people and questions that exist all around us.

Taking It Further

Here’s an easy way to get thinking about people you know: Write the name of someone in the large middle circle below. In the smaller overlapping circles write some important aspects of that person. Then spend a few minutes reflecting, praying and making notes on the implications of this for how you might introduce them to Jesus:

Notes:

Figure 1.5

- TWO -

Plausibility & Desirability

even contextually sensitive apologetics can easily go wrong. This has happened in my own experience. Discovering apologetics, in fact, led to my most unfruitful period of ministry. It all began when I woke up on my first Christmas Day morning as an overseas missionary and found I had accidentally become an atheist.

From Missionary to Atheist . . .

I was as startled by this development as anybody else. I’d grown up in a strong Christian family in the UK and had come to my adult experience of faith through a combination of charismatic prayer meetings and a homeless man approaching me on the street with an unsolicited word of prophecy. The day after opening my life to Jesus I was preaching to a feisty crowd of Muslims in central London. Spiritual experience and passionate activism, then, have always featured prominently in my life as a Christian.

By the age of twenty-two I had moved to Bucharest, Romania, to work with a university campus ministry. It was here that the first cracks began to show. The greatest points of tension occurred on a bench and a bus.

The bench was a simple wooden one nestled among the trees. It looked out over a lake near my Bucharest apartment and was hidden enough for me to spend a couple of hours a day there praying. It should have been an idyllic spot. Instead it was a place of frustration. I was increasingly struggling with the question of how to have a relationship with someone who is invisible. Trying to connect with God was like attempting to hug a cloud. It was lonely being so far from home, and I had expected an overwhelming sense of God’s presence while serving as a missionary in Romania. Instead God seemed distant. I began to wonder whether he was even there or, if he was, whether he actually cared about me.

When I left the bench I would get on a bus. A man with no legs would regularly work his way through its central aisle asking for money. His reddened stumps were festering and protected only by bits of leather tied on with brown string. In each hand he held a metal doorhandle screwed to a small square of wood. He used these as substitute feet and swung himself though the vehicle with his hands pushing down on the door handles. I’d heard that he was placed on the railway line by his parents as a child, so that his legs could be severed and he could make more money as a beggar.

Every time I got off the bus, I would pass a group of street children who lived in the sewers, having fled there to escape abusive parents. They would approach me in their ragged and filthy clothes asking for money. I tried to carry sandwiches with me in my bag and would give them some. Every time I left them, though, I would feel deeply unsettled by what I had witnessed. Where was God in all this? Wasn’t he supposed to be good? How, then, could he look down and not do anything? For all my passion and activism I had never been so brutally confronted by intellectual and emotional challenges to my faith. My sense of God’s absence increased. Visits to the bench became more infrequent, and eventually they ceased altogether.

Finally, on Christmas Day morning, I woke up and uttered the oddest prayer of my life. I said “God, I don’t think you exist. And if you do, then I don’t think I like you.” It was an honest prayer and also felt like a significant one. A weight seemed to lift from my shoulders, and I was taking my first steps into the brave new God-free world. I had moved from missionary to atheist. I was confronting the reality of suffering and choosing the only sensible way of addressing it.

Within the course of just three months I had managed to take an unexpected path from passionate young missionary to one who found the possibility of God untenable. What happened next, though, surprised me even further.

. . . And Back Again

It took only a few hours for me to discover that I had solved nothing. Later that Christmas Day I left my apartment, and the street children were still begging and living rough. I got on the bus, and the legless man was still there. That’s when it hit me: even if you get rid of God, suffering is still a problem. It’s an issue whether you are Christian or not.

After I got off the bus that Christmas Day, I went to some friends’ house, and they gave me a parcel that had come for me in the post. I opened it and found a book. It had a nice cover with a silhouette of Jesus on it, and I began thinking about how much I liked Jesus. I struggled with the idea of God. But I liked Jesus. He’s someone with whom I would have enjoyed spending time. We could have been friends.

I opened the book and began reading. For the first time I came across the quotation from Jesus I cited in the prison talk from the last chapter. It read: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). If you want to know what God is like, in other words, look at the life and character of Jesus.

It was as though someone had switched the lights on in my brain. I saw for the first time that God was not distant or “looking down” on suffering. He has suffered with us and for us. Jürgen Moltmann, in a lecture I heard years later, suggested that the starting point for all discussion of God should be a bleeding man nailed to a wooden cross.1 Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, reflecting on the loss of his own son in a climbing accident, writes of how the life of Christ had highlighted this perspective on God:

We’re in it together, God and we, together in the history of our world. The history of the world is the history of our suffering together. Every act of evil extracts a tear from God, every plunge into anguish extracts a sob from God.2

This rediscovery of the suffering God didn’t resolve every question I had about the subject—many (though not all) of those were addressed though books I read over subsequent months—but it was the dawn of my realization that Christianity has compelling responses to the biggest questions and doubts we can throw its way. More than this, though, it also highlighted for me that Jesus brings clarity to the most profound questions that everybody, Christian or otherwise, has about life. It was the birth of my passion for apologetics.