How Not to Evangelize

From the AP

MADISON, Wis. – A Baraboo man was accused of repeatedly shocking a male dance instructor with a stun gun, claiming the instructor was a “sinner” who “defiles married women.” A Dane County prosecutor said the suspect, 59, hastily arranged a dance lesson at the instructor’s Madison home and showed up with a stun gun and sledgehammer last Friday. The criminal complaint said the man told a detective that his church does not condone touching while dancing and that he was going to scare the instructor “and tell him to leave the women alone.”

The Wisconsin State Journal said the instructor told police that the suspect phoned for private dance lessons, and when he opened the door to his home, he began to shock him repeatedly in the neck with the stun gun.

This speaks for itself. While part of loving others can sometimes entail warning them about remaining alienated from God, that is usually not the best tactic to use at first. It seems that we are more concerned about “fixing” others instead of focusing on what needs to be “fixed” in us. It is never the Christian’s duty to “fix” someone else. Rather, it is our duty to introduce others to the One who can “fix” them, just as he can fix us.

Man Sues California Mall After Guard Arrests Him for Having Conversation About God

From Fox News

Imagine getting arrested for just striking up a conversation about religion in public. That’s what happened to California resident Matthew Snatchko in 2006 when the youth pastor initiated a conversation about God with three shoppers at the Roseville Galleria mall. The women gave Snatchko permission to broach the subject, but a nearby store employee said they “looked nervous,” so he ordered the evangelist to leave. After Snatchko refused, mall security arrested him. “He was put in handcuffs and hauled down to the mall’s security station and later booked at the local jail,” said Snatchko’s attorney Matthew McReynolds of the Pacific Justice Institute, a legal defense organization specializing in the defense of religious freedom. Snatchko was later released and never charged with a crime, but he and the Justice Institute decided to challenge the constitutionality of Roseville Galleria’s restrictions on conversations about topics such as religion and politics.

Read it all.

I have to wonder what is happening to free speech in this country. I also have to wonder why folks cannot simply say “no thank you” to unwanted intrusions, if that is what this was. Third, I have to question if this is the best way to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to a world that desperately needs to hear it. It seems to me that the best way to evangelize is in the context of our daily relationships.

If we really think having a relationship with Christ is something good, and if we have benefited from having a relationship with him, then it follows that we would naturally want to share that with others as opportunities present themselves. After all, we eagerly share other kinds of good news with folks (“Hey, I got a raise,” or “Hey, my kid was elected President of the United States,” etc., etc.), often whether they are willing to listen or not. Why, then, would we not want to share the Ultimate Good News with folks, especially when we see them hurting? Of course, in doing so we must be prepared for people to say “no thank you” to our invitations, and we must continue to love them no matter what their response.

Sharing the Good News is not about us, but about directing people the the Source and Author of all life, and inviting them into a life-changing relationship with him. He can take it from there.

What are your thoughts on this?

From the Morning Scripture

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

—Romans 12:1-2 (TNIV)

Augustine on the Truth

You [God] were not those empty fictions [of pantheism], and I derived no nourishment from them but was left more exhausted than before.

—Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.10

Starved for truth, Augustine was looking for it in all the wrong places and was left exhausted from the lies that purported to be truth. Likewise, when we seek to quench our deep-seated desire for the truth by embracing anything other than the Living and Triune God, we will surely come away exhausted because only God is the truth. Only in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is there life and he desires each of us to have it.

Where are you seeking to quench your thirst for truth?

Augustine on Reading the Scriptures

I therefore decided to give attention to the holy scriptures and to find out what they were like. And this is what met me: something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries. My inflated conceit shunned the Bible’s restraint, and my gaze never penetrated to its inwardness. Yet the Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them. I disdained to be a little beginner. Puffed up with pride, I considered myself a mature adult.

—Augustine, Confessions, 3.5.9

Augustine points us to another important truth about reading Scripture. If we are to profit by it, we must choose to submit ourselves to the text rather than trying to put ourselves over it. Whenever we think we know better than God’s word, we will surely fail to be edified by it. But that’s true with everything, isn’t it? The minute we think we have nothing to learn from something or someone, we surely will not. Ah, the joy of human pride!