REACH PEOPLE BY BEING NORMAL
The first step of reaching out to unchurched people is not connecting them to Christ or the church but connecting them to you. That may sound heretical to our older crowd, but I’m guessing it’s just common sense to those forty and under.
We want to invite people to follow Christ, but there are obstacles to our being heard that weren’t quite as prominent even fifty years ago. Christian leaders being caught in improprieties of sex or money have made people suspicious of Christian ministries. Advances in science and technology have made religion in general seem outmoded, quaint at best. Religion is now a personal hobby, privately engaging but publicly irrelevant. Direct and pushy recruiting (i.e. evangelism) to religious ideas (or groups) is now the socially inappropriate behavior of the cults.
Obstacles like this must be overcome, and that isn’t easy.
I believe the first thing unbelievers need to see is not Jesus or the Bible, but Christians who are normal people and not weird, fanatical religious recruiters.
We have normal lives, normal marriages, normal kids – not perfect ones.
We do normal stuff – work jobs and pay bills and take vacations, go to picnics and ballgames and concerts, go to Parents’ Night at school and make trips to the ER.
We have joys and celebrations as well as discouragements and frustrations.
We succeed in life sometimes, but we fail too.
We have doubts, questions, and fears about things, and there is much we don’t understand about life and the world. We don’t have a magic formula for success, and we certainly don’t have all the answers.
What we have is faith in a firm foundation upon which to build our lives and a moral compass that gives us a sense of direction and purpose, both of which are connected to something larger than ourselves, outside of ourselves. And we have a circle of like-minded friends that share the journey with us.
If people find you to be an honorable and trustworthy friend, you will earn the right to be heard, and the way Christianity relates to your everyday life will be apparent, an acceptable part of normal conversation.
We want to invite people to follow Christ, but there are obstacles to our being heard that weren’t quite as prominent even fifty years ago. Christian leaders being caught in improprieties of sex or money have made people suspicious of Christian ministries. Advances in science and technology have made religion in general seem outmoded, quaint at best. Religion is now a personal hobby, privately engaging but publicly irrelevant. Direct and pushy recruiting (i.e. evangelism) to religious ideas (or groups) is now the socially inappropriate behavior of the cults.
Obstacles like this must be overcome, and that isn’t easy.
I believe the first thing unbelievers need to see is not Jesus or the Bible, but Christians who are normal people and not weird, fanatical religious recruiters.
We have normal lives, normal marriages, normal kids – not perfect ones.
We do normal stuff – work jobs and pay bills and take vacations, go to picnics and ballgames and concerts, go to Parents’ Night at school and make trips to the ER.
We have joys and celebrations as well as discouragements and frustrations.
We succeed in life sometimes, but we fail too.
We have doubts, questions, and fears about things, and there is much we don’t understand about life and the world. We don’t have a magic formula for success, and we certainly don’t have all the answers.
What we have is faith in a firm foundation upon which to build our lives and a moral compass that gives us a sense of direction and purpose, both of which are connected to something larger than ourselves, outside of ourselves. And we have a circle of like-minded friends that share the journey with us.
If people find you to be an honorable and trustworthy friend, you will earn the right to be heard, and the way Christianity relates to your everyday life will be apparent, an acceptable part of normal conversation.