Consulting, Coaching & Chatter

Acts 1:8. You probably know the passage by heart: “You will be my witnesses from Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Those words were spoken to the apostles just before Jesus left them in charge.

And of course, we know the rest of the story, don’t we? Holy Spirit weekend, thousands of converts, the launch of the Christian movement, and the apostles immediately mobilized to head out to be witnesses to the “ends of the earth.”

Ya think?

Nuh uh. Let’s take a look at what really went on.

Pentecost is over. The new church is in full swing. Good things are happening – except for the Hebraic widows who needed some attention. And the apostles? They do a good job of delegating the task to seven who were charged with taking care of the issue.

But wait – what is it the apostles said? “It wouldn’t be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God” (Acts 5:2). Sounds like they’re really busy spreading the word from Jerusalem and in all of Judea and Samaria … right? Well, not so much. They’re still hanging out in Jerusalem (taking care off all those administrative tasks, no doubt).

But those seven guys, the first deacons, tasked with taking care of the widows? Well , six verses later we find Stephen street preaching and getting himself killed. Then a “great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem” (Acts 8:1). The verse says that the whole church was scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.

Everyone except the apostles. They hunkered down in Jerusalem while the rest of the church fled. Well, so much for all that administrative work.

Philip, one of the deacons, however, gets busy being a witness and taking the word to the people … in Samaria (Acts 8:4). And folks there became Christian and the news about it spread – all the way to Jerusalem. So Peter and John actually leave the office to go check it out. They come to Samaria, verify that God has actually shown up there, and then … they returned to Jerusalem (to their credit, they did preach their hearts out on their way home – 8:25).

In the next chapter, God gets a hold of Paul and the focus of evangelizing the world shifts. Paul tries to break into the inner circle in the main office in Jerusalem, but he didn’t get far. For his own safety, he’s hustled up to Tarsus (9:30).

The next thing we know the Holy Spirit gets involved and Peter is called up out of Jerusalem to visit Cornelius and the Gentiles are no longer off limits to the witnessing Jesus talked about in 1:8. But do the apostles jump on that bandwagon? Nope. Peter returns to Jerusalem where he makes his report to the other eleven apostles.

The rest of the book of Acts reads like this. Paul hits the road and starts churches. Then he returns to Jerusalem and reports to the apostles what God’s been doing. Then he bids the apostles farewell and hits the road as a witness to the ends of the earth.

Repeat. Twice.

From Acts 11 until the end of the “Acts of the Apostle” Paul and Barnabas and Silas and others are on the road doing the “ministry of the word” while the apostles – the “one’s sent” stayed in Jerusalem.

And so it would remain, or so it seems, until God sent the Roman “bulldozers” to Jerusalem in about AD 70 to motivate the twelve to leave their office.

So, what are the lessons to be learned here?

First, God’s the one in charge and if God could work around the twelve guys who were “sent” but chose to pretty much stay at home, then there are none of us so darned important that God’s work is going to be sidelined. The final chapter has already been written with our without us.

On the other hand, if we don’t take seriously God’s calling to be witnesses beyond our office walls, then we had better be willing to bear the consequences. For one, if we won’t be faithful, God will raise up someone else who will be and ultimately they’ll not only get the credit for what we were supposed to do, but they’ll get to experience the joy of fulfilling what the Lord has ordained.

There’s a potential second consequence that we need to be aware of as well. If we are reluctant to be faithful to our calling, God may allow (or arrange) circumstances to “motivate” us to faithfulness. I’m not saying Jerusalem was routed because the apostles refused to be witnesses any further than their own backyards, but God will use what God will use to get the point across.

The good news in all of this is that the apostles themselves did eventually move out into all the world. But our world (or our neighborhood, community, county, etc.) isn’t going to get evangelized unless we get  out of our church offices. In the words of Dr. LeRoy Benefield, my beloved Southern Baptist evangelism professor, “No one gets saved in the church office.”

(BTW, if you need help figuring out how to get out of the office, you might want to take a listen to the Church-Talk  episode on the topic at: http://church-talk.com/church-talk-video-archive/11-03-09/.)

Today I’ve spent all day … well, from 10:30 AM until 4:20 … training fifty-two participants the first half of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Evangelism seminar. I’m exhausted (that’s a lot of time up in front doing a lot of the talking) and yet I’m too wound up to sleep. There’s something about watching folks “get it” when it comes to good-newsing the world. What’s most gratifying, is the number of the under-thirties who shared how much they got out of it and that what they heard are tips and tools that they realize will work in their contexts.

One of the hot topics of conversation at this event has been the discussion of the “church’s” role in evangelism. When I use the word “church” here, I’m meaning the cultural understanding of the church as a local expression, that is, a typical North American congregation that meets in some sort of dedicated building. What happens, several were asking, when we share our faith stories and invite our friends to come with us to church and when they get there the welcome and the love and the acceptance just isn’t there. In other words, is our evangelism efforts for naught if all we have to invite them to is church-as-usual?

That’s the rub, isn’t it? I’ve been on staff at churches in the past wheren I was hesitant to invite the unchurched and the irrelgious to visit. I figure that I get ONE chance with someone who’s authentically seeking and if I, or the church, blows it, the seeker may never give the church another chance. Rather than risking the loss to the kingdom, I’d invite them to other churches in the area where I knew they had a pretty good chance to meet Jesus rather than to a church where I knew they had a better chance of meeting ho-hum church-as-usual. I’m afraid there are some things that I’m just not willing to risk.

Which is a real dilemma for some in this evangelism seminar. Just what DO you do when the church you attend is “stuck” or in the midst of its own transformation? How can we prepare the serious seeker for their encounter with “the church” when it’s more of an insider’s club than a well-functioning rescue station? When is taking the risk the “right” thing to do?

It’s a dilemma and I’d be interested to hear your answers. My response is, instead of inviting a serious seeker to the “church” (i.e., the Sunday worship service in The Building), I invite them to an effective small group that I’m a part of. Hopefully that small group would be attached to the “church,” but I’m less concerned about that than I am in creating an incubator for love, warmth, hospitality, and discipleship.

What do you do when your friend, relative, associate, neighbor, or co-worker is seriously seeking spiritual answers? We live in a time where the economic crisis may be helping people get “ripe” for asking those questions. When they do, will you “risk” taking them to church? If not, what will you do?

It’s a rainy and stormy Saturday morning here in Columbia, Missouri. It’s Hurricane Ike weekend, so I have nothing to complain about. I’m relatively cool (though humidity sux), I have power, and my home is dry. As I write this, it’s too early to gauge the devastation of Galveston and Houston, but it isn’t going to be pretty.

As I watch the winds whip through the trees and the birds and squirrels hanging on to the feeders (or hiding inside a feeder, as this squirrel did), I pondered and prayed “What’s worth saying in these days?” What’s worth reading? What’s worth writing?

That’s a question I have to help churches and church leaders deal with all the time. I’ve been invited into many conversations and heard a lot of monologues (sometimes called sermons) that communicated little and prompted me to ponder why I’d invested any of the limited time I have for such palaver. Just what is worth saying?

There’s a huge difference between what people “want” to hear and what they “need” to hear. However, that difference is ameliorated by the ability of one to communicate to another. In other words, if I try to tell someone what they desperately “need” to hear, but they’re not at a place where they can hear me, I’m wasting my breath and their time … and I might even be creating impermeable walls that thwart future conversations. If I’m going to have a meaningful conversation with someone, I’d better be cognizant of our relationship level and the “right” that I have, or have not, developed that might enable me to speak truth into their life.

So, what’s worth saying? If you’re a faithful disciples of Jesus, then you have a story to tell. You may be surprised to hear this, though. It’s not the historical story of Jesus your friends or your congregants are most interested in hearing. As important as that is – and it is important – that’s not what most people want or need to hear. The story you have to share is a much more personal and intimate one. What people want to hear about your faith, more than anything else, is how this Jesus guy turned your life upside down. They want to know that he’s for real in your life and that he’s made a real difference. They want to know there’s authentic hope in this God – not because some ancient book says there is (there are LOTS of sacred books that claim their god is powerful and great), but because you have the goods on this particular god. You know him personally and this God is awesome enough that it’s worth getting up in the morning and facing whatever storms that life tosses at you.

It comes down to what I call the ultimate question: “What is it about your relationship with Jesus that your neighbor can’t live without?” If you have the answer to that, you have something worth saying. If not … well, there’s always the weather, sports scores, and recent sitcom plots to fill in the time.

In December, my new book on Evangelism will be released by Chalice Press. Hitchhiker’s Guide to Evangelism takes a peek at the “new” evangelism needed for reaching today’s world. Let’s face it, if the ways we do evangelism were really working, our churches would be filling up. But that’s clearly not the case. Indeed, in North America we’re not just losing the battle of the church, we’re losing the war. Less than 15% of North Americans will find their way to a church this weekend … and the numbers are dropping sharply.

What’s not working is trying to cajole our church members into doing evangelism like it was done “back then.” Back then you could knock at a door, do a quasi-real survey about checking the religion practices of the neighborhood, and then dropping “the” question towards the end: “If you died tonight, do you know for sure you’d go to heaven?”

It’s not that this method never works anymore. It still does in some communities and with some people. The question to ask is this: Is it worth alienating 98 people, people who will have had their worst fears about the church realized when you show up at their door, in order to share the Gospel effectively with 2 people?

The main problem with this kind of evangelism is that in some circles, this is the only “method” of conversion. I call this the Paul method … conversion happens at a specific moment in time. Paul’s version of conversion has become the model, and yet it is the most invasive, most intrusive, and most aggressive of almost all other evangelism models. And, I’d add, that if Jesus was the one who’s knocking you off your horse, that’s one thing … but I’m not Jesus – and neither are the many “evangelists” who press for a conversion “experience.”

The second problem with this kind of evangelism is that it bolsters the notion that being a Christian is mostly a matter about what you believe. The problem with “believing” Christianity is that this is what’s gotten us into this black hole. Seventy-eight percent of USAmericans “claim” to be Christian. And by the definition that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus, they are Christians. So praying the “sinner’s prayer,” walking an aisle, or even being baptized doesn’t necessarily mean much. I won’t argue about the salvific value of these actions … I’ll even surmise that they may be all that is “necessary” (but I’m not the one doing the judging – see Matthew 25). However, the “conversion” model of evangelism puts so much emphasis on the act of conversion that too often living a Christian life becomes of secondary importance and emphasis.

Now, I’m not advocating that we stop … there are times and places for conversion invitations (see Glenn Kelley’s recent blog entry on Youth Evangelism). But I am suggesting that there’s a better way for the rest of us.

The “New” evangelism is really a very old evangelism. Instead of it being about conversion, it’s about having spiritual conversations. It’s about first being a part of something, such as a friendship, a small group, a work group, a service group, a cause, etc. It’s about exploring the faith by watching it modeled, by associating with it, by practicing it before deciding it’s about believing and accepting and converting. This “new” evangelism is what the twelve apostles experienced. There is no discernable moment when Peter or Andrew of John or James or Matthew or Thadeus or any of the others “became” a Christian. Was it when they left their professions? When they made the great confession? When they walked on water (or not)? When they denied or fled at Jesus’ arrest? When they ate breakfast after the resurrection? When they were on the road and Jesus ascended, even though some doubted? After Pentecost? The fact is, we don’t know. We can guess. We can speculate. But we simply cannot be sure.

Conversations. Modeling. Living such a radically different life that someone actually does ask us about the reason for our hope … people are asking you, aren’t they? Living in community. All this is part of the “new” evangelism.