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Contents
1. The message
2. The messenger
3. Building relationships
4. Talking about God
5. Presenting the gospel
6. Introducing to Christian community
7. Living to provoke questions
8. Answering questions
9. Casual conversations about Jesus

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Assignment
The purpose of the assignments is to help you reflect on how the materials
can be applied in your own church context, as well as to help other
Porterbrook participants benefit from your thinking. They are designed to
help you with the materials, not to be a hurdle.
With this in mind, all assignments can be presented in either spoken or
written form you can choose what you prefer. If you are involved in
public speaking in your church context (whether it is preaching or teaching,
in a small-group Bible study, for example) we encourage you to do at least
some spoken assignments over the course. Spoken assignments will be
delivered in small groups at the residential. Participants give a presentation
lasting five to ten minutes, followed by group discussion. Written
assignments are to be brief, and can be e-mailed prior to the residential. If
you want to quote someone elses thoughts, indicate where they come from,
but your paper does not need to be academically rigorous, with footnotes and
bibliography.
Choose one of the following to present:
1. Unit 5 is about sharing your story. Write out your story using the
guidelines found in that unit.
Prepare a five-minute version and a one-minute version. When preparing it,
use and expand on one of the following openings that could get you in to
sharing your story with someone:
I know lots of people who are nicer than the Christians Ive met.
I cant believe in a god who lets such terrible suffering happen.
That stuff is just so old-fashioned.
Im not the religious type.
Im quite happy with how I am at the moment.
2. Choose one of the following scenarios and consider how the gospel story
speaks into their situation. When answering the question, identify their idol,
identity, saviour and belief and think what Bible stories you might refer them
to (800 words maximum).
a) Someone who says there is no God:
You make your own way in this world. There is no God. This was said
by an old man whose wife had had multiple affairs, who lost his parents at
an early age, who had given himself to serving his children and to earning
money. He is judgmental, obsessed with his kids doing well in life and
feels morally superior to most people.

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b) Someone who wants to know why God allows suffering:

I have Crohns disease. It ruins my life. Im bitter, Im angry, all I have to
live for is my PhD. Why would God do that to me? Why does God allow
suffering?

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Unit 1.
The message
This module will look at the issue of the impact of Gods people upon the
world, and the responsibility of Gods people for the world. The aim is to
build a framework that will help us engage with the world in a meaningful
and, by Gods grace, effective way.

Understanding the message

If we are to understand what our response to and responsibility for the world
is, we must also be clear about what lies at the core of who we are as the
people of God, namely the gospel.

Exercise
God himself has come to rescue and renew creation
through the work and in the work of Jesus Christ on our
behalf. What do you think of this, as a summary of the
gospel? If anything, what is wrong with, or missing from, it?
Tim Keller, senior minister of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York,
argues that there are two ways to read the Bible. How we read it will in turn
shape our understanding of the gospel. One way is to read it diachronically
along the timeline of the Bible (that is, what is called biblical theology). This
understands the gospel as set within the framework of creation, fall,
redemption and recreation. The second way of reading the Bible is
synchronically isolating themes to see what God says about different topic,s
such as faith, sin, and so on (that is, what is called systematic theology).
Here, the gospel is understood under the categories of God, sin, Christ and

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faith. To fully understand the gospel, Keller argues that we need to read the
Bible in both ways.
What really matters is the question of the trajectory of salvation. The trajectory
of salvation is what God is ultimately about, where his purposes are heading.
The Bible states clearly that Gods ultimate purpose is to renew the material
world for his glory. It is the transformation of all things for his glory. The
gospel is not primarily about me in the sense of saving me, or bringing me
to the safety of heaven. It is about the renewed spiritual and physical order.
God has embarked on a process that will culminate in a new heaven and new
earth where God dwells with his people. (See, for example, Romans 8:1922;
1 Corinthians 15:5153; Revelation 21:15.)
The second important question to consider is the means of salvation: how
does God bring this about? He does this by grace, through rescuing
individuals and forming them into his people. The church is a necessary
consequence of the gospel. That is, people are saved through the work of
Christ and formed into the Body of Christ. Both of these things are
important for our understanding of, and response to, the message of our
salvation.

Gospels-in-a-nutshell
One way to answer the question, What is the gospel? is to look at a gospelin-a-nutshell. There are many of them around, for example Four Spiritual
Laws, Two Ways To Live, and so on. In the New Testament there are all sorts
of examples of the gospel-in-a-nutshell, for example, John 3:16, 36; Romans
1:16; 1 Timothy 1:15; 2 Timothy 2:8; Titus 3; 1 Peter 3:18.
The problem, however, is that you cannot reduce the gospel to fit into a
nutshell. The gospel is more like an oak tree. It is true that Christ Jesus is
Lord, and that came into the world to save sinners. That is the message that
we take to the world. But it is not the only thing we say to the world. Those
verses need unpacking and that is what the gospel story does. In the context
in which Paul was speaking, 1 Timothy 1:15 is a fine encapsulation of the
gospel message, but it is not the only possible summary of the gospel
message. We can and should summarise the gospel message for our context,
but those summaries remain contextual. In other words, at a certain time and
to certain people we may need to emphasise certain things about the message;
but that will not be how we summarise it in another context.
For example, a good case can be made that the story of the prodigal son is
actually about the prodigal father (see Luke 15:11-32). The emphasis is on Gods
outrageous welcome and acceptance and sacrificial acceptance of sinners, in
accordance with the context of Luke 15:1. That is the gospel, but it is not the
only aspect of the gospel. The Father is the one who waits, looking for his
son to return and goes running towards him when he comes over the hill. But
the gospel is also the picture of a God who is a consuming fire: a God who is

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angry with sinners. The gospel is bad news before it is good news. But when
the parable of the prodigal son is being preached, the emphasis is not on the
bad news of the gospel. So it is right and glorious to emphasise the
welcome of God: because that is what the passage teaches. In another
context, however, there is more to be said.
A final point needs to be made, however. We must always exercise caution
against over-emphasising only a certain aspect of the gospel across all
contexts. People do come to a conviction of sin by people speaking about the
outrageous love of God. But we cannot only say what hearers want to hear.
Rather, we must speak what is appropriate for them to hear. In other words,
we must preach that gospel element that the hearer needs to hear, in their life
and situation.

The whole counsel of God

To get away from this gospel-in-a-nutshell mentality, perhaps we might
understand the gospel message as being the whole counsel of God. The
phrase the whole counsel of God comes from Paul in his speech to the
elders in Ephesus (Acts 20:27). It comes at the end of a section when Paul
has been speaking about his ministry in general and his work in Ephesus in
particular. Paul is about to go to Jerusalem, uncertain of what awaits him
there (verses 22-24). One thing he does seem to know is that he will not see
this group of men again (verse 38).
As he looks back over his ministry, Paul characterises it as a teaching
ministry. From the summary of his ministry in verses 20-25, we are told the
following: he taught that which is profitable (verse 20); he taught about
repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ (verse 21); he testified of
the gospel of grace (verse 24), and; he preached the kingdom of God (verse
25). Because of his faithfulness in his ministry in serving the scope of the
message, he has a clear conscience. We should also notice the sheer
relentlessness of the method. Not only does he preach Christ and the
kingdom of God, but he does it publicly and from house to house. I have
preached what is necessary and have burned myself out, giving myself over to
doing this. Therefore, he says, I am innocent of the blood of all men
(verse 26).
So this phrase in verse 27, the whole counsel of God, is Pauls summary
term for his teaching ministry. The word translated counsel means plan or
purpose. Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 4:5 when he is speaking about the day
of judgment bringing to light and exposing the plans of the heart. On that
day of judgment not only will our actions be exposed, but the motives from
which those actions flowed the plans, intentions designs, secret counsels.
So, when Paul speaks in Acts 20 about the counsel of God, he is referring
to the gospel that he has preached: God is making known his plans. He is
exposing his heart and revealing his thoughts concerning the salvation of

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sinners for the glory of his name. It is in the gospel that God exposes his plan
to bring all things together under the headship of Christ (Ephesians 1:112).
Those plans were hatched in eternity as the Trinity conferred together. What
a delicious piece of imagery: the Trinity talking together about how they will
best glorify the Godhead, and what master-plan can they concoct to
demonstrate God to be glorious, awesome, majestic and deserving of the
endless praise of all creation. The Bible story is the fruit of that conference:
the whole counsel of God; the plan of salvation.
In Ephesus, therefore, Paul taught the Scriptures as they pointed to and were
fulfilled in Christ. He did this to anyone he could, whenever he could, by
whatever means he could, making him innocent of the blood of all men.
As we seek to identify our message, it is helpful to keep in mind that the
ministry of the apostle Paul was a Bible-teaching ministry. He did not
necessarily take out his scroll to read Leviticus 16, but all of his message
encapsulated the Bible story from Genesis to Christ and on to eternity, when
everything will be brought under Christ as head. Accordingly, everything that
Paul said was sourced from Scripture: Gods counsel. Because it was the
whole counsel of God, there was nothing more to say. As Jim Packer has
said, the Bible is God preaching. Gods sermon is ended, as there is nothing
more to add to the plan of salvation.
If this is right, then our task is relatively straightforward. We need to keep
exposing ourselves and others to this plan of salvation, the whole counsel of
God. If we do that faithfully, prayerfully, imaginatively, sensitively,
passionately, relevantly and patiently, then we have nothing more to do. In
our ministry, we will have done all we can. We do it so that we and others will
know life and how to live life to the glory of God. For the whole counsel of
God is our message.

Teaching salvation
Read 2 Timothy 3:13-17 part of Pauls letter to his protg in Ephesus.
This is perhaps the apostles final letter (certainly the final one we have).
Timothy has been in Ephesus for approximately five years. Pauls prophecy
in Acts 20:29-30 has come true, that is, false teachers are among the sheep
and are ravaging the flock. And Timothy is the one who is dealing with the
resulting fall-out.
In a sense, all Paul has to offer Timothy is what Timothy already knows. Paul
reminds Timothy that his task is to continue in the things he has already
learned (verse 14). It is as if Paul is saying: In this difficult situation, where
you are teaching a congregation that is threatening to fall away from the truth,
and where false teachers have come in to lead others astray, there is no great
master-plan, strategy or blueprint for success other than this: Dont look for
anything new; stick with what youve got!

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What he already had was the sacred writings (verse 15), which Lois and
Eunice (Timothys grandmother and mother) had been faithful in teaching
him: these writings are able to give the wisdom that leads to salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus (2 Timothy 3:15). That is why Paul was so clear
about his task in his farewell address to the elders in Ephesus. Paul taught the
whole counsel of God because it is that which gives the wisdom that leads to
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. There was no other message, and
nothing else that could effect change or transform sinners. Like Paul,
Timothy had nothing except this message.
The Bible is the story of salvation, and the word itself is very important. It
encapsulates Gods two-fold action of rescuing us from something to bring us
into something. It is a comprehensive term that describes Gods action in
rescuing people from sin and its consequences, and his action of bringing us
into a situation where we experience his blessings. He rescues us out of
danger, death, alienation and judgment. He brings us into life and blessing,
reconciliation, meaning and significance.
This has implications for our practice. As we teach the Bible we are not
teaching mere morality. Morality is not a good thing. In fact, morality is a
one-way ticket to hell. We will not be guiltless of peoples blood if we teach
them morality rather than teaching them Christ and salvation and all that
God has done in Christ.

Teaching the Old Testament

Example 1: Samuel and obedience
If you were leading a Bible study on the Old Testament story of Samuel, you
could take that as a morality tale. Children can learn how to be obedient to
their parents, just as Samuel was obedient to Eli (1 Samuel 3). But if you do
that as many have done in Sunday schools and pulpits you will be
teaching a straight line from Samuel to us, and so be teaching morality and
law: Children, obey your parents and God will be pleased with you.
However, the nature of the human heart is such that obedience that pleases
God is impossible without Christ. External compliance is fine; heart
obedience is impossible outside of Christ. In this way, we are preaching
morality if we preach Samuel as a good example of someone obedient to the
one responsible for him. Such morality is a false gospel.

Example 2: Abraham, Sarai, and self-sufficiency

The following, fuller example teaches how we might preach another piece of
Old Testament narrative in a way that leads to the gospel rather than a call to
morality.

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In Genesis 12, God sovereignly chooses Abram to be the one through whom
he will bless all the nations of the world. Abram is directed on a journey, not
knowing where he is going until God says to him this is the land I will give
to your descendants (Genesis 12:7). Because of the severe famine in that
land of promise, Abram goes to live in Egypt. As he nears Egypt, Abram says
to his wife Sarai, I dont mind them taking you off to some Egyptian, Sarai,
as long as Im OK. Because if it goes well with you it will go well with me. Ill
be able to curb my jealousy, as I see them whisk you away on this
honeymoon, but basically its all about me (see verses 13-14). Once in
Egypt, it happens as Abram predicted. When Pharaoh takes Sarai into his
house (verse 15), all goes well with Abraham for the sake of Sarai (verse 16).
However, when the Lord afflicts Pharaoh (verse 17), the truth eventually
becomes clear to him, and Pharaoh sends Abraham away with Sarai and their
belongings, escorting them with his men (verses 18-20).
As teachers of the whole counsel of God, we must ask ourselves how to
present Abrams trip down to Egypt and his dishonest description of Sarai in
Genesis 12:10-20. While morality says that cheats never prosper, Egypt was
a profitable trip to Abram, despite the masterclass in deception (verse 16). A
morality tale is therefore somewhat difficult. It is a mistake to use this
incident to teach that lying is wrong, as you are not teaching the whole
counsel of God. Instead, you are teaching that good works will save people:
do not lie and God will be pleased with you. In doing this, you are persuading
people to be moral. But this is not the purpose of Scripture. Every Old
Testament incident, and every detail it records about the life of Abraham, is
to give wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (2
Timothy 3:15).
Abrams lying was premeditated and was a symptom of an underlying issue.
This is what God deals with, and ruthlessly. Abram needs to learn to trust
God and take God at his word: this is the purpose of the Abram narrative.
Martin Luther, the 16th-century Reformer, talks about getting to the sin
beneath the sin. Abrams lying revealed a much deeper, more pernicious,
ongoing sin. While the sin was lying, the fundamental sin was the refusal to
trust God.
Abram became god in his own world, the master of his destiny, the one who
secured his own future. This was immediately after God had said to him that
he would make Abraham a great nation and blessing, through whom all the
nations would be blessed. Yet he still took matters into his own hands. Just
like Adam, he wouldnt take God at his word, and he wanted to be god in
Gods place. That is the human condition: the dethronement of God and the
enthronement of self.
That was the problem in Abrams life, and Abraham only really comes to
grasp this with all of its implications in Genesis 22, when he is told to
sacrifice Isaac, his only son. According to the writer of Hebrews, it was not
because God had told Abraham to do this that he did it, but because
Abraham knew that Gods promises resided in this child (Hebrews 11:17-19).

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If God was to keep his promise, God would bring this child back to life
again. If that was what God had promised to do, he could trust God to do it.
He had recognised God to be the keeper of his promises.
Abrahams trust in God, rather than in himself, was the issue. This is the
problem in our life too. This is the human condition. Our problem is
Abrahams problem. We, too, want to secure our own future.
As for Jesus, he was supremely the one who trusted God and took him at his
word. He supremely submitted to his Father in all things. As we teach about
this failure of Abram, and the same ongoing failure of Israel, we then teach
about the faithfulness of Jesus. We teach of his faithfulness and trust all the
way to the cross.
We all fail to trust God, and we all grasp after being God. In our teaching, we
need to show how Jesus faithful life makes his death a legitimate sacrifice for
our sin of faithlessness. As Philippians 2:5-11 shows, though Jesus was in his
very nature God, he did not consider equality with God something to be
grasped, but he emptied himself, taking on the fullness of a servant,
becoming a nothing and a nobody. That led him all the way eventually to the
shame of the cross. For us, we demonstrate that living as a Christian is
trusting God and submitting to him; we trust and submit to the word he has
spoken in the cross and resurrection.
This is what it means to preach the whole counsel of God when you are
teaching Genesis 12. This is allowing the Bible to give the wisdom that leads
to salvation through faith in Christ, as opposed to teaching morality. Morality
addresses only behaviour, so it claims to be able to lead to God and salvation
without faith in Christ. A moral person is his own saviour, or at least he
thinks he is. This is the Frank Sinatra Syndrome: When God asks me what
Ive done, Ill say, I did it my way. But my way is never the good way, the
enough way, the right way only Gods way is. I can never deal with the
ultimate sin, which is being my own saviour. The message I preach must
show this: Christ is the Saviour that they need; they cannot save themselves.
Our task, in any situation and any culture, is to peel back the layers of
respectability, exposing self-deception. We show how the word of God
addresses the human condition in all of its terrifying simplicity. It does not
matter which country we are working in; the human condition is the same
everywhere. It is this condition that is in Genesis 12; it is this condition that is
in our hearts. Our message is that there is salvation only in Christ. Morality
deals only with behaviour; the whole counsel of God deals with the heart.
Because morality only addresses behaviour, it claims to be able to lead to
salvation without faith in Christ and thus teaches that a moral person can be
his or her own saviour. That is the problem with preaching good deeds.
When we preach sin, we often preach it in technicolour. We talk about
heinous sin, the big sin: adultery, prostitution, pornography, drugs or
murder. The conception of a big sin varies from culture to culture. But we

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experience difficulty when we meet an upright person in society: someone

from a good family and education who has achieved well, done good things,
is a member of Rotary, gives money to charity, has never got drunk, never
done drugs, never slept around, never even slept with their partner before
marrying them, and so on. People like that still exist in their millions. The
only way to preach the message to such people is by presenting to them the
whole counsel of God. We must expose the human heart for what it is, and
show them that they are grasping after being god and seeking to be their own
saviour. The person who is doing the good works is actually saying, I can do
it myself; I dont need a saviour.

Reflection
Look again at 1 Samuel 3. How does this passage fit into the
whole counsel of God? What is the problem in the
characters lives, and what is Gods proposed remedy?

Teach the Scriptures, and there is nothing

else to teach
Back in 2 Timothy 3, Paul continues to commend the Scriptures (our Old
Testament) to him, pointing out that they are breathed out by God (verse
16). Just as my breath forms my words, so it is with Gods word. Because the
Bible has its origin in God, and is God preaching, it is profitable for
teaching the truth, refuting error, correcting wrong behaviour and
encouraging right behaviour (verse 16). There is a glorious tension and
balance here: truth on the one hand; behaviour on the other. Since they are
breathed out by God, the Scriptures are able to give us wisdom that leads to
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Furthermore, they are profitable,
equipping us for every good work, owing to their origin in God. In other
words, they are sufficient.
The sufficiency of Scripture is a great and comforting truth for teaching the
Bible. I do not need to be hip, cool or trendy. I do not need to be a
psychologist or a therapist. I do not need to be a cultural analyst. I only need
to be able to teach the Bible. The Bible is what our toddlers, teenagers, single
people, middle-aged and old people need to hear. It is the Bible that is
sufficient for all matters of faith and conduct. It is sufficient for the intimately
connected issues of belief and behaviour. Because it is sufficient, we can have
confidence to teach the Bible to whomever, wherever, whenever, knowing
that it, and it alone, addresses the real issues of the human heart.
Because it is the word of God, the whole counsel of God looks underneath
the presenting issues and takes seriously the sin beneath the sin. This means
we will not preach the gospel not in some pre-packaged, one-size-fits-all
form. Rather, we will apply different aspects of the Bible in myriad
circumstances. The Scriptures expose the human predicament and point to

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the divine remedy. We have Bible stories, illustrations, teachings to bring to

bear on every situation. Take the stories to unbelievers. Do it naturally; just
tell them. We do not even need to tell them that it is a story by or about Jesus
until the story has been told.
In Scripture, there is a wealth of different resources: command and
encouragement, examples to follow and avoid, narrative and propositions,
poetry and prophecy, visions and dreams, wisdom and songs. In all its variety
and diversity, richness and depth, the Bible speaks to the human heart.
Through its power as the word of God fulfilled in Christ and the gospel
it is able to renew the heart, transform character and renew behaviour. As
Calvin has said, The Bible contains the perfect rule of a good and happy
life. This is because it points us to Jesus and to life lived in him.

Conclusion
The word of God is the whole counsel of God, and we need confidence in
Gods word to do its work in the lives of those we teach. We demonstrate
that confidence by teaching the whole counsel of God so that it is able to
give wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. We will also
demonstrate that truth in prayer, the supreme expression of trust in God and
a humble and honest recognition that I am not the saviour.
The task for each of us in teaching the Bible just as much as it is if we are
professional ministers teaching the church from the pulpit is to make the
truth plain, and to make it real. This entails engagement with the lives of the
people we are teaching. We cannot do this in one message, however, because
we cannot encapsulate it in one session. The Bible is needed in its entirety. If
God could summarise his message in a nutshell, he would have done so. But
he did not do this. In all of his word given to us, God tells us about his Son
who died, who rose again and who is coming again in glory.

Reflection
Do you have confidence in Gods word, in all of its breadth
and depth, pivoting on Christ in his glory? In what ways can
you know it better to this end?

Exercise
With a few Christian friends, discuss how you can bring the
whole counsel of God to bear sensitively and perceptively in
situations you face. Perhaps you can use examples of
everyday opportunities you have experienced to do this. Together, pray for
the Spirits wisdom, as well as divine strength for the commitment to this and
for the ability to bring this about.

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Unit 2.
The messenger
Love God, not the world
Do not love the world, or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the
love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world the cravings of
sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does comes
not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but
the man who does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)

We are going to begin in what may seem a very strange place, at least in terms
of the subject of this unit. The text is, Do not love the world, or the things
of the world (1 John 2:15). As messengers, it is important for us, in our
responsibility for the world, not to fall into the trap of loving the world, in
the sense that John means it.
We might love the world in different ways. There is love for the world that is
profoundly good, and a love for it that is profoundly bad. The love that is
good is the love that wants to see men and women saved and coming into the
glorious freedom of being children of God. Such love has no racial limits to
its concern and no geographical boundary to its compassion. This love wants
to see men and women of every age, generation, culture, and of every social
standing reached for Christ. It sees that the world out there is full of people
without God and without hope (Ephesians 2:12). This love sees that we
should love the world even as God so loved the world (John 3:16). This is
loving the world in all of its vastness.
But this love that John is talking about, is loving the world for its badness. It
is loving the world as a competing culture, as that which demands our loyalty
and seeks our worship. That world is not to be loved. If they are to love the
world in the right sense, the messenger must be careful, lest they love the

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world in the wrong sense. This is because loving the world in that way is the
way of failure, disappointment and frustration.
The world, as John talks about it, is a value system. It is a whole cultural
framework, a mindset. It can describe peer pressure, or general societal
expectation. He unpacks it for us in verse 16, when he talks about the lust of
the flesh, eyes and the boastful pride of life. Whatever the specific meaning of
the world here described by John, it is clear that it is something that it is
opposed to God. For John, therefore, it is a straight choice as far as the
messenger is concerned between loving God and loving the world.

Why not love the world?

As we begin to grapple with Johns instructions, we must ask first ask
ourselves why he instructs the Christians here, in this struggling community,
not to love the world. After all, the world is not unlovely or unlovable. Our
spiritual instinct would answer that the world is not to be loved: its value
system opposed to God is not a good way to live. But no matter how much
that might appeal to us at a theoretical or superficial level, it just will not do.
Because the world is not unlovely. The problem for many people, including
our churches and us is that the world is altogether lovely and desirable.
That is the problem of discipleship. If it were not lovely and loveable, we
would not love, want, or be drawn by it. We would not want to play by its
rules, or be influenced by its values. But we are! The world is continually
exercising a gravitational pull upon our hearts. To us in our fallen nature, the
world as a system and thought-structure, as a way of looking at life and
understanding reality, as a way of functioning is altogether too appealing,
and is always likely to win our affection.

How not to love the world

If we as Gods messengers are not to love the world, then we must consider
how to go about obeying Johns command. There are a number of strategies
we could suggest.
One way is to convince ourselves of the foolishness of the world. The world
is so futile, its values are so transitory, its thinking is so flawed only fools
would love the world. And that is true. The world and its lusts are passing
away, says John. But the problem with that approach is that our love for the
world is not a rational decision we make after a careful consideration of the
facts. Our love for the world is an instinct, a bias, a disposition. It is subrational and so not amenable to rational analysis, or resolved by intellectual
arguments.
A much better strategy is the one implied by John in the second part of verse
15: If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. In
Johns mind, there is a close relationship between love of the world and love
for God. To love the world is not to love God. This would imply that love for

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God is the way in which we will not love the world. This is the nub of the
solution.
The only effective way to resist the gravitational pull of the world upon us is
by means of a force that is even stronger. The more we love God, the less we
will love the world. The more we love God, the more we will value his
approval, and the more we will be able to withstand the pressure brought to
bear upon us by the approval of our peers, or the rewards of society.
A helpful sermon was preached by Thomas Chalmers, a 19th-century
Edinburgh minister. The sermon was entitled The Expulsive Power of a New
Affection, and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to love God and
not the world. Chalmers thesis is profound in its simplicity: we will only not
love the world to the degree that we do love God. His argument is biblical
and irrefutable.
Chalmers believed that sin is always a matter of affection. We sin because our
affections are misplaced. The way to stop us sinning is not to present us with
more rules. Many Christians have committed adultery, despite being
absolutely persuaded of the wrong in committing adultery: they know the
command of God. But that law does not stop them in the heat of the
moment. What does stop someone from sinning is a heart that is in love with
God. We fall prey to sin when our love for God is on the wane. Sin and the
world become more attractive when God has become less attractive to us.

The messenger: a lover

The task and character of the messenger is therefore summed up in one title
and two aspects. The messenger is a lover. The messenger is first and foremost
a lover of God. They should be someone who loves God with all their heart,
soul, mind and strength. We must begin, continue and end at this point.
Failure to love God is always the reason for our failure as the messenger, for
our failure as Christians and for our failure to resist the pull of the world. It is
never anything less or more than that. We sin because we love something or
someone more than we love God.
This is a missing chord in the symphony of contemporary evangelicalism. It is
subtle, and we can very easily fail to notice its absence. Yet we must
rediscover it in order to fully understand what it means to be messengers that
God uses in this task of winning the world for him.
Let each of us ask ourselves a simple question: do I love God? If so, do I
love him with my heart, soul, mind and strength with the totality of my
being, with all that I am? Do I rejoice in the personal, possessive pronouns of
faith? He is my God, my Saviour, my Lord. Do I delight in those? Listen to
how the apostle Peter describes it in 1 Peter 1:8 to the suffering believers:
Though you have not seen him, you love him, and though you do not see him now,
you believe in him, and you rejoice greatly with joy inexpressible and full of glory.

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As we think about evangelism, we must become convinced of the idea that

Christianity is not a religion, and that we are not trying to peddle or sell a
religion of works to people: we are commending a relationship of grace to
people. But we must pause and ask ourselves this question: if that is the case,
what kind of relationship do people see? If Christianity is not a religion and it
is a relationship, what kind of a relationship is it? Is it cold and distant, clinical
and formal? Or do people see in us someone who is quite simply in love with
God? The greatest commendation someone might give us is, They love God
thats all I can say. Not that they have a charismatic personality, not
that they are dynamic, learned, or good-looking, but that I met somebody
who loves God. Someone whose heart beats fast at the thought of him, at
the prospect of seeing him, and with the thrill of speaking to him or listening
to his word.
It is emotive language, but this faithfully echoes the tones of biblical
language.
When Israel was a youth I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more
they [that is, the prophets] called them, the more they went from them; They kept
sacrificing to the Baals, and burning incense to idols. Yet it is I who taught Ephraim
to walk, I took them in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led
them with the cords of a man, with bonds of love, and I became to them as one
who lifts the yoke from their jaws; I bent down and fed them. (Hosea 11:1-4)

That is emotive language and rich imagery: it was I who taught Ephraim to
walk; I bent down and fed them. That is the LORD God of Israel speaking
in the most emotive of family terms. For a true work of God to take place in
the world, the true work of God first has to take place in the hearts of his
messengers. It is this gospel that must capture our minds, wills and hearts: the
whole counsel of God, where we see God in all of his glory, where in Christ
God turns his friendly, gracious face towards us. The gospel is never about
mere facts imparted to analytical brains in order to produce sterile obedience.
It is about a God who has gone to the most remarkable lengths in order to
win our love.
At an evangelistic event, I had been given the topic of sex to speak on. I was
talking about God as a lover and of his unrequited love, explaining how the
cross is God running after us and displaying his love for us. I explained that
the reason we have rejected God is because we have gone running after other
lovers, but he is the lover of our soul and calls us back to fidelity with him. I
spoke about conversion in those terms. The antagonism that was generated in
some of the Christians there was incredible. They spoke to their leaders,
saying that they had brought non-Christian friends along to the talk,
expecting them to hear the gospel, and they had not. It might not have been
the best sermon that they had heard, but they did hear the gospel being
preached. It boiled down to the fact that they had expected to hear a
presentation of Two Ways To Live. And because it was not that kind of
presentation, they believed that it was not the gospel. That grieved me. Their
friends will come to them with all sorts of life issues arising out of broken

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relationships, and all they will be able to do is whip out a Two Ways To Live
tract. My intention is not to disparage Two Ways To Live there is a place for
it, and it is a useful reminder of the Bibles storyline or big picture. But it is
not the only way to preach the gospel and it will not work in every context.
A messenger is somebody who loves God. If we love God, then we will
speak about the gospel in terms of love. We are commending to people a
better lover, a better object of their affection. We are not commending to
people a distant deity, detached somewhere up in the heavens. Just as Jesus
saw the central issue with the woman at the well (John 4), we are to ask
people why they are running after these things that draw them away and
distract them from the love of the living God. We can only see those issues
when as a messenger we recognise that we are a lover of God, someone
whose heart has been captured by God in all of his captivating glory,
someone whose heart has been ravished by Christ in all of his stunning
beauty, and someone who has looked at the cross and has been won by the
Saviour at that deep, emotional level. When that has happened, and is
happening day after day, then our minds and hearts will both grasp the truth
simultaneously, forcing our will into glad and eager obedience.

Reflection
How do you think of the gospel? How do you present it to
your non-Christian friends? How do you think of God, in
your personal relationship with him? Can it become, or has it
been, dry and passionless, as if God is not intimately involved and concerned
with every aspect of your life and heart?

Loves distractions
All sorts of things can distract us. Ironically, gospel work has a tendency to
drain this heartfelt love of God from us. It is easy for us to become so
focused on the tasks of the gospel that it distracts us from being that lover:
reaching people, developing effective strategies, ensuring we are reading the
Bible with people, writing sermons, leading Bible studies, attending
conferences, reading or writing books.
What is even more ironic is that so few conversations between Christians are
about Jesus. We are very comfortable talking about strategies, ideas, models,
Bible passages, and doctrine. But we are so uncomfortable talking about our
relationship with the one who has loved us so well, in intimate and personal
terms.
We should learn to encourage each other by asking these kinds of questions:
Do you love Jesus?
Do you love him more now than before?
What is there about him that has had an impact on you, and made you
love him more?

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 When was the last time you felt love for him love that stirred your soul?
As you were reading the Bible recently, what truth about God caused you
to rejoice and love him more?

Reflection
With another Christian friend, try having this conversation.
(You may find it more helpful to think this through on your
own first, before you confess your heart to your friend.)
This dimension of mutual encouragement is so vital. These are the kinds of
questions and conversations we should be having, as people who, though
[we] have not seen him [we] love him; though we do not see him now, we
believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy (1 Peter
1:8).
The reality, however, is that we do not do this very often. We will now
examine four reasons behind this failure.

Christianity
Christianity as an idea can be a distraction. Too often it is easy to love the
idea of God, the idea of a saviour, the idea of being rescued from our sin. So
many of us love the notion of Christianity. But Christianity is actually about
loving a Saviour loving him truly, madly, deeply. And so many of us feel
rebuked by this.
Many of us feel embarrassed to talk in those terms. It may be a cultural or
sub-cultural issue. Even when I am sensing that depth of relationship with
God that sense that I truly love him with all my heart I feel awkward
talking about it. Yet, while condemnation is never the way to true godliness,
we must feel this inability to talk about Jesus as a rebuke. It should cause us
to long to be lovers of God who talk often about the love of God, whatever
cultural or sub-cultural issues we may have. If we want to become people
who encourage others to love God more, then we must become those who
are able to speak freely about our hearts and our love for him.
There is no magic formula or special insight that we can buy into. This love
for God grows in the context of our developing relationship with him. This is
through his word, through prayer and through our brothers and sisters:
through seeing Gods grace at work in their lives, and through them
encouraging us to experience his grace at work in our lives. It grows as we
commend him to people. Those are the things that nurture it.
As I look around, I see all the competing objects of affection vying for my
heart. The new car, the holiday abroad, the bigger house all of them are
saying, Look! I can satisfy you; I can give you what you are looking for. I can
give you that because I can give you status, possessions, happiness,

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security These are things that you may want, whatever shape they take.
Growing in love for God is about saying, No, you cannot satisfy me and I
am not attracted to you because God has captured my heart. It is love for
God that should occupy and define the culture we are creating and nurturing,
and to which we belong.

Blessings of God
Ironically, the very blessings of God can also be a distraction in our lives as
messengers, and indeed in sharing the message. We want Gods blessings for
what they do for us, but we should want God for himself. Often it is easy for
us to want God, or to commend him, for his blessings.
We will think more about how to avoid this pitfall when we look at ways of
sharing the gospel. Briefly, however, we must know that God invites us to
love him for himself. However, it is in loving him for himself that we find life,
benefit and satisfaction. It is not as though God invites and draws us by
saying, Look, you have to love me for my glory and my reputation, but
then he does not care about us. Rather, he says to us that he has given us our
thirst for life so that we would seek him. It is as we seek him for his glory
and only when we do that that we know joy, life and peace. We cannot
seek God for the blessings, but we must seek him. And in seeking him, there
are blessings: blessings untold.
We are always in danger of selling Christianity on the basis of the benefits it
will bring to the listener. Indeed, the Bible provides us with a number of
examples to show that this is not always completely inappropriate. Yet at its
root, the gospel we preach and believe must always be about growing more
and more in love with God for his own sake and for his own glory. The glorious
truth, however, is that it is in seeking God for his own glory that we find our
ultimate joy, for there is no one and nothing better that we could seek after or
worship. In giving us himself, God is giving us the very best. It is a difficult
thing; we are always going to skew it, both in our how we live and how we
communicate the gospel. But we will look more carefully at this in Unit 5.

Exercise
Discuss with some others in your Christian community: what
are some of the blessings that come from seeking God for
his own glory? Have you ever found yourself commending to
others the blessings that come from knowing God, rather than commending
God himself? In what ways do we do that?

Obedience
Obedience can also become a hindrance to our love for God. We can
establish a false dichotomy, where love is an action it is about what we do
and not a feeling. So we say to ourselves that we need to be obeying God.

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But God is not looking for naked obedience a drudgery where we

conform and oblige reluctantly. God says that, when we love him
comprehensively with our hearts, soul, mind and strength, engaging our
intellect, emotions, affections, actions, everything, the totality of our being
then our obedience will be a ready obedience, just like that of Zacchaeus
(Luke 19:8). Having encountered Jesus, having been won by Jesus and his
table-fellowship, he wants to make restitution, to give money to the poor. It
is not a question of either love or obedience, but of love and obedience: a
heartfelt, all-out love for God, and an obedience to him that flows out of a
heart so engaged by him.
We must stress, however, that sometimes the right thing to do is the right
thing to do only because it is the right thing to do. Sometimes, we should do
things out of duty: because we know we should do it. We do not have to wait
until we feel a love for God before we do the right thing. But as we do that we
can pray, Lord, I want to do this because I love you. I want to delight in
doing this because I love you; I want my heart to be ravished by you. In
time, or even immediately, obedience becomes a pleasurable thing.

Disillusionment
Disillusionment is a major way in which the messengers love for God can be
dampened. It can eat away at our hearts, even leading us in extreme cases to
despise God in our hearts. This is due to our having to cope with a number
of things as Gods messengers:
Rejection from non-Christians
Persistent indifference: sometimes a small amount of hostility would be a
refreshing change. Most of the time, we just get apathy. The Who cares?
attitude
An apparent gap between our experience and Gods promises
Conflict with other Christians, which is the biggest pain in the neck and
ache in the heart that there is. Yet it happens so often in so many peoples
experience. Christians living with Christians seems to be profoundly
complicated and difficult
Misunderstandings with other gospel workers
Weariness, just of being a messenger
All these things can wear away and drain our love for God. But to people like
us, Jesus makes this great promise:
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
(Matthew 11:28-30)

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There is an interesting and touching illustration of this principle in Genesis

29:20:
So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, but because of his love for her it seemed
like a few days. (Genesis 29:20)

It is a wonderful verse. I have been labouring away as a fully supported

gospel worker for 28 years. But because of my love for God, it seems like a
few days. Some friends I have known for years in the Soviet Union have
served in a prison for 50 of their 70 years. But because of their love for God,
it seems like a few days. They have lost their family, but because of their love
for God it seems as though it were nothing.

Dealing with distractions

The writer to the Hebrews recognised this problem of distractions when he
encouraged them in their heavenly calling (Hebrews 3:1). The simple fact is
this: our hearts are prone to wander. They are prone to leave the God we
love, for their default mode is always set towards hardness. The preventative
treatment and antidote for that creeping coldness of heart is mutual and daily
encouragement (Hebrews 3:12-13).
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the
blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is,
his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near
to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to
cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.
Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.
Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us
encourage one another and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
(Hebrews 10:19-25)

This does not negate the centrality of Bible-teaching to the task of the
messenger. Rather, this aspect of loving God with our hearts, minds, souls
and strength is critical to a word-centred ministry. This is because the Bible is
not only at the very heart of gospel ministry, but it is at the very heart of our
relationship with God. It is through his word that we know him, and see
what a great and good God he is. Yet, while we recognise that gospel ministry
is essentially word ministry, we must also see that this is much more than
simply using the Bible in our conversations. It is about being hungry for
Gods word because it is his love letter to us, his people. It is about reading it
with a sense of devotion, and then teaching it with a sense of privilege.
Nor is prayer sidelined. According to Luke in Acts, it is not only the ministry
of the word that is the task of gospel workers. Prayer is also our task. In Acts
6, there is a problem in the Jerusalem church regarding care for the Greekspeaking widows. The apostles recognised the core issue, and took steps to
deal with it. They refused to be distracted from their central task, which was
prayer and the ministry of the word (verse 4). At its most basic, prayer is an

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expression of our utter dependency upon God, but it is also a privilege that
flows out of our relationship with him, and so it too grows out of our love
for him. There is a direct correlation between our love for God and our
willingness to pray or our willingness to read his word, or our willingness
to witness and the effectiveness of our witness.

A lover of others
As messengers, we are to be lovers of God. We are to be lovers of people, too.
In Mark 12:28-34, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is. He says,
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your
strength. The second is this: Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no
greater commandment than these.

The issue of loving our neighbour follows exegetically and experientially out
of our love for God. We love God, so we love our neighbour. You cannot
love God and not love your neighbour. It is impossible; it is contradictory;
they are incompatible categories. There can be no other way. John says that in
his epistle. Loving God will always mean that we love our neighbour (1 John
4:7-11). The extent to which I do not love my neighbour shows the extent to
which my love for God is waning. If I am truly loving God, then I will be
loving my brother and my sister. Gospel living and gospel work being
gospel messengers is all about love.
This is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians:
For if we are beside ourselves it is for God; if we are of sound mind it is for you.
For the love of Christ constrains us, having concluded this, that one died for all,
therefore all died. (5:13-14)

The task of the gospel worker is to love people, even as Jesus loved people.
There is that incredible scene when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, and says with
great pathos:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how
often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks
under her wings, but you were not willing. (Matthew 23:27)

It is this kind of passion and compassion that should fill our hearts and
motivate our ministry.
Gospel work cannot be sustained out of a sense of cold duty. To share our
lives with people as the gospel calls us to, and to tell them of a God who
loves sinners with a deep, costly and enduring love, requires that we love
others as we love ourselves. There can be no other way. Love for them,
which flows out of and is a consequence of our love for God, will be that
which enables us to lay down our lives for them if need be. It is love for

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others that enables us to speak when we have to speak, but also to be silent
when we need to be silent.
Love for others liberates us from gospel work becoming self-serving, as it so
often can be. Our gospel work can be a means to self-esteem. What is more,
in the wider Christian community being a church-planter or on a churchplanting team can give us a bit of kudos: it makes us sound dynamic, driven,
focused, on the edge. It can give us our identity. But if we are planting
churches because we love God and love people, then that will not be what
drives us. We will be free to plant truly gospel churches and not churches that
just pander to peoples desires. We will be free to love people truly, and not
simply say what people want to hear.
Loving people will liberate us from the fear of people, and so set us free to
encourage and challenge them when they need it. When we fear people, we
think, Im not going to challenge you on a point, where you really need
some gospel challenging, because youre not going to like me when I do it.
When we do that, we are not thinking of them at all: we are thinking of
ourselves. Or, we say to ourselves, Im not going to encourage you because
you might just think it is too twee. You may not be someone who can be
encouraged. So Im not going to come over to you, put my arms around your
shoulders, and speak a gospel truth to you, or talk about Jesus in some
intimate way. Because youre just going to reject me and think Im a right
saddo. Im fearful of that. But if we love them, then that love for them will
energise us, and enable us to cope with rejection.

Conclusion
There is such simplicity in the gospel. We need to keep learning that our task
is essentially simple: it is to love God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my
mind and with all my strength. And to love my neighbour as myself.
That love of God love for God and for others which is poured into my
heart by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, is that which will sustain me in
this task that God has given me (see Romans 5:15). It is that and nothing
else which will enable me to persevere when I am rejected, forgive when I
am slandered, and speak when I am vulnerable. My prayer for myself, and our
prayer for one another, should be always and only: Lord, make me a better
lover: a lover of God and a lover of others.

Reflection
them?

Think about the Christians who have had the greatest impact
on you in your walk with the Lord. What was it about them
that had such an effect on you? What can you learn from

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Unit 3.
Building relationships
We will now begin to look at the practical issue of building relationships, and
how and why we do it. The how-to is important because Christians are often
not very good at it. When one of the assistant ministers in our church first
moved to Sheffield, an older local man remarked that he could tell he was a
graduate because he kept asking questions. It was quite a telling comment. If
that is a feature of middle-class, tertiary-educated people, then we must work
hard at thinking how we can form relationships with people not from that
sub-culture.
An old Christian leader once told me that the key was taking a real interest in
people. This is not necessarily done by trying to find out things about them
through interrogation, but simply allowing them to talk. Let them tell their
stories because that is how they share lives. Participate in that process by
telling your story that is how you can share your life.
Relationships do not often form around shared ideas, but they do often form
around shared activity. This makes it particularly hard for people who are
abstract thinkers, whose interest is primarily in sharing and discussing ideas.
We should try to build relationships by getting involved in performing tasks
together. Share ordinary, mundane tasks, because it is those things that
provide a focus, which in turn makes conversation easier and more natural.
Deuteronomy 6 is an excellent model, and its broad application is surprising.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These
commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on
your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the
road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands
and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses
and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

The Law which defines Israel is transmitted mainly through everyday life.
This is done as fathers go about their tasks with their kids. It describes how
to build relationships with people for the sake of the gospel by sharing tasks
along the road.

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One portion of the Bible that is compelling and helpful in shaping gospel
ministry is the Gospel of Luke, and the so-called table-fellowship of Jesus.
So that is where we shall begin. There is an ancient Middle-Eastern proverb
that says: I saw them eating and I knew who they were. How you ate and
with whom you ate made a big statement; it was a significant social marker.
But Jesus also ate with the religious and the moral, because in each and every
event he was reaching out to them. How they treated him in relationship to
meals was an indicator of their attitude towards him.

Exercise
Have a look through the following passages in Lukes
Gospel: 5:27-39; 7:18-50; 14:16-24; 15:1-2; 19:1-10. Analyse
them and see what you spot about Jesus gospel ministry, and
the way he builds relationships for his kingdom.

The importance of relationships

Relationships are vital to effective evangelism because the gospel message of
restored relationships is communicated best when the medium
relationships matches the message. This is demonstrated by our reconciled
state; we need to show the reconciliation we are in. God is a relational God.
It is our lives together with others Christian and non-Christian that are to
be the hermeneutic of the gospel. That is, to understand the gospel properly,
people need to see the gospel being lived.
On a more basic level, people need to trust us before they will talk about
spiritual matters. They also need to trust us before we can confront them
with the call to repentance. Furthermore, relationships ensure that follow-up
takes place naturally.

Reflection
Read 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12.
What strategies did Paul reject (verses 1-6)?
What were the characteristics of Pauls ministry among
the Thessalonians (verses 7-12)?
Paul shared the gospel message and his life with the Thessalonians (verse
8). Can you think of examples of Christians who have shared their lives,
but not the gospel? Can you think of Christians who have shared the
gospel, but not their lives?
The importance of relationships means that gospel ministry will normally be
long-term. Credibility and integrity can only be demonstrated over a long
period of time. Many unbelievers have little knowledge of Christian truth and
a strong assumption that it is irrelevant. Thus, while major evangelistic events

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have a role to play in church life, the bedrock of gospel ministry is this: longterm, low-key, and intentional relationships.
It happens in ordinary, day-to-day, often unseen work. Most gospel ministry
involves ordinary people doing ordinary things, but with gospel intentionality. Whether it
is helping out a friend, a day at the office or going to the cinema, there must
be a commitment to building relationships, modelling the Christian faith and
talking about the gospel as a natural part of conversation. We need Christian
communities who saturate ordinary life with the gospel. We want God-talk
to be normal. This is done through talking about what we are reading in the
Bible, praying together whenever we share needs, delighting together in the
gospel, sharing our spiritual struggles both with Christians and
unbelievers.
This model also ensures that people make mission and church central to life,
as they ought to be, rather than seeing them as fringe activities. Often we
operate with work, leisure, family, mission and church as separate activities
that compete for our time. But when sharing the gospel and building up other
Christians take place in the context of ordinary life, then leisure, work and
family can overlap with mission and church activities. Imagine you go to the
cinema with some Christian and non-Christian friends, and afterwards end up
talking about its themes over a drink. Would that be an evening spent in
evangelism, in building up people in the church, or in leisure? The answer
ought to be, all three!
This model requires gospel intentionality. We need to be intentional about
the gospel, doing the ordinary things of life with a commitment to living and
proclaiming the gospel. The gospel is a message; it is a word. God does his
work in the world through his word. Mission only takes place as we share that
word with people. Otherwise, we simply form good relationships, but they
never go anywhere. We may even hesitate about sharing the gospel for fear of
jeopardising those relationships. We fear that if we talk about Jesus, people
will not want to be our friends and that the relationship will be broken. That
will in fact happen; it is a reasonable fear. So we need to have the priority of
the gospel clear in our minds, and thus be intentional. That does not mean
ramming the gospel down peoples throats at the first opportunity. However,
it does mean having a clear aim of getting to the point where we can read the
Bible with people.
Effective evangelism usually involves three elements, which will provide the
framework for the next three units:1
Building relationships
Sharing the gospel message
Introducing people to the Christian community

Chester, T., and Timmis, S., Total Church (IVP, 2007), 58-60

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Out of the ghetto

One problem with friendship or relational evangelism is that we can end up
only reaching people like us or even just people we like. So in addition to
bringing gospel intentionality to our existing relationships, we need to cross
cultural and social divides. We need to move out of the ghetto.
A lot of evangelism revolves around getting people to come to church or
church events. For some this is appropriate, but most people are no more
likely to enter a church than you or I are to go into a betting shop. Many
people no longer even go to church for rites of passage. Church is where we
feel safe and comfortable. Church is where non-Christians feel embarrassed
and awkward. We offer people the gospel, but on our terms and on our turf.
Even friendship evangelism, where the emphasis is on sharing the gospel in
the context of friendship rather than the context of a church event, can keep
us in the ghetto. We end up reaching people who are like us our friends.
Almost by definition friendship evangelism leaves the socially marginalised
untouched. And yet these were precisely the people Jesus went out of his way
to include. But it is not just among the socially marginalised that we do not
always feel safe. For some, stepping out of the ghetto may mean engaging in
a gospel way with academia, politics, business or the media.
In Luke 14, Jesus is invited to a party where he observes people jostling for
places of honour. He says our parties should not be like that. Nor should we
invite only those who will return the invitation. Instead, we should invite the
poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind (verse 13). This is because God
the Master of the great eternal party has thrown open his banquet to the
poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame (verse 21). Jesus urges us out of
the ghetto in imitation of our gracious Father. He himself left the splendour
and security of heaven to live and die among us. And, just as the
Father sent him, so he now sends us (John 20:21).

Reflection
How do you think your non-Christian friends would feel
about going to church?
Are there communities that your church is not reaching
with the gospel because your focus is on friendship evangelism or because
you are fearful of leaving your comfort zone?
Are there Christians in your church who are engaging in a gospel way in
academia, politics, business or the media? How could you support them?

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Exercise

Talk with others in your Christian community about how

you can develop relationships in a way that is long-term, lowkey, and with gospel intentionality. Consider, for example:
doing ordinary things in community (cinema, football, pub, shopping, and
so on) that is, if you are going, invite someone else to join you
buying from local shops
frequenting a local coffee shop or pub
playing for a local sports team
always tipping generously in local restaurants
being the kind of neighbour everyone wants as a neighbour
volunteering at a local charity shop along with some others from church
opening your home to, and sharing your food with others
being willing to receive hospitality as well
going to work the same way at the same time every day

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Unit 4.
Talking about God
This unit aims to deal with how we bring up the topic of God in conversation
and how we embrace the subject in our culture. We will do a brief cultural
overview in order to address our cultural difficulties in talking about God,
and will then go on to consider the biblical solutions to our problems.

Amway salespeople
Here is a conversation I found online
Acquaintance: Hi Scott! How are you?
Me: Me? Im great! Yourself?
Acquaintance: Oh, good.
[Pause.]
Acquaintance: Hey Scott. Do you use the computer much?
Me: Uh A little, I guess.
Acquaintance: Hmm Are you in on the internet?
Me: Oh, I suppose you can say that.
Acquaintance: Well, do you ever buy things on the internet?
Me: Yeah, Ive been known to do that from time to time.
Acquaintance: Have you ever heard of Amway on the internet?
Me: No, no Whos scamming you?
Acquaintance: Oh, no, no I just buy what I want from these guys, and then at the
end of the month they cut me a cheque. What are you doing Friday night?
Me: I beg your pardon? [Keep in mind this is a guy Im talking to.]
Acquaintance: Well I thought I could come over and show you what this is all about.
[Identity blown over. It is an Amway salesman in disguise, also known as
Acquaintance.]
Me: What is this, Amway on the internet?
Acquaintance: Yeah I guess you could call it that. Although I guess it is a lot more
than that.
Me: Bye!

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Amway is a distributive selling network that is huge in America and Australia.

As a salesperson, you get people on board to sell things. The more people
you get on board to sell things, the more your income increases. I have been
duped this way before. Someone came into my house and we sat down and
chatted. Halfway through, I realised, This isnt about me; this is about you!
This is about what you want! It gathers momentum, and you realise that the
persons motive is about them, although they spin it as if it is about you.
When it comes to talking about God, the real risk is that we come across like
the above Amway salesperson. We end up sounding a bit clunky and forced.
People are living in a culture where they are already very suspicious of being
sold something: they are forever being approached by salesmen in the street,
and being enticed to buy into all sorts of things. If we ever do talk to people
about Jesus, we often come away thinking, That sounded a little bit clunky.
This is especially likely in a secular work environment. When you are in paid
ministry, in a church job, it is sometimes easier because people expect you to
be a certain way. But out in the real world, people are generally much more
suspicious.
In the comedy series The Fast Show, there are some classic sketches which
illustrate the point that non-Christians are aware of evangelistic workers like
Amway salespeople. One of them involves people in a party, with the music
turned up really loud. One comes over to the other and he says, Its a bit
loud! What? He repeats, Its a bit loud! Yeah makes your ears
bleed! Yeah makes your ears bleed! There is a pause, and then the first
person clicks: Thatll be like the blood that Jesus shed on the cross for our
sins! And you can see the other person realising just what is going on.
This is the sort of clunky thing that happens when we do not think about
how we are bringing up the subject of Christianity. We do similar things to
the sketch above, and people on the receiving end do walk away.
On the few occasions when a real opportunity comes up, we summon up the
courage and we figure out what to say but then it often ends up being a
real let-down. People often do not know what to do with the topic. The
awkwardness can happen in any relationship, even with those we know very
well.
We know that talking about God and sharing the good news of Jesus is
integral to us as Christians. We have a missionary God, and he calls us to be a
missionary people. But so often we experience guilt for not going out there
and gossiping the gospel, or we go out there and become not fools, but idiots
for Christ.

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Reflection

When have you experienced the evangelism clunk?

How did you feel afterwards?
How did the person you were talking to respond?
Why do you think it happened?

The state of our culture

A post-Christian culture
We need to recognise that we live in a culture which has lost the language of
Christianity. I realised this one day as I was coming out of a bread shop on a
Sunday. I had a little loaf tucked under my arm ready for our Sunday soup. It
was a quirky bread shop: a convenience store that tries to advertise itself as
selling the bread my granddad used to make. There was a poster on the
side saying, Bakers Delight is open on Sundays. (Whatever happened to the
day of rest?) I remember walking on and wondering, Yes, what did happen
to the day of rest? I remember it from when I was a child; it was built into
our psyche that Sunday was a day you set aside.
It was a statement that showed just how much life has changed: our culture
has shifted. There is no going back to those old days: things have moved on.
Prayer in school has gradually slipped away from our culture. The last vestiges
of Christendom are fading away. This means that we find ourselves with a
great deal of Christian language in our vocabulary, but without the ability to
communicate the message effectively to people. We live in a post-Christian
culture, and so increasingly people simply do not understand what we are
talking about.

Loss of common narrative

In the UK, it used to be that the God that people would not worship was the
Christian God: if they were not going to believe in God, it was the Christian
one they would be rejecting. But that is no longer the case. The word god is
simply depleted of meaning: people pour meaning into it. God today is
whatever you conceive him, her or it to be. If people did not go to church 6080 years ago, they would at least admit to being sinners in continuing that
way of life. They understood the terminology on which Christianity is based.
Our starting ground for conversations with people is therefore much further
back than it was 60 years ago. There is a man who walks around Sheffield
with a sign that reads, The end is nigh repent. 60 years ago, people
would have understood what he meant. But now things are different. We do
not wish to lambast what he does, and we pray that the Lord will use him for
his glory, but the problem is this: people no longer know what this end is,

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let alone what it means to repent. The whole terminology of Christianity

needs to be re-explained to people.
That being the case, we must ask ourselves whether our Christian culture has
caught up with this reality, or whether in fact we are giving the answers to
questions that no one is asking. We may have evangelistic tools like Two Ways
To Live, but we do not seem to know how to make them link with where
people are today.

Reflection
What evidence do you see around you that we are living
in a post-Christian culture? In what ways have you
experienced a shift in culture over your lifetime?
What challenges and opportunities does this present us with as messengers
of the gospel?

A privatised spirituality
The other issue today is that spirituality has become a very private thing.
Even when Christians are geared up to have gospel conversations, they find
that those with whom they are talking shut down conversations very quickly.
We live in a world where people have a sacred-spiritual divide in their minds.
The more the secular world has taken hold of our culture, the more science
has pushed spirituality out of the market. While spirituality is making a comeback, it is still a very private thing. Each persons spirituality is up to each
person, so the story goes, and so you must be careful what you say. Christianity
used to be central in the market place, to have a right to be heard; it no longer
does. We cannot assume that we have a voice any more.
There is also a break between morality and spirituality. The new spiritualities
of today have less to do with moral living than with power and will. For
example, The Guardian has a regular feature on ethical living, which is entirely
devoted to ecology. Ethical moral living, in our culture, has nothing to do
with what we do with our bodies unless it affects the environment. Our
very understanding of ethics is being modified.

Disconnected relationships
In 2004 there were 7 million people living alone in Britain nearly four times as
many as in 1961. By 2021, 37% of all households in Britain are expected to be made
up of people who live alone.2

You can live alone very easily in the West. The reason we are not having
conversations with people all the time is because we are becoming more and
more isolated. There is a book by Robert Putman called Bowling Alone.3 More
2
3

Turner, A., Living Alone in The Sunday Times, 2nd September 2007
Putnam, R., Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

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people in the States are going bowling alone than ever before. They do not
join leagues, but instead arrive with six or seven other strangers to play a
competition together. They do not talk to them because big TV screens
provide entertainment between frames: there is no need to engage with
others. It is an indictment of our culture. We are forever finding new ways to
be privatised. There was a case in London of a womans body that was not
discovered in her apartment until over two years after her death.4 It can only
be assumed that she lived such an isolated life that her death went unnoticed.
Work and home are disconnected, often seen as completely different spheres.
Geographically, people work a long way from home. Dispositionally, many
people like to maintain a watertight barrier between work activities and home
activities. For Christians, therefore, it can be very difficult to connect people
from work with people from home.

The state of our Christian culture

Subculture versus counter-culture
A tendency for Christians can be to move from being counter-cultural to
creating a Christian subculture, disconnected from the culture we live in and
yet subtly duped by it. This is what has happened in the West. Poor Bible
teaching has reduced the Bible to a list of principles by which to live: we are
not engaging the culture by telling people the story of the Bible and helping
people to see how they fit into it. Mirroring our culture, we have reduced our
relationship with God to a pietistic, privatised spirituality that has nothing to
say to engage those around us. Just like the world we live in, relationships
within churches are often disconnected, making Christianity into a one-onone direct-line experience between the individual and God. Churches often
resemble the self-interested clubs of the world around them, which people
join in order to service their personal, individualistic needs. As communities
of Gods people, we need desperately to rediscover what it means to engage
the culture in which we live, to know its stories and to speak its language,
while living counter-cultural lives and telling a counter-cultural story that
point to something better: the gracious, in-breaking rule of King Jesus.

What the Bible says

The encouragement from Scripture is that none of this has taken God by
surprise. In fact Scripture deals explicitly with the issue of living as a people
among a people, and what that means for our life and witness to God.

Womans body in bedsit for years,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4906992.stm
4

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A people among a people

In Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Moses says this to the people of Israel:
See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the LORD my God commanded me, so
that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it.
Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the
nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, Surely this great nation is a
wise and understanding people. What other nation is so great as to have their gods
near them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And
what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body
of laws I am setting before you today?

Israel were to be a people living among a people. As they lived countercultural lives visible to those around them, so the nations would see the truth
about the great God who had given them such good laws and who lived
among them. They would be seen to be a wise and understanding people.
How striking, then, that the apostle Peter, writing to churches spread
throughout the Roman Empire, takes up the Old Testament language of
living as Gods people among the nations and applies it to the church. 1 Peter
2:9-12 says,
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging
to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into
his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of
God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear
friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful
desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that,
though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify
God on the day he visits us.

The Bible calls us not so much to be witnessing but to be witnesses to

something. Our lives are to witness to what God has done. Your life as a
community is to witness to the culture around you what it means to be the
people of God. But it will only do that if people actually see and experience
this community life in action. We are to be a people among a people, living
visible, counter-cultural lives before a watching world.

An exiled people
In Ezekiel chapters 1 and 10, the Israelites learn through the prophet
Ezekiels visions that the glory of the LORD has left the temple in Jerusalem.
They are a people in exile. And yet God has not been defeated, and his
people have not been abandoned: his glory now rests with his people in
Babylon. This is now the place where they are to live and to thrive as Gods
people. Thus in Jeremiah 29:7, the people of God in exile in Babylon are told
to seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the LORD
on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. Even though the

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people are in exile, God is there with them: that is where they are to live and
prosper and do good as the people of God.
Again in 1 Peter, the great apostle takes imagery of the Old Testament people
of God in exile and transfers it to the church. At the beginning of his letter,
Peter describes the Christians he is writing to as those who are elect exiles of
the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (1 Peter
1:1). The church is now Gods chosen people scattered throughout the world,
just like the Old Testament people of God were in exile. In the passage in
chapter 2 quoted above, he says that they are to live such good lives among
the pagans [literally, the nations] that, though they accuse you of doing
wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits
us. (verse 12) As they live as Gods people in exile among the nations, the
good life they live as a community is to be a witness to the reality of God to
those around them.
The response, however, will be mixed. Peter says that there will be two
reactions to this kind of community life lived among the nations:
Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? But even if you
should suffer for righteousness sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor
be troubled, but in your hearts honour Christ the Lord as holy, always being
prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that
is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that,
when you are slandered, those who revile your good behaviour in Christ may be put
to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be Gods will, than
for doing evil. (1 Peter 3:13-16)

The first kind of response will be to disparage you for being a Christian: to
make you suffer for righteousness sake and to slander you. We will end up
suffering just like our King suffered. The other kind of response, however
the response for which we must pray will be for people to see the hope
that you have. They will see this through your community life of love and
good deeds, even under persecution, and they will ask questions about the
source of that hope. Your communal life will provoke questions among those
around you.

An observed people
Daniel was one of the exiles living in Babylon. In Daniel 6:1-5, we are told
that:
It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 satraps, to be throughout the whole
kingdom; and over them three presidents, of whom Daniel was one, to whom these
satraps should give account, so that the king might suffer no loss. Then this Daniel
became distinguished above all the other presidents and satraps, because an
excellent spirit was in him. And the king planned to set him over the whole
kingdom. Then the presidents and the satraps sought to find a ground for complaint
against Daniel with regard to the kingdom, but they could find no ground for
complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in
him. Then these men said, We shall not find any ground for complaint against this
Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God.

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The people of God living in the land had failed to be faithful. As a result,
their land was overrun and they were sent into exile. Far from being a people
who provoked questions, they became indistinguishable from the nations
around them. Indeed, as the nations observed Israel, she became a laughing
stock and an object of scorn to their enemies. Daniels life in exile was
different: it was everything that the life of the people of Israel should have
been. His faithfulness and the spirit in him distinguished him from all those
around him, so that those who observed him could find no fault in him. His
very life mirrored the God he served. Some were provoked to honour him,
and later to honour his God. Others were provoked to despise him.
Peter says that we, as Gods New Testament people, are also to be an
observed people. We are to live our lives as Gods people among the
pagans lives which they will see. The question is whether our lives will
simply be indistinguishable from those around us (like those of Gods people
living in the land), or whether (like Daniels) ours will be the kind of lives that
provoke people either to ask questions about the hope that is in us, or to
despise us because of what our lives reveal.

Reflection
When has the life of your church or small group
provoked questions in those around you?
When has it led to hostility from those around you?
If you cannot think of any examples of this happening, why do you think
that is?

How to put God centre stage

Recognise worldviews
Everyone has a worldview, but most people do not recognise that they do.
The system in which they are living simply confirms their worldview and so it
is a given. People need questioning as to why they believe what they believe.
But we must also be humble enough to admit that we also have a worldview.
This is a great place to start with people. You can find out how they see the
world and why they view it in the way that they do. But you also have a
genuine opportunity to help them explore your worldview and why you believe
it. Thus begins a conversation about the Bibles great narrative of history
from creation to new creation, and how it engages with other peoples
narratives about their lives.

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Water-cooler Christianity
A water-cooler TV programme is a show that people talk about around the
water-cooler at work, for example Friends, 24, Top Gear, or The West Wing.
However trivial the shows may be, these kinds of TV programmes are
excellent ways of engaging with people on issues of life, death, relationships,
values and so on. We need to use TV programmes like these to connect with
people. We need to be reading, watching and critiquing our culture so that we
can engage with people. We need to get under the skin of the books and films
that people are watching. Every story ever told is about characters, problems
and ways of redemption. We live in a world that loves narratives, and so we
need to listen to the stories people are telling and engage with the stories they
are listening to, so that we can show how Gods great story of redemption
intersects with and reshapes the stories of our culture. We need to introduce
people into our network of Christian relationships so that we can model and
show how this alternative story shapes and recreates an alternative
community.5

Reflection
Have you ever had good conversations about the gospel
with friends off the back of a TV programme? What
happened?
What TV programmes do people around you watch?
What points of contact with the gospel might there be in those
programmes? What issues about life and relationships do they throw up?
What is the problem with the world, according to those programmes?
What is the solution?

For help with this, see the Foundation Year Porterbrook module Culture.

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Loving Jesus
We will look in the next unit at ways of presenting the gospel. A word of
warning as we do this, however. The principal reason we do not talk about
Jesus as we should is not a lack of evangelistic tools or a lack of knowledge.
As we saw in Unit 2, the reason we do not talk about Jesus enough is
ultimately because we do not love him enough: our hearts are distracted and
enticed by other things, and cold to our Saviour. A heart that is captivated by
Jesus will talk freely about him, like a fountain overflowing. After all, we talk
about the ones we love and those that are dear to our heart. If we want to be
effective in evangelism, then our hearts need to be full of Jesus. Why not pray
the following as the apostle Paul does for yourself and for those around you?
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together
with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of
Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledgethat you may be filled to
the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably
more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to
him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever
and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:17-21)

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Unit 5.
Presenting the
gospel
A clash of worldviews
As we saw in the last unit, it is important to be aware of peoples worldviews
when we wish to engage with them. When Jehovahs Witnesses or Mormons
come knocking at your door, there is often a clash of worldviews. There is
immediate hostility and resistance. As Christians, we need to learn that people
do not want you to come into their territory in order to push your beliefs on
them. When it comes to talking about God and sharing your story, rather
than forcing your beliefs on to the other person, there must be another way
to do it. We need to bring the truth of the gospel to bear on peoples lives
without generating this level of aggression and confrontation.

Exercise
What things about a person show what their worldview is?
For example, think about their attitude to their job, or to
having children. Talk with another Christian and come up
with as long a list as you can.
A person can tell you about all manner of beliefs that make up their
worldview. But you can really tell what someones worldview is by looking at
their life and seeing where they invest their time, energy and money. By
finding out their eschatology that is, where they place their hope and
what their end goals are we will be able to identify what their worldview is.
People will make decisions based on what they think their future holds. Our
job as messengers of the gospel is to captivate people with a different future.
The issue of the future brings the conversation onto a personal level. As we
saw in the previous unit, 1 Peter 3:13-16 shows a group of people with a
hope in the gospel:

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Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should
suffer for what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear; do not be
frightened. But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give
an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those
who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of
their slander.

The Christian community provokes questions by their hope: a hope that

motivates and empowers them to keep on rejoicing and loving, even when
suffering unjustly at the hands of those around them. The hope of the
Christian community stands out as starkly different from those around them,
and Peter says that people will start to question that difference. In our
conversations with people, we want to get to a point where we are talking
about our different eschatology: the future hope that motivates and
empowers us for a phenomenal life of hope and joy in the present.

Reflection

Can you think of times when a Christians future hope

has affected the way they live in the present?
What effect did it have on you?
What effect did it have on those around them?

Sharing your story

Telling the story of what God has done for us is a great way of introducing
people to Jesus. (A personal story of what God has done for us is often called
a testimony, but in the Bible the testimony of the disciples is their witness to
the facts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and how he was the
fulfilment of the prophesies of God.) In this unit, we will focus on telling a
conversion story, that is, how you first came to Christ. But God has
continued to show you grace throughout your life. So you should also be
ready to tell other stories which will intersect with peoples real lives: how
God has helped you through a bereavement or illness; a concrete example of
how Jesus wisdom has helped you love your children better; why you chose
to teach English to migrants rather than continue as a DJ, and so on.

Be personal rather than preachy

You are opening your heart to reveal things that are personal and real to you
how God has dealt with you. You will teach someone the content of the
gospel as you do this, but not in a preachy way. In other words, do not say
something like: I came to realise that everyone in the world, including you, is
lost and dangling over the pit of hell. Instead you might say: I came to
realise that, although I thought I was quite a decent person, the problem with
me as far as God was concerned ran deep within me, and I couldnt deal with
it myself. Do not make generalisations from your specific circumstances.

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Make Christ central

Jesus has done the work to change us. He is the one who should be the
centre of our story. We are telling the story of how we changed our thinking,
but ultimately we must show how our thinking about Jesus changed. As the
clich goes, the aim is to tell Christs story through your story.

Be honest
Most stories fail to have an impact people because they are too glib
(Everything changed and life was suddenly wonderful), too triumphal
(Since that day I have not looked back) or exaggerated (I was lost in the
depths of sin and depravity, and my dark heart sought out opportunities for
evil, and then when I was seven). Tell it just as it happened, with all the
doubts, questions and slowness of your response. Even though you may be a
convinced Christian, it is important to include your current struggles. It is also
worth talking about inadequate versions of Christianity (people and churches)
that you have come across. This will probably resonate better with your
hearer and shows you are being honest.

Include the relevant individuals and churches

Most peoples stories include a significant relationship or meeting with a
group of people or an individual. Tell people what was different about them
and why they attracted you. Concrete details make your story easier to
understand and more interesting.

Avoid jargon
Avoid using religious language or jargon. And avoid being gratuitously hip
and trendy. Talk as you normally would.

A format for sharing your story

It is helpful to prepare your story so that you are always ready to tell it to
people. Here are some possible models:

Before and after

What was my life like before I received Christ?
Identify one or two well-chosen incidents that give a genuine insight into
your values, the direction of your life and the lifestyle you lived. Be careful
not to dwell on, or glory in, past sins.
When did I first become aware that God was working in my life?
What did he do? How did God work in you until the time you became a
Christian?

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How did you come to understand the gospel?

Explain how you came to understand and believe the facts of the gospel
that Christ died for your sins on the cross and has risen to give you
new life.
How did you receive Christ?
Explain how you realised your need and how God opened your heart to
him.
What changed after I received Christ?
How have your attitudes, desires and values changed? How has knowing
Christ changed your actions, habits and relationships?
What are my goals and ambitions now?
How is God leading you now? What is he revealing to you? What have
your learnt as you have followed him? Again, these things are better told
in one or two pithy stories rather than a catalogue of theological concepts.

Always believed
The present
What does my faith in Jesus mean for me today? Think about how
knowing Jesus affects your attitudes, values, desires and relationships. Talk
about how God has led you and taught you over the years.
The past
How did you grow into your relationship with God? Who were the key
influences? What were the crucial moments in which you were faced with
a choice to continue or to go another way? You could frame it according
to some key life-stages, for example, When I was 6, I thought Jesus
When I was 26, Jesus Now I am 66, Jesus
The facts
Why are the gospel events of Jesus life, death and resurrection so
important to me?

Exercise
Practise telling your story to a Christian friend. Get them to
give you feedback on how well you communicated it, how
central Jesus was, your use of jargon, (dis)honesty, glibness
and so on.

Openings
You need to think about several openings to your story that will enable you
to tell it in response to different cues. For example, if someone in a
conversation talks about their bad experience of church, then you could start
your story in response. Yes, I know what you mean. When I was a teenager,
I went along to church and I understood nothing they were talking about. It
seemed totally irrelevant so I gave up and rather stupidly thought that
because the church was so hopeless that meant that God was hopeless too.
Then I went to

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Of course, if someone opens the door just a crack to a gospel conversation,

many of us will feel the temptation to barge on through, saying everything all
at once in a dull monologue. This will ensure that people do not foolishly
open that door again in the future! Peter encourages us to tell stories with
gentleness and respect, so we must be sensitive to our listeners. We will
often be in a situation where we can start a story, but wait for an invitation to
tell the remainder. In the example above, we might leave the story at: and
rather stupidly thought that because the church was so hopeless that meant
that God was hopeless too. The use of the word stupidly here suggests that
our feelings about God and church have since changed, so if the listener
wants to know more, they can ask.

Closings
Often the end of your story can be just an embarrassed silence with no
natural continuation of the conversation. You need to cue up some kind of
response. Here are a few suggestions, but depending on your context, these
may well fail the clunk test! Talk with others in your Christian community
and work out what you would say.

Do you think Im mad?

Do you think thats weird?
What do you think about Jesus?
Have you ever been to church?
Do you ever think much about God?
Would you be interested in joining a group to think about who Jesus is?

A gospel outline
Part of being prepared to answer people is being confident that you can
explain the gospel. So it is important to be familiar with a gospel outline.
Again, this is not something that you will often have a chance to present in
one great block, but such gospel outlines help you know the basic turning
points of the gospel story and the key underlying doctrines. The more
familiar you are with these, the more naturally you can relate the relevant
parts to peoples everyday life. As we have already noted, sharing the gospel
message normally takes place in the context of relationships. We add to
peoples knowledge and break down their prejudices gradually. Often you will
only talk about one component of a gospel outline in one conversation.
There are numerous outlines you can use, including this one from The World
We All Want.6

Chester, T., and Timmis, S., The World We All Want (Authentic Media, 2005)

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1. God promises the world we all want

The New Creation: God promises the world we all want. We know this
promise is real because there was a point in history when we glimpsed the
world we all want. (Revelation 21-22 and Mark 5)

2. Jesus shows us Gods new world

Jesus: Jesus had the power to make Gods new world. But Jesus said it was
necessary for him to die so we could enjoy it. (Mark 4-5 and Mark 8)

3. We have spoiled Gods good world

Creation and Fall: We have spoiled the good world that God made, but God
promises someone who will put it right. (Genesis 1-3)

4. God promises a new world

Abraham: God promises a people who know God and a land of plenty and
security. (Genesis 12 and 15 and Romans 4)

5. We cannot create Gods new world

Israel: God set his people free and gave them a land of plenty and security,
but they could not create Gods new world. God promises that he himself
will put it right. (Nehemiah 9 and Ezekiel 36)

6. We can enjoy Gods new world because of Jesus

The Cross: The death of Jesus deals with the problem of rebellion and
judgment. The resurrection of Jesus is the promise and beginning of Gods
new world. (Mark 15-16)

7. Christians are Gods people waiting for Gods new world

The Church: Christians are Gods new people waiting for Gods new world.
We become Gods people through faith and repentance. (Acts 1-2)

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Exercise

Which part of the Bible story (as outlined above) might you
talk about with an unbelieving friend who:
is struggling with suffering?
thinks that they are good enough already?
thinks that education and politics are the answer to the worlds problems?
thinks that, if God exists, he would not have just left us to it like he has?
is frustrated at their own inability to effect change in their life?

Believer or not a believer?

Sometimes we are unsure whether someone we are talking to is a Christian or
not. But this uncertainty need not affect your approach. People are converted
through the gospel and they grow as Christians through the gospel. So our
concern is always to apply the gospel commands of faith and repentance.

Using the Bible

As advocated by The World We All Want, the Bible story itself is the best way
to present the gospel message, rather than a methodology such as Four
Spiritual Laws. Even with Two Ways to Live there can be problems. Two
problems to be aware of in many gospel outlines are:
1. They are often completely individualised there is nothing about the
community of Gods people, the church;
2. They produce a change of behaviour rather than a change of heart. Tim
Kellers view is that there are three ways to live the religious way, the
irreligious way, and the gospel. People hear many presentations and their
response is, Oh, you mean that you want me to be good? and plenty of
people are being good in lots of different ways.
The Bible story is dangerous, demanding and engaging, exposing the heart
and calling the individual to have their life swept up in Gods gracious
purposes for history. It is not a set of principles to live by. So often it is
treated as such: a virtual codebook that, if you get it right, will lead to all sorts
of blessings.
In Hebrews 11:39-40, the writer sets before his readers a list of great men and
women of faith. They are examples of those whose hope was in Gods
promised future. He says, these were all commended for their faith, yet none
of them received what had been promised. God had planned something
better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
The implications of these verses are enormous. As Christians, our lives are
being swept up and incorporated into Gods great narrative of Scripture: the
cataclysmic story of God saving a people for himself through his Son,
bringing all things together under his Christ, and all for his glory. As we
present the gospel to people, that is what we are praying will happen: not that

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they will invite Jesus into their hearts or into their own privatised story, but
that the lives and stories of those we are speaking to will be brought into
Gods cosmic story of salvation, as they become part of that great people that
God is saving from every nation, tribe and language.

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Unit 6.
Introducing to
Christian community
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging
to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into
his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of
God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful
desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that,
though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify
God on the day he visits us. (1 Peter 2:9-12)

Corporate living
In 1 Peter 2:11-12, we are called to live such good lives among the pagans
that they may result in praise of God. The context for living such lives is
found in verses 9-10. Here, Peter commands us to live such good corporate
lives. Verses 9-10 explicitly use the language of the Old Testament to refer to
the people of God. They were called to be distinctive among the surrounding
nations. As Gods people today, we are not to adopt food laws, ban football
or prohibit polyester. We are to do something altogether more radical.

Living good lives

Read Ephesians 4:17-5:21. Old Testament language is again used. The call to
be imitators of God is found in 4:24 and 5:1. Note that it is a corporate
task!
You have been called to be Gods glorious inheritance and his holy people
(1:18).
You have been called together so that together you can be a home for
God (2:20).

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 You are called together so that together you can display Gods wisdom
and glory (3:10).
Thus we receive the same call as Gods old covenant people.
Let us look at how this plays out. Paul lays out how we used to live, and then
gives new exhortations using the pattern of not that, but this. He describes a
community that is a discommunity of darkness (5:8), a community that lives
for itself and he says, Not that! He then describes Gods new
community, united, without division, loving God and loving each other, and
he says, But this! For example:
Not falsehood, but truth because we are members of one another (4:25).
Not anger that leads to sin but reconciliation because you must not give
opportunities for the devil (4:26-27).
Not stealing but honest work so you can share with anyone in need (4:28).
Not using words that destroy but using words to build up because then you
will not grieve the Spirit (4:29-30).
Not negative attitudes towards others but kindness and forgiveness because
God in Christ forgave you (4:31-32).
It is a deliciously attractive new community. Holiness is not merely the
absence of evil, but it is the glorious presence of the good. We have been
rescued, according to Paul, out of a life of selfish destruction in which we just
lived for ourselves. And we have also been rescued into a people where we are
called to love each other selflessly.
Paul then gives various examples of what this new life as a people will look
like. As we live it, we display the gospel that has achieved it.

Speaking
Let us home in, however, on one factor: how we speak. This comes up a
number of times, and is therefore quite significant in Pauls thinking. We can
normally see what is important to someone by what they talk about. I talk
about music quite a lot because that is something that is important to me.
Others will talk about sport, or their job, or their family. What we talk about
reveals what is important to us. That is what we see played out here.
Look at Ephesians 4:25. Paul says that we are to be a people who speak the
truth to each other. That seems fairly obvious: God is the God of truth; the
gospel is the word of truth; Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. So, of
course his people should be people marked by speaking the truth. But this is
not always the way we live. We lie because it is convenient. This might be
something seemingly trivial, for example, when someone asks us how we are
and we say, Fine, thanks!, though actually we feel awful and we want to rip
their heads off. We are lying because we want them to view us in a certain
way. We want to be seen as someone who is always happy, who is never
bothered by the waves of life. We want to be seen as cool and collected, and
not as sinful as we actually are.

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When someone asks us our honest opinion of something and we give

something that is not our honest opinion, why do we do that? We say we do
not want to hurt them, which may be true. But the reason I do not want to
hurt them is because I do not want them to think badly of me.
To summarise, the problem is that my identity is tied up with what other
people think of me. I want them to think a certain thing, but the truth might
make them think something else, so I am liberal with the truth.
Such lies are actually the product of the bigger lie that my life is all about me.
This is the opposite of the gospel. The truth is that life is not all about me as
an isolated individual, because I am a person in relationship with God and his
people. That is my identity; that is what the gospel teaches. This truth leads
me to speak the truth. In a community that speaks the truth to each other,
people are able to see the gospel being acted out in front of them.
Look at 4:29. We say things that are unwholesome and we come out with
snide remarks. We also say things that we know will put people down. When
I do that, my actions are the opposite of the gospel my identity, at that
moment, is all about me. We put people down so that we can be built up.
Perhaps we feel like people are not appreciating us as they should. My boss
didnt recognise my hard work on that project. But Barry, he just plays
around all day on the internet and he got all the credit for my achievement!
So we put him down because it is only where he should be.
But Paul says, Not that! Gods community is not a community of people
who put others down to make themselves look better. They are not a
community of people who are always trying to be top dog. That is not what
you have been saved for. Gods community is a radical community. They do
not say things to build themselves up, but they say things to build other
people up.
In fact, that is all they ever say. And they do this because of the gospel. Their
identity is not tied up in what others think of them. Their identity is wrapped
up in being the people of God: in loving him and each other. The gospel is
about God reconciling people to himself as a people under King Jesus. That
is what Paul has been saying again and again in Ephesians.

The gospel in action

If that is the gospel, and we want people not only to hear the gospel, but see
it in action, then what we must do is obvious: we introduce our friends and
neighbours and colleagues to this people that God has reconciled to himself.
Evangelism cannot be done in isolation.
People will never see the reconciling effect of the gospel if they never see us
with our reconciled brothers and sisters. People will never see the forgiveness

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in the gospel unless they see us actually forgiving or being forgiven. They will
never see the other-person-centred result of the gospel if they do not see us
humbly serving our brothers and sisters.
When people come among us they should be able to see a group of sinners,
forgiven, forgiving, building up when others put them down, serving, loving,
caring, working hard for Jesus glory. They should see and experience people
living truly other-person-centred lives.
That is what people should encounter when they come among Gods people
in everyday life: the gospel enacted. This is the good, corporate life which we
have been called to live as Gods people. By its very nature, such a life
displays the good news that has brought it about.

Enacting it ourselves
If this is the community life to which we want to introduce people so that
they can see the gospel in action, we must end by asking ourselves how good
we are at doing that in our context.

Reflection
Here are some questions to ask to see if this is the kind of
life you and your church are living:
How often do you see other members of your church or

small group?
When did you last have to forgive someone in your church or small
group?
How often do you have people from your church or small group in your
home?
How often do you pop round to other peoples homes from your church
or small group?
When did you last share a meal with people in your church or small
group?
When was a non-Christian last observing or involved in each of the
above?

You may wish to revisit some of the suggestions in Unit 3 for how to
introduce unbelievers into your community in natural ways that show genuine
love.

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Unit 7.
Living to provoke
questions7
1 Peter 3:15 assumes a life on display that provokes questions:
but in your hearts honour Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make
a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you

The Greek word translated defence here is apologia. It is the root from
which we get apologetics. So living to provoke questions is all about
apologetics.

Reflection
When we think of apologetics, what usually comes to
mind?
What is it?
When does it happen?

Tough questions
Apologetics is typically thought to be about tackling intellectual barriers to
faith. That usually requires some sort of well-worked-out argument that
knocks down these barriers.
How many times in a week do people come up to us and say, Ive seen your
7

For a more in-depth treatment, see the Foundation Year Porterbrook module Apologetics.

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life: now tell me about your belief system? This verse assumes that it should
be a regular occurrence, but all too often it is not. We must therefore ask
ourselves why people do not ask us this kind of question more often. Imagine
the following. It is something of a caricature, but nevertheless one that sums
up many Christians experience and mindset when it comes to this verse:
We are individuals trying to live a good life at work, hoping that someone will
notice a difference in us. And then sometimes well get the opportunity to invite a
friend to a talk on apologetics to tackle issues like suffering and religion and
Richard Dawkins!

One example of this happening is with Christian students on sports teams.

They work away furiously on their own, hoping that people will notice that
they only drink Coke, and praying that once in a blue moon they might have
a conversation about atheism. They read this verse as individuals. They feel
the burden as a lone Christian and they press on having the odd conversation
over their three years at university and taking friends along to apologetics
talks.
Churches often do the same. They operate as a kind of Christian stockroom:
they get people converted through a gospel course and then stockpile them in
meetings. A few of the going-for-it ones stop stealing the staples at work,
hope to get noticed, and then get their friends along to the apologetics talks
that the leadership puts on.
Peter here overturns both of the supporting assumptions of that way of
doing things:
1. He overturns the idea of individualism;
2. He overturns an idea of apologetics as something mainly to do with
knocking down intellectual barriers to faith.
These he replaces with something far deeper and more life-encompassing,
which will provoke more and different questions. Once again, the
expectation here is that it is the corporate life of the church that will provoke
questions. Using the language of Exodus 19, Peter describes the church
community as a priesthood displaying God to the world. Our identity is
fundamentally corporate and it is therefore the day-to-day life of the church
that provokes questions. It is the good works of the church community and
their joy-filled, hope-inspired life in the middle of suffering that provokes
both questions and opposition. And the questions that arise are not so much
about intellectual barriers, but about what you put your hope in, about what you
build your identity around, about what drives you.
I want to suggest that living life to provoke questions is fundamentally about
a gospel community living a life of grace that prompts questions about what drives it.
Those questions come because, through exposure to the community of grace,
non-Christians start to see that they are driven by something different. That is
uncomfortable for them. It creates a tension in them: You live for
something different from me, they begin to feel. That is what generates
questions.

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Of course, that tension can produce hostility: I cant live for what you live
for. It will cost me what I really value and treasure. Im my own saviour and I
dont need the Jesus you value. But it can also offer hope and restoration: I
see that what I have lived for produces wreckage in my life and ultimately
offends God. But you live for something that makes your life cohere, that
gives you hope. Your relationships are restored and bring reconciliation; and
your community dies to self daily. I need to change what I value and who I
live for.
In other words, the gospel-centred community exposes the hearts of our
non-Christian friends as we live and speak the gospel and as they come
among us. That means that we do not need big programmes or complex
strategies: we simply need radical communities of grace that live alongside
and incorporate our non-Christian friends.
This kind of community will provoke questions such as:
Why do you serve that person?
Why dont you get jealous?
Why is your marriage different?
Is it possible to love each other without God?
We need to be asking ourselves the following questions:
How do we expose non-Christians to the real life of the community?
What are the points of connection?
How do we notice the question behind the question?
There are two things we need to see:
1. Apologetics is a heart issue. Questions about intellectual barriers do come,
but they are always a symptom of a deeper heart issue. There is always a
question behind the question.
2. The community of grace exposes the heart. It facilitates getting to the
question behind the question.

The heart of apologetics

1. Apologetics is a heart issue
The blockade to faith is a heart issue, not an intellectual one. Much
apologetics implicitly assumes that the root to faith and salvation is a rational
path. So if we can just help people to remove the intellectual barriers along
that path and show that Christianity is logical and hangs together, then people
will come to faith.
But the Bible says that our thinking is driven by what we value, what we
worship, what we desire. So behind every intellectual problem with
Christianity, behind every grand philosophical system that rejects the gospel,

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there is a heart-level commitment to something other than God. The

intellectual system simply serves that heart-level commitment.

Exercise
Read Romans 1:18-32.
What have human beings done?
What are the results?
Paul diagnoses here the heart-level problem behind every human beings
rejection of Christ. We are all worshippers and believers. That is a
fundamental truth about our design. But the problem is that:
1. We exchange the truth about God for a lie, verse 25. Our hearts
functionally believe wrong things about God living as if none of the
truths about him were true.
2. We exchange the worship of the Creator for worship of the creature, verse
25. Instead of enjoying God and thanking him for all that he gives us, our
hearts value and worship his gifts instead of him.
That double exchange in our hearts is the root of all sin. But it is also the
driving force behind our thinking. Look at verses 21-23. Exchanging the
glory of God revealed in creation for the glory of images of created things
looked so attractive to us that we were duped into doing it. And the result is
futile thinking.
In other words, behind every self-proclaimed wise and complex intellectual
objection to Christ is a prior commitment to self-worship. And the fruit of
such a commitment is an inability to make sense of the world. Our
intellectual objections come from philosophical systems that are dark and
futile and cannot actually comprehend the world we live in. Why do we stick
with them? Simply because they serve to facilitate our prior commitment: our
fundamental love and worship of self. As a result, we live in a state of total
meltdown, as the rest of the chapter describes. Life unravels: intellectually,
emotionally, socially and sexually.
Let us consider the implications of this for our evangelism and apologetics. If
we spend all our time trying to show how inconsistent the intellectual system
is, we are missing the core commitment of that system: a heart-level love of
self instead of God. In fact, if we do that we are wasting our time. Because, as
1 Corinthians 1:19-21 says, God has cut off the possibility of coming to know
him simply through clear thinking and logical reasoning. He has frustrated
the wisdom of the wise and has revealed himself through the foolishness of
the cross and through the weakness of the community purchased by it:
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it
pleased God through the folly of what we preach [that is, the cross] to save those
who believe. (1 Corinthians 1:21)

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Apologetics cannot be about attempting to bring people to Christ by

breaking through their intellectual barriers. The best that intellectual
apologetics can do is to show that intellectual objections are actually excuses
for avoiding the foolishness of the cross. In the end, the reason we avoid the
cross is because we think we are strong on our own: our hearts say, I can
save myself through my status, through my good deeds, through my wisdom.
I can find satisfaction in creation, in relationships, in achievement, in my own
image not in the foolish cross.
What stands between my heart and knowing God is my hearts commitment
to self-worship and to finding life and meaning through everything the cross
opposes: power and self-righteousness. That is why the community that the
cross produces is weak and humble. The foolish cross is seen in the foolish,
unimpressive community that it saves.
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly
standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose
what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even
things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being
might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:26-29)

This cross-community is a community of people who realise that they came

to God with nothing to boast about, and are saved entirely by grace. They
depend utterly on the merits of Christ and not on the merits of status, power,
wisdom and so on. The cross is the truth that faces up to the heart-level
commitments of sinful humanity. And the community that is built around the
cross brings those heart commitments to the surface.

2. The community of grace exposes the heart

The community of grace lives in the same world as its non-Christian friends.
But through the cross we live in that same world according to a different
programme, a different blue-print, a different heart-level desire-structure. We
have been saved from the dark exchange outlined above. And we are now
people with a new capacity for loving God through Christ. If the heart is the
hardware, then the new software that operates on it is grace. And grace spills
out into an entirely different way of living in the same world.
As we operate through grace, we no longer need to be self-righteous. The
cross shows us that our righteousness is in Christ. So we do not need to be
defensive. Through grace we have been forgiven, so we can forgive. When
we are wronged, the cross is our answer. Furthermore, we can now respond
properly to Gods revelation in creation. We can see Gods goodness in the
world and respond with thanksgiving. We no longer need to use the creation
for self-worship. Grace and the love of God rule our lives. We can relate to
others without a self-driven agenda.
When idols ruled my heart, every one of my relationships was only a help
towards worshipping my idol or a hindrance to it. People either served my

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self-worship, or they threatened my reputation and stood in the way of my

worship of myself. But now that grace is the programme operating in my
heart through Christ, relationships start to be restored, motives shift, agendas
disappear. I am free to serve others at great cost; I am free to love and forgive
and use the creation to Gods glory. The church operating through grace is a
picture of what humanity should be. It is not perfection, but it is humanity on
the mend.
The software programme that operates in our non-Christian friends hearts is
idolatry. When these two pieces of software interact, two ways of living in the
same world are shown up; two ways of responding to the same God and his
revelation in creation and the cross are exposed. This reveals the core
programme of peoples hearts. We live in the same world; we do the same
things; but we live by different programmes. We celebrate, we eat, we serve,
we do community, and we work hard. All those things appear in nonChristian culture. But they are driven by very different agendas. The
community of grace does these things motivated by a desire for Gods glory;
the community without grace does these things in order to avoid God and to
worship self.
The fact that we do many of the same things but for different reasons gives
us points-of-contact with our non-Christian friends. Our distinctiveness as a
community of grace comes from our different heart structures or different
operating systems at work in the same world.

Exercise
Consider two insights into Jesus community. Jesus eats two
meals with people who do not consider themselves part of
his community of grace in Luke 5:27-32; 7:36-50.
What happens?
What are the signs of grace?
What is revealed about the hearts of those who raise questions?
In these two accounts in Lukes Gospel, the two programmes are exposed.
Questions are asked that reveal peoples central heart commitment: selfrighteousness or grace. Jesus spends time with unsavoury people because he
is the gracious Saviour. His community is a community of acceptance and
grace. As unbelievers interact with this community, self-righteousness and a
concern for reputation are revealed in them. When people are exposed to a
community of grace filled with people who are rejected by the rest of society,
one of two things happens: either their self-righteousness is brought to the
fore, or they too are won by grace and accept Jesus welcome.

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An example
Kate is a migrant worker who lives in our local area. After several months of
spending time with our church, she revealed that she had a dislike for one of
the church members. He had made some comments at one get-together that
had offended her. As we talked about it, she began to ask why we hung out
with such a person. She said that you could tell someones character from the
friends they have, so she could not see how he fitted in with us. There was no
doubt that this Christian brother had sinned against Kate. Later he apologised
and was glad to. But on that night, during that conversation, we took her to
the meals of Jesus and said that our community is made up of sinners. It is
made up of people who know that they make mistakes and that they need a
saviour. Not all of them are pleasant to hang around with. By the end of the
conversation, the spotlight began to fall on Kates own self-righteousness. We
were a community of grace who took sin seriously (the brother would be
challenged), but she wanted a community whose togetherness was based on
who was socially acceptable.

Essentials for lives that provoke questions

1. Grace sets the agenda for our communities
In both word and deed, grace sets the agenda for our communities:
Word. Churches need to equip Christians to understand the human heart
and how grace operates in the heart. In this way, they will be able hear the
question behind the question as they engage with unbelievers. By doing
this, they will start to see into their friends central heart commitments and
to be able to speak the gospel of grace to them.
Deed. The grace of the cross strips away boasting in ourselves; it strips
away the need for reputation and for righteousness in the eyes of others.
All the promises of the gospel release us to die to self and to go to hard
places with unsavoury people. They equip us not simply to put on
programmes for those who are socially marginalised, but to live in real
relationships with them: to include them in family outings and in the life
of the community.

2. Exposure to this community comes not through special

programmes, but through everyday life
It happens through eating together, through hanging out together, through
trips to the park and through watching TV together. These are the kinds of
activity and points-of-contact on which we should be focusing.

3. Exposure happens as we invite people to serve alongside us

For example, we might call our non-Christian friends to serve alongside us as
we seek to do good to the community around us. Instead of doing a hit-and-

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run litter-pick, we might expose them to a grace-based community by inviting

them to join with us in some of the things we are doing: decorating a
neighbours house, making food for people, and so on. We are not
advocating calling people to works before faith. Rather, we are suggesting
inviting people into a context where their heart-programme and the heartprogramme of the community of grace are both exposed. This might
generate a tension that would provoke questions: Why do you serve that
person? your friend might say. I couldnt! I wouldnt!

A final example
I have a friend who has run out of arguments to put to his atheist friend.
They just end up going around in circles together. His friend is moralistic. I
wonder what new conversations would start if he were asked to join in
cleaning up the students residential halls with his Christian friend and his
friends after a Saturday night out. He would be exposed to costly service.
Such exposure would reveal to him the grace-gripped hearts of the Christians
around him, and his own heart gripped by selfishness. He would see that
Jesus brings heart transformation and joyful, costly service: a heart-change
that his atheism is simply powerless to bring about.

Reflection
Think about the situation of your church.
What stories do you have of unbelievers hearts being
exposed by the community of grace you belong to?
What things might you do together in order to expose those around you
to a community of grace?
How could you invite unbelievers to serve alongside you?
How can you equip each other to be ready to give an answer for the
hope that is in you?

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Unit 8.
Answering questions
In this unit we will seek to achieve the following objectives:
To understand that non-Christians questions are informed by their story.
To understand the role of the community, and to see relationships as the
context in which we might understand the story that underpins peoples
questions.
To answer questions by applying peoples personal story to the story of
Jesus, the gospel.

Reflection

Think about someone you know well who does not follow
Jesus. How is their identity shaped by their personal history?
How does their personal history inform their worldview?
Exposure to gospel-centred community provokes questions about what we
value, trust and hope in. As our friends come into contact with the day-to-day
life of this grace-based community, it begins to expose what rules their hearts
and introduces them to what rules our hearts. Our non-Christian friends
encounter a group of people who live in the same world as them, but who
operate by a different programme, namely grace. They hear about grace as
Christians talk about the gospel, and they see grace as Christians are freed
from self-worship to serve each other and to make friends with the kinds of
people with whom Jesus made friends.

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The real target in giving an answer or a defence of the gospel has to be the
heart. The real impediment to faith is not an intellectual problem but a heart
problem. There is always a question behind the question. Intellectual
arguments ultimately will not get you anywhere. The only message that
addresses the heart and reveals God is the message of the cross, the story of
Jesus.
The strategy for answering peoples questions is therefore as follows:
1. To understand the question behind the question. To put it another way,
we need to understand why that question is significant for that person.
What personal story underpins that question? This is where exposure to
the community and real relationships are so vital, because they are the
context in which we see and hear each others stories and start to see what
might be behind the questions people are asking.
2. To bring our friends questions to the story of Jesus. We need to show our
non-Christian friends how the story of Jesus makes sense of their lives.
We want to be able to take their story and their identity, and bring them to
the gospel. If we spend time trying to understand the significance of our
friends questions for their lives, we will avoid bleating out abstract, glib
answers that do not address their hearts. If we bring our friends stories,
identities and questions to the story of Jesus, we will avoid endless
intellectual debates and bring the gospel to peoples hearts. In short, in
answering our friends questions, we want to introduce their hearts to the
Saviour Jesus Christ.

1. Understanding the question behind the

question
Questions always have a context. They never simply appear out of nowhere.
They are always informed by a persons situation, beliefs, heart commitments
and interpretation of the world.

Exercise
Take a typical apologetics question, for example, How can
we know God?
How would you begin to answer that question? Write as
much as you can in one minute.
Of course, we could go off and learn every possible answer to that question.
There is some value in doing that. Then, when someone asks, How can we
know God? you could off-load everything you know. But here is the
problem: questions are never asked out of the blue. They do not just pop into
peoples heads. They have a context. They come from a persons situation.
That means that the way we answer a question has to be modified according
to why someone is asking it.

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For instance, the question, How can we know God? can be asked in any
number of ways. And each one will require a different answer.

Exercise
How might you answer the following possibilities differently?
God cant ask anything of me! How can we know God
anyway?
There is something missing in my life: how can we know God?
How can we know God, according to your religion?
This is not rocket science. We always encounter peoples questions in the
context of everyday life. To understand someones questions we have to
understand where they are coming from; we have to understand what is
informing that question. What is going on in their life; what are their dreams,
hopes, fears and failures? Why does someone want to know about suffering
in the world? Have they suffered? Do they know someone who is suffering?
What is the story behind that question?
I want to suggest that if we wish to get to the heart issue behind a question,
we need to be in the business of understanding the persons story. In this
way, we will be able to that make sense of that persons question. How do we
understand someones story and how does that help us understand their
question? Everyone has a story. Our story is our way of understanding
ourselves, of explaining our behaviour, of interpreting the world and what
has happened to us. It contains our hopes and our dreams. Fundamentally, a
persons story is always about them and God.

Examples
Here are some stories people tell of themselves:
I didnt have much as a kid, so I work hard and thats me. My mum and
dad havent given me anything; Ive earned what I have. Im self-sufficient.
I was hurt by someone once and that has shaped how I view relationships.
Im a recovering or vulnerable person.
My dad is harsh and judgmental. Because I grew up with him, I now feel
like there is always something I havent done. Im a fearful person. Im a
people-pleaser.
I struggle with a particular sin and have never conquered it. Im a guilty
person.
Im a struggling mum. Im just a feeding machine and a nappy changer: I
dont have any other identity.
Im frightened that my life might fly out of control. I dont trust others to
do a job. Im a control freak.

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At the centre of everyones story, you find at least four elements:

Something we build our identity on

Something that we worship
Something that will save us
A functional belief about God (either implicit or explicit)

Reflection

Think about two of your friends.

Can you identify what their central story is?
What do they build their identity on?
What do they worship?
What do they think will save them?
What does their story reveal they think about God?

Stories always fall into one of two categories. Our stories are either informed
by:
1. Gods word, or
2. A central idol.

Genesis 3:4-7
In Genesis 1 and 2, God gives Adam and Eve their story. They are made in
Gods image: that is their identity. Their lives as image-bearers are to be lived
out according to Gods word. They have an in-built need for Gods word.
God is the provider and is living in his rest. Their relationship with this God
defines them and their view of God and the world. That is their story.
In Genesis 3:1, however, Satan starts to modify the story: Did God really
say, You must not eat from any tree in the garden? This version of the
story implies that God is not their provider and that he has withheld food
from them. Eve then offers up her own slightly tweaked version of the story
in verses 2-3: We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did
say, You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden,
and you must not touch it, or you will die. She adds to Gods command.
Then, however, Satan offers a completely new story, which contains a new
identity, a functional belief about God, a route to salvation and a central idol:
You will not surely die, the serpent said to the woman. For God knows that
when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing
good and evil.

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Exercise
What is the identity on offer?
What is the idol (the god-replacement)?
What is the saviour?
What is the belief about God?
Adam and Eve buy the story. It promises so much. Eve looks at the tree,
which now stands as the route to the promise and it starts to look good!
Its the route to being like God. It appeals physically: it is good for food, it
will satisfy. It appeals visually: it is a delight to the eyes. It appeals
intellectually: it will bring wisdom.
Eve has bought into the story. She is now in a state of awe, admiration and
worship of the tree. This tree will give her entry to a new identity. It will save
her from an oppressive God. It promises Eve self-promotion to God-like
status. There is a seamless link between the objects we worship and selfworship. That is how idolatry works. Something other than God promises us
ultimate self-promotion: If you have me, you can be someone!
The Fall is about human beings buying into an alternative story about who
we are. If we do not buy into Gods story about who we are, then we will buy
into a different story: a story in which our world is re-centred on a new and
false identity. We rewrite our stories around who we want to be. We rewrite
the character of God and what is worth living for. We rewrite what
constitutes a saviour. When we are trying to understand and answer our nonChristian friends questions, we will do a much better job if we can
understand their story. We can be greatly helped to answer questions if we
know four things about our friend:
What do they build their identity on?
What is their idol?
What do they look to as their functional saviour? In other words what in
their life do they feel they need in order to be who they want to be?
What do they functionally believe about God?
If you got to know Adam and Eve and got to know the four elements of
their story, they would be something like this:
Idol. They are self-worshippers.
Identity. They want to be God.
Saviour. By eating the fruit from the tree they seek to gain wisdom outside
of God.
Belief. God does not want the best for them.
The kind of question that Adam and Eve might ask would go something like
this: Hasnt human wisdom and ingenuity proved that we dont need a God?

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Havent we flourished since we threw off religion? These are the questions
that fit their story.
I want to suggest that all the questions about Christianity that non-Christians
ask are informed by their story. Their questions about suffering, about the
existence of God, about science, and so on, are all informed by the elements
of their story.

Exercise
In the following story what might be the identity, idol,
saviour, belief?
I have Crohns disease. It ruins my life. Im bitter. Im angry. All I have to
live for is my PhD. Why would God do that to me? Why does God allow
suffering?
We must now turn, however, to the question of how we discover peoples
stories. The answer is two-fold: through relationships, and through their
exposure to a gospel community. In the context of these two things, we will
be able to help people to tell their story.

Relationships
We learn peoples stories in the context of everyday relationships, as we rub
up against people in the warp and woof of life. We get to see and hear what
people lean on as their saviours, what they invest in for their identity, what
they ultimately worship and what they think of God in the everyday things of
life: over a cup of tea; at the end of a busy, stressful day; as we share a meal
together; or as we take the kids to the park. By building real relationships with
people, we get to see and hear what their stories are. This means that when
they ask questions of us, we already understand where that question might be
coming from.

Reflection
When has building relationships led you to hear peoples
stories? What situations have you found particularly helpful
in uncovering peoples narratives?

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Community
It is not only relationships that help us uncover stories. Exposure to a gospel
community begins to expose the hearts of non-Christians, because the church
lives by a different story: the story of Jesus.

Our identity is in Christ

We worship Jesus
Our Saviour is Jesus
Our belief is in the glorious truth about God, revealed in Jesus

That story of grace reprogrammes our lives from the inside out. Our nonChristian friends not only hear it, but they also see its impact in community
and start to discover their own story in the light of the story of Jesus.

Helping people to tell their story

If we are to help people to tell their story, we need to be good listeners. We
need to care about people and to ask helpful questions that give people space
to tell their stories. We need to be patient, and not simply blurt out answers.
We want to help people to see for themselves what they trust, what they
value and so on.
A rule of thumb I try to operate by is: Do not just roll out an answer to
people: ask yourself, Why is this person asking this question? Then try to
ask them a question in return that will help you to understand why that
question is significant to them. For instance, you might ask, Is that a
question that you struggle with? Or, Would it make a difference if we could
know God? Or, What has prompted that question? If it is a question
about suffering, then maybe ask, Has there been suffering in your life?
I believe fervently in trying to listen to non-Christians, and in giving them the
space to unpack why their question is significant to them. I want to do this
before I say anything. This is because I want to make sure that I have
properly understood the story behind their question. Here are some of the
benefits:
You take people seriously and avoid being glib.
You earn the right to speak if you have listened carefully and given
someone space to unpack and explore their questions.
You are participating in a genuine conversation, not a lecture, so you must
act in humility.
This often allows you more time to think.
You may discover some important extra piece of information, which helps
you to answer the question in a way that speaks to their real concerns, to
interpret some aspect of their story in light of the gospel story. Avoid the
cluster bomb approach, where you say everything you know about the

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topic, but miss the real question in the process. Asking questions helps
you to address the real issue.

Bring their story to the story of Jesus

The story of Jesus redefines us. We turn from idols to God, from false
identities to identity in Christ, from believing lies about God to the truth of
the gospel. We live out a different story. Ultimately, therefore, answering
questions is about the call to turn from a false story to the gospel story. And
the best way to do that is to listen, to ask questions, to help them to articulate
their stories in order to understand their stories. But then we must begin to
offer them a new story, or more precisely, to show how Jesus story
reinterprets their story. We do this by taking them to the Bible. Take them to
the words of Jesus, to Bible stories, which speak into the elements of their
story. What we want to do is to cut through endless intellectual debate and to
help people interact with Jesus himself. That way they are not fencing with
your opinion: they have to deal with things Jesus claimed, taught and did.
Gospel overviews are helpful in some situations. But there is no substitute for
simply opening the Bible and taking people to a pertinent story.

Exercise
1. Think about the two friends whose stories you thought
about before. What stories from the Bible might you take
them to?
2. Think again about the story from the previous exercise and the idol,
identity, saviour and belief it reveals:
I have Crohns disease. It ruins my life. Im bitter. Im angry. All I have to
live for is my PhD. Why would God do that to me? Why does God allow
suffering?
What stories from the Bible might you turn to with this person? How does
the Bible story reinterpret their story?

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Unit 9.
Casual
conversations about
Jesus
A wedding story
Some years ago, my wife and I attended the wedding of one of her university
friends. My wife and I had both only become Christian a year or so before.
We were all sitting around a big, round table. My wife was on the other side
of the table, and I was sitting next to one of her good friends, who had
always seemed very hostile towards the gospel.
But we got into a very good conversation. My wifes friend started asking lots
of questions, and for nearly an hour we chatted away, going through all sorts
of questions, from metaphysics questions to things about the Christian faith
she did not know. We were able to talk through the whole gospel. It was not
like she was saying, Tell me more; I want to be converted! But she was
showing a genuine interest. And I was delighted.
After the meal, we all went for a dance. My wife came up to me, asking Aw!
Were you having a gospel conversation with Jane? And I said, Yeah! Did
you hear? She replied, No, no. I couldnt hear what you were saying. But I
could tell you were talking about the gospel because you were using a
different voice.

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I was gutted, absolutely gutted. I thought to myself, Isnt that awful, that
when I talk about Jesus with people, I have a different voice I have to
become someone else! I have to hide behind this different voice in order to
talk about the gospel.

Exercise
When have you struggled to talk about Jesus naturally? What
particular situations make it harder for you? Why do we find
it so hard? Share your thoughts with some other Christians.

Natural Jesus talk

One of the reasons we find it hard to talk about Jesus genuinely and casually
is that we think we need to be someone else. We read books on evangelism
or hear about opportunities other people have had, and we try to be like
them. Often, we read about the ways other people do evangelism which
would just be weird for us to implement.
The problem with following others techniques for evangelism is that we are
all very different. We need to be able to share Jesus in a way that is true to
ourselves. God has made us who we are: he has not made us all Billy Graham
or Rebecca Manley Pippert. We need to pray for him to change us in
character, but God has made us all different in terms of our personality.
Learning techniques and tricks only increases the pressure. We feel we need
to act. The strain increases within us, we slip into evangelism mode and
people can tell that we are not being ourselves. The tension mounts, and the
sweat rings under our arms grow.

Knowing Jesus
That is why in this unit we are going to focus not on tricks and techniques,
but simply on getting to know Jesus himself. My conviction and experience is
that it is only as we get to know Jesus better with our heads and love him
more with our hearts that we will be able to communicate him more naturally
to other people. As Jesus himself said in Luke 6:45, it is out of the overflow
of our hearts that the mouth speaks. In other words, if our heads and our
hearts are full of Jesus, then our conversations about him will flow out
naturally. We can kiss the sweat-rings goodbye.

Loving Jesus with our hearts

First of all, we need to be convinced in our own hearts that Jesus really is the
one our friends need to meet. We need to delight in him, so that it seems
obvious to us that he is the one we need to be introducing.

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In John 4, Jesus meets, loves and accepts a Samaritan woman. He tells her
everything about herself. He sees where her sin is and exposes her heart. And
then he promises her living water that will well up to eternal life. He shows
her that he is the Messiah and she comes to believe. John tells us what
happens next:
Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the
people, Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the
Christ? They came out of the town and made their way toward him Many of the
Samaritans believed in him because of the womans testimony, He told me
everything I ever did. So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay
with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became
believers. (John 4:28-30, 39-41)

This was a woman who had experienced Jesus love, his straightness, his
compassion, his words which pierced her soul to the core. She had
experienced his healing and compassion towards her, and his amazing
promises of life and blessing. Her own thirst had been quenched. And so it
was utterly natural for her to introduce her friends to him: Ive met this guy
who has told me everything that Ive ever done, who is the delight of my
heart, who is the promised King. So Im going to tell you about him of
course I am! She did not need to work herself up to it. There were no sweatrings in evidence here. Her words about Jesus simply flowed out of her,
because she was convinced that he was the one her friends needed to hear
about, because she loved him, and had experienced his love.
In the same way, we too need to be convinced that Jesus really is the one who
is worthy of being worshipped, that he really is the one who our friends need
to hear about. When I know the following in my heart, it ceases to be weird
for me to tell people about Jesus:
that he is lovelier than anyone else.
that he is the most complete human who has ever existed.
that he is the most loving and compassionate man in history.
that he is the embodiment of Gods grace.
that he knows our friends better than they do.
that his words and his parables pierce people to the heart.
that he knows our sufferings and struggles and speaks into them.
For example, if we are convinced that Jesus is the most loving and
compassionate man in history, we will want to point people to him in the
accounts of his life. He reached out in love to people: to people who were
broken and suffering. So if we know that in our hearts and we find our
friends and neighbours struggling and suffering, it will be entirely natural for
us to introduce them to Jesus and to his words, just as the Samaritan woman
did.
If we are convinced that Jesus knows our friends better than they do, that his
words and parables pierce people to the heart, then we will talk naturally
about him with people. Because in whatever conversation we find ourselves,

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we will be convinced that what Jesus has to say on it is the most insightful,
gracious and true thing.
If we knew someone who had found the cure for cancer, and there were
someone suffering cancer in front of us, we would not stay silent. We would
introduce them to that person straightaway. Similarly, if we are convinced
that we know the person who has the definitive words to say on stress in
fact the cure for stress we will not be able to stop ourselves from talking
about him when the topic comes up. If we know the person who knows
rejection better than anyone else, and he knows how to deal with it, we will
be telling our rejected friends about him.
Ultimately, if we know that Jesus is King, if we know that he is the only one
worth worshipping that he is good to worship then we will naturally
want to talk to people about him. When we see people trapped in idolatry,
suffering from its harmful effects, building their identities on idols, then we
will want to point them to Jesus who said, Come to me all who are weary
and heavy-laden and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28).
I was recently chatting with a Muslim shop-owner I know about the state of
families in the West and the rebelliousness of kids. And so, because I had
been writing this unit, it was totally natural for me just to start chatting about
Jesus story of the prodigal son. We talked about how he had left his family
behind, wishing his father dead and just wanting what he could get out of
him. Jesus story really spoke to him, and out of it developed a long
conversation about how we have treated God like that, and about his
outrageous grace in welcoming us back for free.
If we are convinced that Jesus is the one our friends need to hear about, if we
know in our hearts that he has the words of eternal life that his teaching
cuts to the heart, that he knows how people tick, that he is the gracious,
compassionate King then our conversation about Jesus will flow naturally
out of us, like water from a spring.

Knowing Jesus in our heads

Second, however, we need to know Jesus in our heads. We need to ask
ourselves the question: How well do we know Jesus? We may know a lot of
theology, but how well do we know Jesus for ourselves? How well do we
know his life, his thoughts, what he said, the things he did, the events of his
life?

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Exercise

Given five seconds to point people to Jesus in the situations

below, what part of Jesus story would you talk about?
You have been playing football with some kids in the
park. One of the kids is complaining on the way home that the teams
were not fair, and is sulking.
You have a friend who is complaining about another friend who never
spends time with their kids.
In a local residents association, you are chatting with somebody
afterwards, and they are complaining about the state of the local area and
the negligence of the council.

As we said in Unit 1, our job is to teach people the whole counsel of God.
Nothing that we are about to say discredits that fact. But how good are we at
actually introducing people to Jesus, the central figure in the biblical
narrative? My experience is that Christians are very good at talking about the
new creation, or about sin, or even about the cross. But when it comes to
talking about the One who is at the very centre of all of Gods purposes for
the world, we are often less able. And yet we are to commend to people not a
system of salvation, but a person: the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one we
love and worship, he is our King. If we fail, in everyday conversation, to
point people to him, perhaps this is not only because our hearts are not full
of him, but also because we just do not know his life very well.
If we are going to talk about Jesus naturally with people, we do not only need
our hearts to be full of him: we need our heads to know about him too. He
needs to be our specialist topic, the one we know everything about. We need
to be Jesus-geeks. We need to know the events of his life, to know his words
backwards and inside-out. We need know what he thinks about things, how
he responds to things, the ways he deals with people. We need to know the
stories he told, so that we can tell them too. My experience is this: the more
my heart and my head is full of Jesus, the more my conversation flows
naturally into chatting about him with others.

Reflection

Why not run a series in your church or small group (or just
do it with a few friends from church) looking at some of the
stories in the Gospels about Jesus engaging with people, and
the stories told by Jesus? You could read the stories through a couple of
times together, and talk about the central impact of the story. Talk about
what you discover about Jesus there. Talk about how lovely or striking or
challenging the portrait is that you find of Jesus. And then consider together
in what situations you might talk about the story with an unbelieving friend.
Pray that, as you work together on this in your church talking to one
another about Jesus words and actions and how lovely he is your talk
about Jesus will overflow all the more in your evangelism.

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Conclusion
Trainspotters do not have a problem talking about trains. Football fans do
not have a problem talking about football. If we have our heads and our
hearts filled with Jesus, then we will begin to find ourselves talking very
naturally about him with our unbelieving friends. In fact, we will be unable to
stop ourselves.

Exercise

1. What day-to-day topics do you often get onto with your

non-Christian friends?
2. What events, actions, stories or teachings from the
Gospels might you chat about in those conversations?
For example, when:
talking about injustice and how the country is corrupt
talking about how others have ostracised the person you are talking to
talking about stress and its effects
talking about relationships and commitment
3. In what situations or conversations can you imagine it might be natural to
talk about some of the events, stories and teachings from Jesus life in
Mark 2 and Luke 13?
4. What can you do in your church to help each other to keep your heads
and hearts full of Jesus?

Last updated 8th October 2010

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