A.K.A. Lost: What If Sharing Your Faith Meant Just Being Yourself?

What if “evangelism” meant just being yourself?

If the gospel really is good news, why do most Christians avoid evangelism? Why is “witnessing” often a negative experience, for both the sender and receiver? Wouldn’t it be great if you could communicate the good news without having to become a spiritual salesperson?

What if…
·you didn’t have to make a speech in order to “witness”?
·you could use everyday experiences to nudge others closer to Jesus?
·the things you’re already doing counted as evangelism?

Evangelism can be as normal as asking great questions and paying attention to the people Jesus misses most. It involves doing things you already do, but with a little more intentionality. Just by being yourself and becoming unusually interested in others, you can discover that people will ask you about Jesus.

This isn’t another program or pitch. It’s a handbook on how to make real connections with the people formerly known as lost.

Think of it as evangelism for the rest of us.

BOLDNESS IS
OVERRATED
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Witnessing. Few words strike more fear into the heart of the average Christian.

What is witnessing, exactly, and how do you do it? What happens if you forget what to say or get tongue-tied or don’t know the answer if the person asks you a question?

I know the feeling. I became a Christian at age twenty-one during the Jesus movement. Witnessing? Wasn’t that something you did in court?

“Don’t worry,” my long-haired Jesus-people mentors told me.

“We’ll show you what it’s all about.”

They showed me the ropes of evangelizing as we witnessed our way through clouds of cannabis smoke at an outdoor rock concert. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d been part of the “target audience.” Now I was the targeter. I was told that this is what it meant to be a Christian. If you weren’t finagling a way to steer the conversation toward Jesus, you were “selling out.” If you weren’t feeling uncomfortable at least once a day due to your boldness for the cause of Christ, it was doubtful that you were really saved.

When I was a new Christian protected by my closed hippie-Christian culture, it all seemed so simple. Go out, witness to as many people as you can, come back to the bible study, and tell everyone about your exploits. When you do this, you’re rewarded with kudos and assurances that anyone who rejected you rejected God. You can shake that experience off like so much dirt on your shoes. Their blood is no longer on your hands. On to the next target!

In time I became a professional Christian and started acting like one. Pastors learn not to do radical things, such as walk up to people on the street and ask them for a few minutes to explain Jesus, God, sin, and hell. Instead, we find culturally appropriate ways to “present” the gospel. We do it at special church programs, or we sneak it into the talks we give at weddings and funerals. We don’t want to come off like the door-to-door guys. We become more sophisticated in the way we go about sharing our faith. And sadly, many of us stop altogether.

Sure, in public we keep it up. We still remind the “troops” to go out and share the gospel with their neighbors. We read the latest demographics so that we know where our target markets are located. We even hold seminars and commit a few weeks every year to teach on evangelism. But we pretty much know that nothing is going to come of it.

I speak not as an outsider but as one who has been there and done that. I was a busy pastor, preaching, leading meetings, and coming up with mission statements. Yet I couldn’t make myself stop thinking about evangelism. I couldn’t live with it and I couldn’t live without it. So I buried that voice.

But still, I could hear it call to me. I’ve been intrigued, frustrated, and energized by the issue of evangelism all of my Christian life. I’m not an evangelist. I am more a student of the game we call evangelism.

It may be because it’s one topic that’s guaranteed to irritate both Christians and non-Christians. I have been told that one of my spiritual gifts is provocateur, which may help explain the connection.

I’m a late bloomer. I didn’t succeed in my thirties or forties. As I turned fifty I had a slight inkling as to what I wanted to do when I grew up. I took heart in studying the lives of leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Harry Truman, and Mother Teresa, all of whom really got started around age fifty. The sense of mortality has a huge upside: It helps you stop worrying about trying to become something you aren’t and get on with being who you really are–warts and all–because this is as good as it’s going to get.

Someone has said, “We change when the pain of changing is less than the pain of staying the same.” I finally realized that my evangelism fixation wasn’t going to go away. I had buried the memory of it, but it was buried alive, and it was rising from the dead to haunt me.

You’re Not Brave? Great!

Some of us are born salesmen. Most of us aren’t. Some of us are born leaders, taking our place at the front of the charge and ready to accept the casualties. But again, most of us aren’t. So it’s a good thing that connecting with the people Jesus misses most doesn’t require a Type A personality.

In his counterintuitive book Leading Quietly, Harvard professor Joseph Badaracco steers us away from the well-worn leaders-as-heroes path and onto the road less traveled, where ordinary people get things done. Delving into the decision-making experiences of several quiet leaders, Badaracco takes a closer look at their thinking. “The most effective leaders are rarely public heroes,” he writes. “These men and women aren’t high profile champions of causes and don’t want to be.”1

The book of Joshua opens with these startling words: “Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you…” (1:2). Just as Joshua had to learn to lead in ways that differed significantly from Moses’s approach, we have to learn to connect with the people Jesus misses most in our own way. I’m sure Joshua wanted Moses to stick around just as we want those who are more gifted than we are to go ahead and do the work of evangelizing others. But eventually it falls to us to get it done, in our own way.

Even though Moses got all the press, Joshua may have been a better leader. Moses did stuff for others; Joshua did his work through others. Moses led the Israelites across the Red Sea; Joshua followed them across the Jordan River. Moses saw the Promised Land; Joshua lived in it.

People Prefer Prayer

Fortunately for those of us who lack boldness, it’s not all that hard to connect with the people Jesus misses most. If you can pray, you can preach. John from Mount Vernon, Washington, tells about a time he and his wife resorted to prayer: Thirteen years ago my wife and I moved to Portland for a job. We didn’t have a place to move to, so my brother offered to put us up while we looked for a house.

My brother didn’t sound too hopeful [about us finding a place], especially since my job didn’t start for a couple of weeks. We went out anyway and fell in love with the first place we visited. The landlord was inside painting. He asked me about the job and also asked if I had ever done that type of work before (I hadn’t). He was very skeptical, but accepted an application anyway, telling us he had several other applicants, all of which he said were better prospects as tenants.… Taking applications for rentals wasn’t a common practice where I came from, and I was quite intimidated by the whole process.

Anyway, we had a feeling about this, so Jeanette and I prayed that God would bring us to this man’s mind every time he looked at the applications. The next morning we received a call; it was the landlord telling us he had decided to rent to us. He set up a meeting for later that morning. When we arrived, he said we would have to make arrangements for the first month’s rent and deposit. We had the money to meet those requirements! Then he told us that each time he looked at the pile of rental applications, he was drawn toward ours, even though he was inclined against it from a logical point of view.

I told him we had prayed that very thing would happen. My landlord, it turned out, was something of an agnostic, but he laughed and told us that took the responsibility off him, he supposed. Anyway, we visited our landlord and his wife when we were down in Portland last summer....