Encouragement for our personal witness
Here is an article by Glen Scrivener which appeared on the Gospel Coalition website which gives encouragement to every Christian to love their neighbour &, where an opportunity is given, not to be afraid to share the good news of Jesus with them. I found it here The Guy with the Mic :-
The Guy with the Mic Doesn’t Speak for the Room
I love preaching to students, and I get dozens of
opportunities each year on university campuses across the UK. Usually I’m
invited as a guest of the university’s Christian Union, their strategy to reach
fellow students based on four cornerstones: deep friendships, personal
invitations, free lunches, and, when it comes to talk titles, unashamed
“trolling.” I absolutely love Christian Unions, and I heartily
endorse three of these four foundations.
The trolling part involves talk titles that, in the
interests of “engaging the difficult questions” end up delivering the hapless
speaker—occasionally me—before an audience of undergraduates to address the
issue of why God is such a genocidal maniac/homophobic bigot/hell-loving
kill-joy, and so on. As I’m about to address the assembled students, it always
occurs to me that 90 percent of the audience would have shown up just
for the sandwich. Nonetheless, I step up to the plate and speak to the
topic because I’m polite enough to do what the Christian Union tells me and
contrarian enough to enjoy the argument.
GUY WITH THE MIC
During one outreach the Christian Union organised a lunch
around the topic: “Does God Hate Women?” The students had the wisdom to bench
me for this talk and invited a woman who spoke to the subject brilliantly. So
there I was in the audience, doing what every evangelist does in such
circumstances (mentally stealing every one of her illustrations), and after 20
minutes of winsome gospeling, the floor was thrown open to questions.
At this point the president of the Atheists and Secular
Humanists Society stood up, grabbed the microphone, and began an interrogation
that lasted the allotted 15 minutes. The speaker did excellently, answering
with Scriptures, wisdom, grace, and humour. The subjects veered from women, to
slaves, to homosexuality, to hell, to Old Testament war, to transphobia. She
kept smiling, kept answering with grace, but all the while the shoulders of
everyone in the room rose steadily until no one had any neck left. At last a
poor student had to get up, cut off the atheist, and close the meeting,
sheepishly inviting inquirers to a meeting that night.
Simply because they’re loud, we imagine they’re
representative.
As the music played and we began to let our shoulders
descend from around our ears, I turned to my neighbour Mark, a 19-year-old
economics student. “What did you make of that?” I asked. He was quiet for a
bit. Then he said, “Oh I wasn’t listening to that guy. It’s
just . . . my grandfather died last month, and I’ve just been wondering what
it’s all about. What do you reckon?” And we were off.
We spoke for a good hour, rooted to those plastic seats,
still holding our paper plates, and talking all the while of Jesus. We opened
up a copy of John’s Gospel, which the Christian Union was giving away (this is
the fifth cornerstone of university outreach in the UK, and it’s
brilliant: lots of free Gospels!). As we opened up to John 1,
I glanced around the room. Half a dozen similar conversations were happening.
Engaged enquirers were talking to Christian students and listening—really
listening—to gospel truths. Most took copies of John’s Gospel. Many, including
Mark, returned that night. In fact, he heard the gospel and believed.
Ever since my motto has been: The Guy with the Mic Does Not
Speak for the Room.
CLOSED CULTURE, OPEN NEIGHBOUR
As you may have guessed, this anecdote is also a parable.
The guy with the mic is anyone with a platform, culturally speaking. It’s the
talk show host, the media commentator, the columnist, the celebrity, the mood we
pick up on the airwaves. And simply because they’re loud, we imagine they’re
representative. But what does their amplified opinion have to do with your
neighbour? The amplified voice might despise Christianity, but your
neighbour just lost a loved one. They’re wondering what it’s all about.
Maybe they’d even be open to looking at the Bible with you. So why don’t we
turn to them and ask?
You’re not called to love ‘the culture’ as a concept.
You’re called to love your neighbour.
Here are two broad reasons why we don’t: The brash among
us are too busy yelling at the radio, despairing at “the culture,” and
fantasising about how our devastating ripostes would skewer the guy with the
mic. The shy among us are too busy cowering away from our
neighbours, expecting each to be as difficult as the guy with the mic. In both
cases, we give far too much credence to the guy with the mic.
As one small but instructive example, a
recent survey in the UK asked non-Christians whether they considered
Christians “homophobic.” Among non-Christians who say they know a Christian,
only 7 percent said they did. What’s fascinating to me is that whenever I
quote that statistic, Christians instantly shoot back, “I don’t believe it. I
bet it’s different in my town/workplace/demographic.” Maybe. But statisticians
ran the survey, and you’re going with your gut. Is it possible you’re
giving too much weight to the atheist with the mic? Perhaps you’re excusing
yourself from fruitful outreach simply because you’re afraid of a projected
image of what “the culture” believes. But you’re not called to love “the
culture” as a concept. You’re called to love your neighbour. So why not turn to
your neighbour and start the conversation?
NO PLAN B
Whenever I read Jesus’s parable of sowing the seed (i.e.,
preaching the Word) in Matthew 13, I imagine a little dialogue:
Disciples: Lord, what’s our evangelistic
strategy for really hardened people (v. 19)?
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Disciples: Right! Yes! Good one, Lord. But now, get this, what if they’re really shallow? They have no depth, no sticking power (vv. 20–21).
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Disciples: Wow! Okay! Really doubling down on that preaching the Word thing. Great. But, here’s a curveball for you, Jesus. What if they’re choked by worries or by consumerism (v. 22)?
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Disciples: Starting to see a pattern here. And I’m guessing if they’re open to the Word we . . .
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Disciples: Right! Yes! Good one, Lord. But now, get this, what if they’re really shallow? They have no depth, no sticking power (vv. 20–21).
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Disciples: Wow! Okay! Really doubling down on that preaching the Word thing. Great. But, here’s a curveball for you, Jesus. What if they’re choked by worries or by consumerism (v. 22)?
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Disciples: Starting to see a pattern here. And I’m guessing if they’re open to the Word we . . .
Jesus: Preach the Word.
Jesus even speaks of weeds growing up (vv. 24–30)—noxious
teaching in our midst that destroys people—yet still he doesn’t recommend plan
B. There is no plan B. There is only plan A: “Preach the word.”
If this soil won’t hear, we sow on another. And another. And
another. If this hearer is hard, we don’t get out the crowbar. We don’t beat
them into submission. We sow into the next heart, and the next, and the next.
There is good soil. We have good seed. So ignore the guy
with the mic. Turn to your neighbour and speak of Jesus. Preach the Word. The
fields are still white for harvest.
Glen Scrivener is an evangelist and author of
several books, including 3
2 1: The Story of God, the World, and You and Four Kinds of Christmas: Which Are
You?. Glen also directs the charity Speak Life, which released a four-episode
evangelistic mini-film, Meet the
Nativity, in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2017.
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