July 2024
UNAPOLOGETIC
An Exploration of Evangelism Today
“I must talk about God, or I cannot keep Him in my mind.
I must give Him away in order to have Him.”
-Frank Laubach
In his book Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer describes a situation many of us can identify with:
“A few days ago my teenage sone came home distraught. ‘What happened?’ I asked. Deep sigh. He had just been walking downtown with a friend and came across a group of Christians preaching ‘the gospel’ on the street corner. It was textbook: They all had signs on poles – a bizarre mix of ‘Jesus loves you’: and dire warnings about the fires of hell. Naturally, there was a bullhorn, and tracts were passed out. The friend he was walking with isn’t a follower of Jesus, and Jude felt the group’s ‘evangelism’ would do nothing but push his friend away from God, not draw him in.”
“Like Jude, many of us cringe just hearing stories like this. These old methods feel tone-deaf and out of touch at best, if not manipulative and cruel. They rarely result in people discovering life through apprentice-ship to Jesus.”
So what is a serious follower of Jesus to do in light of peoples suspicion and mistrust of those who have a desire to share their faith with others? One common approach is to not say anything at all.” I didn’t want to offend my neighbor, so I will let any actions speak for themselves.” The problem with this approach is that people will have no idea what your motivation for doing something is unless you tell them. People will never know the “gospel” or good news about Jesus unless somebody verbally explains it to them. It simply cannot be received through osmosis.
As John Mark Comer points out so eloquently in his book – “In our generation, the primary problem with evangelism isn’t that we’re doing it with bullhorns and low-grade bigotry; it’s that we’re not doing it at all…As a reaction against an unsophisticated, manipulative, and at times mean-spirited kind of ‘preaching,’ that often left people feeling degraded and demeaned, many of us have lost our sense of witness entirely. But it is core to our faith and essential to our discipleship that we reach out to others with this good news of Jesus.”
But how do we announce the good news in a culture that is increasingly hostile to it?” That is the ten-million-dollar question. Certainly not by keeping silent or letting our actions speak for themselves. At the same time, there must be a way to do it that is more in sync with what Jesus did and proclaimed throughout his earthly ministry.
During the summer months of July and August I will be leading a discussion on the book UNAPOLOGETIC by Francis Spufford as a way to begin addressing the question of how we do evangelism in a pluralistic, postmodern culture. When asked to explain what his book is about, Francis Spufford explains “You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defenses of Christian ideas. This book, however, is a defense of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility of their grown-up dignity.” Hence, the subtitle of the book “Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.” This book is called Unapologetic because it isn’t giving an “apology,” in the more familiar ways books are written to defend Christianity, but is rather humming with ideas and arguments to make the good news accessible to postmodern seekers.
The schedule for July and August is as follows:
Sunday, July 7th - An Introduction to “Unapologetic”
(read pages 1-23)
Sunday, July 14th
Fellowship Event following church - BBQ PICNIC
NO BOOK STUDY TODAY
Sunday, July 21st - The Crack in Everything
(read pages 24-53)
Sunday, July 28th - Big Daddy
(read pages 54-85)
Sunday, August 4th - Hello, Cruel World
(read pages 86-106)
Sunday, August 11th - Yeshua
(read pages 107-146)
Sunday, August 18th - Et Cetera
(read pages 147-164)
Sunday, August 25th - International League of Guilty
(read pages 165-202)
Sunday, September 1st - Consequences
(read pages 203-220)
The discussion group will meet after fellowship time on Sundays in the sanctuary. The cost for the book is $15.00. I look forward to our discussion of this important topic.
Your Fellow Pilgrim On the Journey,
Pastor Greg
