Bringing the Gospel Home
November 8, 2011 by Steve Pogue
Filed under Marriage & Family, Sharing Your Faith
Randy Newman,
Faculty Commons staff at George Mason University
Witnessing, for most of us Christians, is difficult. Witnessing to family members is even tougher. So what do we say around the Thanksgiving table?
A few years ago I authored several books on evangelism. Many of you live in the publish or perish world; among Christian writers it’s publicize or perish. I was invited often to speak on the topic and I began to notice something.
At every seminar I presented on how to evangelize, people would say to me, “This is helpful, but what do I say to my father, he’s an atheist?” The examples were seemingly endless both in their variety and anguish – “My mother’s an alcoholic.” “My sister’s now a Buddhist.” “My cousin runs an abortion clinic.”
I started interviewing people who had tried to share the gospel with a relative – horror stories outweighed success stories. But I observed some patterns. Witnessing to family took time, required deeper expressions of love, and often came through a side door.
This research led to yet another book, Bringing the Gospel Home (Crossway). On the remote chance that you haven’t read it, allow me to unpack three common elements.
Building, Not Dumping
First, most of our evangelism training models assume we’ll see people only once. But family members keep showing up…for decades. We need a gradual approach rather than the dump truck method. Perhaps asking more questions, engaging in partial conversations, and building a case rather than just stating it will prove more effective.
Second, I found that family is the place where love is always assumed but seldom expressed. At least, it’s not expressed in ways that people really feel loved. There’s a tacit assumption that we love our family…simply because we’re related. We might even say “I love you” quite a bit.
But many adult children don’t really experience a sense of love from their parents. We don’t express love all that well to a brother or sister either. We assume more than we should and the result is a painful alienation that everyone feels but no one acknowledges. So the challenge for a Christian who wants to reach out to an unsaved loved one is to find ways to make sure they feel like a loved one.
What Difference Does It Make?
Finally, many of our relatives have heard our “Jesus-sales-pitch” more times than they care to. What they need to hear now is how our faith makes a difference in our marriage or our parenting or our view of money or death or trials or a thousand other topics that faith is supposed to transform. We need to show and tell them how the gospel informs and transforms all of life…and it better be deeper than just “Jesus makes me happy.”
Witnessing to family and others close to us is difficult. But it can also be effective for the very reasons it’s difficult – the ones who know us best are likely to see the gospel in a deeper way…if we just can point it out to them and, better still, incarnate it in what we say and do.
(c) 2011 Randy Newman
(c) istockphoto
The Gift
September 28, 2011 by Steve Pogue
Filed under Caring About Colleagues, Marriage & Family, Recent MMMs
Karl D. Stephan,
Electrical Engineering,
Texas State
[October 2, 2011]–
For too long, I have viewed my life as two distinct worlds, increasingly separated.
In the university, I am generally in control in the classroom, and if things don’t go well in my research, at least I can decide what to try next.
Back at home, things have been completely different since my father-in-law came to live with us. He lacks short term memory and can no longer live independently. Television seems to makes sense despite his impairment, so his set is on all the time. That noise became a constant annoyance to me.
Tangible Help
Then my wife’s 10-year-old nephew came to live with us this summer. His mother faces a life-threatening illness and underwent a bone-marrow transplant. Our caregiving was a tangible way we could help her, far better than any gift. As fall approached, my wife, her father and her nephew moved two states away so the child could be in school near his home.
This has left me in complete control of my home life: there isn’t any to speak of. To maximize my work life, I could stay in the lab until midnight five days a week. But I have not chosen to do that.
Instead, the day my wife left I drove from San Marcos to at an out-of-the-way ranch near the Texas coast. There is a retreat center on the ranch operated by a monastic order. At the grand old stucco mansion the only sounds are the wind, birds, insects, and the dinner bell. A rule of silence is observed – no one talks.
During my retreat I was rewarded with sighting wild turkeys roosting near my cabin, a deer and her fawn dozing in the afternoon heat a dozen steps from my door, and hawks soaring high above the mesquite trees as the red ball of the sun settled below the horizon.
All of Me
Since my return from the retreat, I have avoided television, the radio, and most websites except for job-related emails and such. I have spent the weekdays working, but now I deliberately don’t work at all at home after 5 pm. I consider it a warm-up exercise for when my wife returns. When she’s back, I want all of me to be here, rather than the leftovers from my job.
Isaiah 30:15 (NIV) says:
This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,…”
This separation from my family, though difficult in many ways, has been a strange kind of gift. For my wife to help her sister and father, both of us had to be willing to sacrifice. Such self-sacrifice is not instinctive to me. I have learned that being quiet, turning to God, resting, and trusting is how I found the strength to do it.
September and early October for so many of us is terribly busy, whether with class preps, student advising or the deadlines of research and publishing. God’s peace is always ours for the taking; we only need stop long enough to become aware of His presence.
© 2011 Karl Stephan
photo © Faculty Commons