‘It’s not hard to view the world as something beautiful but somehow broken.
‘Institutions have let us down. More effort is spent on blaming others then finding solutions. And today it seems a person’s word has lost its worth. Yet if the fading of these values disturbs us, then surely they must still matter? We still admire honesty, fairness and the courage it takes to speak out against what’s wrong.’ Not the start of an evangelistic sermon (though it might well be!), but the text of a full page colour advertisement in the Telegraph Magazine for September 1 2012, for the home and business insurance firm Hiscox, whose strapline is ‘as good as our word’.
Paul and his missionary circle knew how important it was to be tuned into the heart-beat of the culture they were evangelising. ‘He reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the market place day by day with those who happened to be there’ (Acts 17.17). That was what opened the door for his famous gospel presentation to the Areopagus in Athens. He knew how people were thinking. Today, our culture is shaped not by the soap-box orators. For us, our cultural shaping is the product of the omnipresent media, written, verbal and visual. The Hiscox advertisement obviously thinks it is sufficiently in touch with the current cultural mood to invest a great deal of money in a tangential approach to increasing its client base, by tapping into not just a nostalgia for how things used to be, but a growing desire for honesty and fairness. That is a great way in for the gospel.
No thanks!
So often we Christians are on the back foot because we expect to be cold-shouldered or rejected, if we try to talk about Christ. A friend of mine who is working in a predominantly Roman Catholic context tells me that almost every response to their street evangelism is ‘No thanks, I’m a Catholic’. You can put all sorts of descriptions into that sentence — ‘I’m an agnostic, atheist, Hindu, Muslim’ — we are all familiar with the closed door, leaving no way forward. Not surprisingly we assume that no one is interested and decide it’s easier to go low profile. We are trying to move from our territory into theirs, without any shared ground. So the response is much the same as my own would be to the telesales rep from a call centre in Asia trying to persuade me to change my broadband supplier! ‘No thanks, not today!’
Listening for the opening
But what if some people really are aware that our beautiful world is ‘somehow broken’? What if more people than we realise are grappling with the harsh realities of life in a fallen world, but without the Maker’s instructions, without any guide book or direction, except the prevailing cultural drift? Then there may well be an open door. Why do these values still matter? How do we know that the world is not as it was meant to be? What has happened to break our society? When opportunities like these appear, we tend to want to unload our biblical theological package straight away. So we talk about the fall, about the origins of evil, about Adam and Eve, all of which are essential ingredients in the story, but which will tend to take us away into disagreements about Genesis, before we have even had an opportunity to say anything about Christ.
Be prepared to follow a wiser and more patient course. Learn to listen, really carefully, to what the other person is saying and look for the most natural way to build on their perceptions, with a view to presenting the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as the answer to their problems, which they have never, as yet, considered.
Culture adrift
Yes, this is a broken world and we are all broken people. But God is in the business of mending his world (for it belongs to him) one person at a time. When those values of honesty, fairness and courage to stand up for the right were much more current than they are today, it was because many more individuals had personally accepted, and continued to live by, God’s authority in their own lives. One thing 20th-century atheists and philosophers were clear about was that human life is ultimately meaningless unless there is an infinite reference point beyond ourselves, whose goodness and power are limitless. Rejecting belief in such a God, they cast our culture adrift on a sea of relativism, with no navigational aids and no anchor. But can we really accept that the billions slaughtered in the two great wars, and still today in all the violence and conflict of the modern world, that all these people were, or are, ‘meaningless’, that they have no ultimate significance or value? Everything in us cries out against that, as it does against all forms of cruelty, abuse and megalomania. But if there is no God, then there can be no absolute standards, so that anything may be permitted…
To be continued.
David Jackman is the past President of the Proclamation Trust.
