Reaching Out
Part 2
by Mike Stine
Last week, I told you the story of
the people of northern Africa, neighboring the Sahara Desert. They
receive rain only four months out of the year. They plant and harvest
all within those four months. As the harvest comes in, there is much
rejoicing and dancing. The people eat two meals a days, morning and
evening. Then as the months go on, food becomes more scarce. Finally,
the month before the rainy season a child will rush in excitedly
exclaiming that they found grain in the shed and that they can eat that
night.
But the grain is not for eating, it
is what has been saved to plant for the next harvest. Finally the rains
come and the father takes the only grain he has and scatters it across
the ground. Tears stream down his face because he knows that his family
is hungry and that he is scattering their only grain across the ground.
But he believes in the harvest. He believes that his investment now
will see benefits in the future.
Last week we looked at three values
surrounding evangelism that should spur us on to a deeper desire to
reach those who do not know Jesus as their savior. These are three
things that we must believe fully if we are going to able to make the
sacrifice to scatter the seed in hopes of a harvest. These values are:
People matter to God, People are spiritually lost, People need Christ.
If we truly believe these things, we
are going to be able to make the sacrifices needed to reach out. We
will be willing to spend our time and our money and our talents on
things that we believe will enable us to make contact with those who do
not know Jesus.
Some of you are at this stage where
you feel the need to reach out and you wish to use what God has given
you for building His kingdom further. Some of you have tried, some of
you have scattered the seed and have not seen any return. And you ask
yourselves why? Some of you are frustrated because your efforts seemed
to have been in vain.
The matter comes back to soil. Rest
assured, the man who’s life depends on whether he can grow grain during
the rainy season does not simply go out and scatter grain across the
ground. The soil must be prepared. Today we know all about fertilizers
and crop rotations and soil nutrients. Even without these things, the
soil must be tilled. When the seed is planted is must not be planted
too deeply. It must not be too shallow so that the soil won’t wash off
of it.
If you simply scatter seed, some
seeds are going to grow and some are not. If you take the time to
prepare the soil, you will maximize your results. You will get the most
return on your investment. And let’s face it, you and I, and the church
as a whole, do not have money and time to waste on things that are not
going to work.
Soil is a very good analogy used for non-Christians
but the audience Jesus spoke to would have understood it better than we
do today. As many people today live in big cities and have been nowhere
near a farm, there are a few things you should know.
Not all soil is good for growing in. Sometimes soil is too rocky or
hard to grow in. Other times, there are too many, or too little
nutrients in the soil to grow. Other times, things are simply too hot
or cold to grow some plants in. My dad was recently in Arizona and
remarked how none of the homes had grass in their yards. It was simply
too harsh an environment to grow grass.
Soil must be prepared before it can be planted on.
Jesus speaks on soil in Mark 4:3-9. The four types of soils are four
types of people. On three types of soil, the seed is planted but there
is no fruit gained. Only on one type of soil is there anything gained.
“Listen! A sower went out to sow.4 And as he sowed,
some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Other
seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it
sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun
rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. 7
Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and
it yielded no grain. 8 Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth
grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a
hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”
So, all of this begs the question,
how do we prepare the soil if we wish to plant the gospel in people’s
lives? The final four values in Mark Mittelberg’s Becoming a
Contagious Church discuss how to do this.
Value # 4
People need answers
After September 11th,
people were all asking the same question. How can a loving God allow
such an evil thing to happen? There was an intellectual barrier
blocking people from believing in God. People are willing to listen
about the love of God and the forgiveness of sins. But if their concept
of God is of someone who didn’t care enough to stop a terrible thing
like the 9/11 attacks, then they don’t want to know anything about that
God.
Other questions are, how can I
believe that Christianity is the only true religion when there are so
many with so many devout followers? How can we even know that God
exists? Why should I believe the Bible?
The last question is one that I
believe Christian have ignored far too much. We have packaged our
evangelistic techniques into nice little boxes that we pull out whenever
we have the opportunity to do so. We answer questions by saying Romans
says this and the gospel of John says that. But if these people don’t
believe the Bible is God’s word and don’t believe that it is truth, you
may as well quote Shakespeare to them. While the Bible may be truth to
us, those who don’t believe the Bible are not going to do something just
because the Bible says we should do it.
This, of course, compounds our
problem. Not only do we need to be aware of what the Bible says as
truth, we need some way to back it up. If the Bible says that all have
sinned, you need the person to realize what sin is and that they have
sinned. When the Bible speaks of our need for salvation, you can speak
about relationships. When we make a family member upset, we need to do
something to make up for it or the relationship is hurt. So it is
between us and God.
I run a school online and have two
entire courses devoted to causing students to think through answers to
common questions that unbelievers may have. At times we won’t have the
answers right away. We may need to go ask a more mature Christian about
a question. That is okay. Most times a person will respect that you
don’t know the answer but are willing to find it out. But people need
answers and we need to give them if we want to overcome boundaries in
sharing the gospel.
Value #5
People need community
We all want to be a part of a place
where we feel accepted. We want to go to a place where everybody knows
our names, to quote the theme song from Cheers. This is just as true
among non-Christians as it is among Christians. Teenagers especially
flock to people who are like themselves or will try to be like someone
else so that they will fit in. Gangs are formed with a strict sense of
community. You mess with one person from the group, you mess with all
of them.
We are a very relational society.
We have telephones so that we can communicate when we are apart. Now we
have instant messengers and cell phones to aid us in this. What this
all comes down to is the fact that people are not going to come to any
church and stay if they feel unaccepted, unloved, or unwanted. The man
who doesn’t own a suit and tie is not going to attend a church where
everyone wears a suit and tie every Sunday because that man will not
feel like he belongs where he is at.
So how does community help us to
prepare the soil to plant the gospel? I have become absolutely sold on
relational evangelism. This means that evangelizing is not a one time,
hand out some tracts, “come to our service” type of thing. If we are to
win people to Christ, we need to establish relationships with them.
They must become comfortable with us before they are going to become
comfortable and accepted with a whole community of people like us.
Relationships need to be established
because it is by far what is the most effective in bring people to
Christ. When a church isn’t growing, the pastor usually gets blamed for
not bringing people in. However, statistics tell us that the vast
majority of Christians were lead to Christ by a friend or family
member. The pastor accounts for very few actual conversions. The
actual numbers as to who or what drew a person to Christ:
|
A
special need drew them |
1-2% |
|
They
just walked in |
2-3% |
|
A Pastor |
5-6% |
|
Church
visitation |
1-2% |
|
Sunday
School |
4-5% |
|
Evangelistic crusade or TV program |
0.5 % |
|
A church
program |
2-3% |
|
A friend
or relative |
75-90% |
Why are friends and relatives so
successful in bringing a person to Christ? It is the need for
community. A group of friends or a family is a small community and in
that community people are going to be more trusting of one another.
This doesn’t mean that suddenly our
friends and family should become “targets” for evangelism. Rather, we
should be willing to discuss Christianity with them in an open and
natural way. Don’t press the issue but when opportunities arise,
express how you feel about certain things because you are a Christian.
Even more importantly, live your
life the way you should be living it. Your actions speak much louder
than your words. If your life does not reflect how much you love God,
your telling a person how much they need God and how they should love
God isn’t going to get you anywhere.
We need to establish relationships
because people need community.
Value # 6
People need cultural relevance
If you talk to the vast majority of
non-Christians and ask them why they do not go to church they will tell
you they do not believe Christianity is relevant today. Church is
something that their parents went to. Church is a bunch of traditions
that don’t mean much to the average person today.
The church people look different,
act different, dress differently, and talk differently than the rest of
the world. We are called to be not a part of this world and we have
succeeded admirably in some sense. Our problem is that we are sitting
in our churches, dressing, acting, and talking like church people do and
wondering why people don’t come through our doors. We’re the only ones
with the gospel of life, why aren’t people beating down our doors to
hear it?!
According to the outside, we’re
weird. We don’t understand the world as it is today. When missionaries
prepare to go to another country, they spend a lot of time in
preparation. They learn about the people they are trying to reach.
They learn the language of the people. The look at how they dress.
They learn what their culture values.
Yet the church in America says this
is how things should be, we are right, everybody should be like us
because we know what we’re talking about.
America has a divorce rate of 50%.
This means that we have a lot of single mothers trying to raise children
on one income and possibly child support. Has the church taken the time
to understand what these women value? Have we taken the time to learn
how to best reach these women?
Do we understand the needs of
teenagers and college students? Or have we said, they don’t understand
God, they don’t love God enough because they don’t like what we like?
In order to be relevant, the church
needs to earn the right to be heard. We think that everyone should
listen to us because we are right. The problem is that everyone else
thinks that they are right as well and we are all yelling our solutions
at the world from our soapboxes. Our arguments can’t be heard above the
din of the rest of the world.
In order to be relevant the church
needs to earn the right to be heard. This means that we must show
people that we care about them. We need to show people that we are
concerned about their needs. Maybe we don’t approve of the way they
dress, or the music they listen to. This is all superficial. If we
show people that we care, they will be willing to listen to us. When
they understand that we have something important to say, suddenly, the
church seems a whole lot more relevant. Maybe we still don’t look and
sound like popular culture but when we have taken the time to be heard,
we’re understood that we have an important message. When others realize
that the message is important, they are much more willing to overlook
the fact that we may look and act weird. In time, they may even
understand and appreciate why we look and act so weird. But people need
to see the church as culturally relevant before those doors can be
opened.
Value # 7
People need time
I can be a very impatient person at
times. It goes along with my youth I believe. I hope. I get
frustrated if the drive through takes me longer than a minute. How long
does it take to collect money and hand someone their food anyway? The
stuff is already cooked and just waiting to be stuffed in a bag.
But people need time. The seeds we
sow are not magic beans. We won’t plant them and wake up the next
morning to discover a beanstalk full of beans waiting to be harvested.
Just like in actually planting, even when the soil is properly prepared
it will take some time for the plant to sprout. Even after the plant
has sprung up, more time is required before a harvest can be made.
So it is with sowing the gospel. We
can’t expect immediate returns. Even when we’ve done all the work of
establishing a relationship and causing the person to see a need for
Christ, it still isn’t easy. We may feel defeated when we present the
gospel and a person doesn’t understand fully or isn’t ready to accept
yet. On average, a person must hear the gospel seven times before they
accept it.
This means that you may never see
the fruit of your labors. You may work with someone for years and never
see them come to Christ, then they move away. Six months later they
write to you about how they became a Christian. All of that work you
did, and now someone else even gets the credit for it!
However, the work you do is still a
necessary part in bringing people to Christ. Even Paul recognized that
not everyone who taught was brought to Christ immediately. Instead,
Apollos later came along and built on the foundation that Paul had
laid. But neither one took credit for their work because it was God who
caused growth.
1 Corinthians 3:5-9 says:
5 What then is Apollos? What is
Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to
each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So
neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only
God who gives the growth. 8 The one who plants and the one who waters
have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the
labor of each. 9 For we are God’s servants, working together; you are
God’s field, God’s building.
We may never know the impact that we
make upon people. Words that we say may seem to never be heeded but
they may be recalled to memory years later.
We may never be aware of when a
person came to Christ either. For many people, salvation is a gradual
process and once day a person may wake up and realize that they are a
Christian. They can’t look back at any moment when they suddenly “got
it” but they realize that at some point they understood.
We can’t rush the salvation
process. We can’t force people into a decision that they are not ready
to make. When can simply pray that God would soften hearts so that once
the seed is planted, it would spring up quickly.
When a plant does sprout however, we
can expect a harvest of 30, 60, or 100 times what we planted.
In conclusion, if we expect a
harvest, we must be willing to prepare the soil. We must spend time and
effort into making this happen. The four values that reflect the soil
preparation process are, People need answers, People value community,
People need cultural relevance, & People need time. If we keep these
values in mind, we can expect a great harvest along with much rejoicing.
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