Margaret Thatcher: Society does not exist just people and families
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| Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
If Mrs. Thatcher was correct how do we reach people and families with the gospel?
It is so easy to fill our time with the activity and fellowship of Christian life. Block out time for prayer, quiet time, worship, Sunday school, small group, committee meetings, accountability partners, Christian entertainment, political action and socializing with your best friends with whom you just so happen to also attend church and, well, there really isn’t much margin left for, let’s say, evangelism.
Separation from the world isn’t really so hard. One could suggest it is a preferred and more comfortable course than engagement with it, especially if your love of God is strong. It is easier in many ways to be not of the world than it is to be in it and not of it.
The Two Block Mission Field
A pastor challenged us at the holidays to pray for our neighbors by name, take them some baked goods, and then seek opportunities to invite them into our home. I confess that, first, we had to figure out most of their names in order to pray for them. When we did visit them with our jars of holiday snack mix, all of the neighbors were delighted that someone had finally instigated “neighborhood.” Most notably, when they started visiting our home and sharing our dining room table, it became quickly apparent to us, “We’ve been spending way too much time with fellow Christians.”
We were confronted with the mainstream culture head on, not in a cable TV shout show way, but just as people talking about things that people talk about. We heard with fresh ears just how easily unbelievers embrace things that we church folk won’t even go near, and how delicate is the task of discussing such things with people who don’t sing from the same hymnal as we do, indeed, who don’t sing from a hymnal at all. Our neighbors left our home knowing that we were Christian people, that we respect the authority of the Bible and, most of all, that we love our neighbors. Within in a couple weeks, one of them was serving in a local Christian ministry with us.
Such engagement is not easy, not at all. It requires higher degrees of attentiveness and calculation than do conversations with our brother and sister Evangelicals whose sentences we can all too easily finish. It requires an ability to apply rightly the Scripture to the circumstances and conversations in which we are engaged, a capability for which we are supposedly being equipped during the times we are together as Christians “loving and exhorting one another to good works.” And it requires a great patience with the blindness, deafness, and death that Jesus asks us to speak in to. Actually, it requires us to be disciplined and mature enough in our faith to see with his eyes.
Seven Simple Steps to Boost Evangelism
Develop your “personal Great Commission number” as if it were something as routine to your daily life as church, work, fitness, and carting your kids around. How much time do you spend with unbelieving individuals, and what is the quality of your social relationships with them? You can boost your number substantially by exercising these seven disciplines.
1. Pray for the unbelievers in your life by name.
Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families...” Her point being that we must regard each other at human scale, not as mere components of larger social institutions. The same can be said of the way we use the term “the lost.” Of course our hearts grieve for the millions who do not know Jesus, but we don’t know the millions, personally. Most of us do know personally at least dozens, some of us hundreds, and rather than lump these precious individuals into one big prayer cohort, we could begin to take their given names before the Lord in prayer. Start writing their names down and praying over them at least once a week.
2. Be intentional in pursuing relationships and scheduling time with unbelievers.
If you don’t make engagement with unbelieving people a priority, your life will gravitate automatically toward the pleasures and comforts of the church community cul de sac. Identify two people outside of your Christian circle with whom you think you would enjoy spending more time. Look for two more who appear to need someone to come alongside of them as they struggle with burdens in their lives. Target one other with whom you seem to have the least in common, but enough of a relationship that you could see it becoming, with a little work, a friendship. You needn’t feel that you to need to sacrifice any of your principles or values to love someone else. It’s what we’re commanded to do. Love God. Love our neighbors.
3. Don’t withdraw from unbelieving family members. Lean in.
Family members are people with whom, like it or not, you are already in relationship. You already love them, and they already love you, despite theological differences. Don’t make them a project, just love them as a members of your family. Be sincerely interested in what they’re interested in, even if you find it hard to be interested. Know their struggles. Encourage them. Affirm them. Don’t be estranged. Lean in and never give up on any of them. Above all else, pray for them.
4. Love your neighbors
Know your neighbors. Help your neighbors. Enjoy your neighbors. Be the epoxy that glues your neighbors into a neighborhood. Practice hospitality. Make your home a place that you neighbors associate with their love for each other.
5. Appreciate your work place as the best place
For most Christians, the workplace is the place where we will spend the most time with unbelieving people. Work requires us to collaborate with others to see it to completion. Relationships in the workplace are sometimes even easier to develop than with family members. You share more time and, in time, more in common. Don’t allow your Christianity to be a wedge that separates you from co-workers. You needn’t compromise your values, nor engage in any unbiblical activities to secure a co-worker’s esteem or affection, but you do need to take an active interest in your coworkers as fellow human beings, not just the other spokes in a wheel you happen to share. Appreciate that people in the workplace are not the means of getting your work done, they are the objects of your work as an ambassador for Christ.
6. Harvest relationships from your children's activities
Children are now involved in lots of activities, year round. If you have several children, the breadth of your relationship universe is substantial across the expanse of all the other coaches, parents and teammates. So, go deep. Work these crowds. Befriend people in these communities. Do things with them. Bring them together in your home with family members, co-workers and neighbors. A word of warning: don’t permit all of your kids’ activities to take place in Christian-only programs.
7. Take up a new hobby, especially one shared in groups
Diversions from responsibilities can be personally renewing and restorative, and great venues for evangelism. Find something fun or interesting to do or learn in which you are not fulfilling a specific responsibility or obligation to anyone — just taking your mind off of things for awhile. But, find something that requires you to do it with other people. Here you'll likely meet people of all different walks, the bond being the shared interest in the hobby. It will help to find something in which someone else, perhaps an unbeliever, will have to be invested in you to help you along. This can be the leaven of really great relationships.
The truth is the product of this hypothetical formula is not a score, it is joy. There are few greater joys in life than sharing the gospel with another person, even fewer greater joys than knowing you have been used as means, immediately or eventually, in another’s conversion in Christ. Yes, we rejoice in corporate worship, in Christian fellowship, and in private devotion, and also in the essential work of sharing Christ with those who do not yet know him.
