Compiled by Marti Clark from Don Everts & Doug Schaupp, I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus, IVP Books 2008.

 

Crossing Thresholds: How 21st Century Americans Become Christians

 

THRESHOLD 3: OPENING UP TO PERSONAL CHANGE

Last time we looked at some ways we can help provoke curiosity about Jesus in our unchurched friends. When they do become curious it can seem like they are very close to the Kingdom. But people can be curious about God, yet completely closed to the idea of personal change. While they may be eager for answers to their questions, Christianity calls them into a changed life, and for most people, that is a scary prospect. Often this Third Threshold is the most difficult to pass through. For many non-Christians, an openness to change requires them to reconsider and possibly surrender closely held beliefs, current lifestyle choices, and their whole worldview.

 

How can we help guide friends into a posture of openness to change?

1. Patience: People at this stage often go through a chaotic struggle with many twists and turns, and we need to be as patient with them as God is with us in our struggles.
2. Enduring Prayer: Our persistent prayers are vital. This is often a time of intense spiritual warfare. Many people don’t make it past this Threshold.
3. Willingness to challenge: This is a time when honest, loving challenges can be exactly what our friend needs in order to take further steps. For many of us, the thought of challenging our friend produces anxiety. But we can look to Jesus for our example. He challenged people all the time. He challenged different people in different ways, but he always did so with love and nonjudgmental truthfulness.

 

If you have a non-Christian friend who you feel is ready to be challenged, you might want to study Jesus’ encounters with the people he challenged: the woman at the well, Nicodemus, the rich young ruler, Zachaeus and others. Pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Also it might be helpful to learn more about Threshold 3 in Evert’s and Schaupp’s book, I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Paths to Jesus. Oh, and let us know about your friend. We’ll pray for them too!

Compiled by Marti Clark from Don Everts & Doug Schaupp, I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus, IVP Books 2008.

 

THRESHOLD #2: BECOMING CURIOUS (Part Two)
Last time I wrote, we looked at ways we can help provoke curiosity about Jesus and God in the minds of our non-Christian friends. We said that a thoughtful, non-threatening question can sometimes get our friend thinking, and open the door to an amazing conversation, if we can discipline ourselves to be sensitive listeners and respectful conversation partners. Here are some other “curiosity starters”.

 

a) Breaking stereotypes: Sometimes unchurched friends can become curious when they see you and maybe your Christian friends living in ways that break their previous negative stereotypes. For instance, Janette, a young schoolteacher, became curious when her Christian friend invited her to go to the fair with some other young Christians. She discovered that they were “normal” and fun, not at all what she expected. She became open to learning more. When one of the friends invited her to come to an Alpha Course she eagerly accepted the invitation.

 

b) Giving glimpses of Christian love and community: For a number of years a team from the Vineyard engaged in a compassion ministry that twice a month brought groceries, clothes, etc to a barrio community. Some of the team members invited their unchurched friends to join in. Every one of those friends eventually became believers. What convinced them? They told us that they were deeply touched when they saw the love, care, and generosity the team expressed towards one another, and towards the people they sought to help.

 

c) Another example: Every Easter season a friend hosts several Seder dinners in her home for family and friends and anyone they’d like to invite. Nearly half of the guests are unchurched, but they are all warmly welcomed, and invited to share the experience. Some attendees are so intrigued that they want to learn more. Some have asked my friend to teach them more about the Bible, others have joined an Alpha Course Betsy holds in her home.

 

When your friends grow more and more curious about Jesus, you know the Holy Spirit is at work. Count that as another God Sighting!

 

Compiled by Marti Clark from Don Everts & Doug Schaupp, I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus, IVP Books 2008.

 

Crossing Thresholds: How 21st Century Americans Become Christians 

 

THRESHOLD #2: BECOMING CURIOUS (Part One)

Last time I wrote, we looked at the vital importance of developing trusting relationships with Outsiders. We said that a move “from distrust to trusting a Christian” is the first Threshold most unchurched people must cross before they will start to consider Christianity. But that is only the beginning. The fact that your friend trusts you doesn’t mean they are curious about Jesus. The process of moving from complacency about Jesus to becoming curious is the second major threshold most Outsiders must cross on a path toward faith. What can we do to help provoke our friend’s curiosity? Here’s one suggestion.

 

Using Questions:
Sometimes just asking the right question can start an amazing conversation. Moreover, “answering a question with a question” can super-charge curiosity. That’s what Jesus did.Our authors, Shaupp and Everts point out that Jesus was asked 183 questions in the Gospels, He answered just 3 of them, but asked 307 questions back! Don Everts quotes a favorite professor: “A good question is worth a thousand answers!”*

 

Here are some questions Don and Doug suggest. Try asking one of them when you sense the time is right, then listen to your friend’s answer, and encourage them to share more. This isn’t the time to try to correct them. If you’re not sure what to say, simply say, “That’s interesting!” You won’t be lying – it’s usually very interesting to discover what other people think!

 

1. Have you ever had a spiritual experience? Would you like to have one?

2. Have you ever felt like you received a sign from God? What would you do if God gave you a sign?

3. What is your take on this whole God question? What do you think God is like?

4. What do you think life is about? Do you think you have a destiny?

 

(For more suggestions, check out see I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught us About their Path to Jesus.)

 

 

*(Don Everts & Doug Schaupp, I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus, IVP Books 2008) p.56

 

Karl Barth wrote,

. . . since Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, [the church] can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with a bad conscience, but willingly and with a good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4/3, pp. 773-74)

 

In our inward journey we are drawn into the life of Jesus in fresh and imaginative ways. Even in our times of struggle we find solace in the reminder that we belong to God and that his grace precedes us at every turn.

 

But when we leave our quiet place and step into the drama of human interaction, we often encounter some disturbing realities: Within ourselves remain all the broken possibilities that we see in the world around us. We are confronted again with our propensity toward failure, weakness, and sin. While we believe in all that God has done in and through Jesus Christ and trust that God’s forgiveness has been freely poured out upon us, we may still be disturbed at the frailty of our own lives.

 

That recognition, however, is what allows us to engage with others, not in a manner of superiority or untouchable piety, but rather as co-humans, made in the image of God. In facing the reality that we share with all other people, we can freely and honestly point people to Jesus, the One who is forming and reforming us in his image, and invite our fellow sojourners to turn their lives to him.

 

It is in the authentic recognition of our brokenness that we can sincerely invite people to immerse their lives in the way of Jesus. We participate in the outward journey of faith as full members of the human race.

 

Mike McNichols, Fuller California Coast Campus Director

 

 

When we go to that quiet place to be alone with God, we find that we are not really alone. If truly alone, then we lack identity and definition; alone we have no reference point except ourselves.

 

We believe, of course, that we are not alone—we are with God. It is God who summons us to himself and, in our response to him, we find out who we really are. We recognize that we are a broken people with tendencies that lead to death, and yet in the embrace of God we are summoned into life.

 

There is another sense in which we are not alone, even with God: We always take others with us. They may not be with us in body, but they are in our minds and we just can’t seem to shake them. In our aloneness with God, our thoughts often turn to those who share our lives, and we find ourselves fighting against these distractions that draw us from our quite time of devotion.

 

But, again, we do not turn our attention to God as ones who stand alone, isolated from others. We find our humanness in the drama of community, and it is a shared humanness that we bring before God in prayer and worship.

 

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s students chafed against his requirement that they spend an hour in meditation upon Scripture, they complained that they couldn’t keep their minds focused, but kept thinking about family members and friends. Bonhoeffer encouraged them to bring those loved ones into the text of Scripture and let their meditations become prayers of intercession.

 

Followers of Jesus are never quite alone. We live in attentiveness to God’s presence, and we do so as persons in relationship with others. In the embrace of God and in the sharing of our lives in community, we find out what it really means to be human.

 

Mike McNichols, Fuller California Coast Campus Director

A big part of my motivation for writing this book is rooted in deep and gnawing intellectual curiosity: Why don’t the various aspects of church life produce better results?  How does it happen that people can follow and experience profound liturgies for their whole lives and not feel connected to Jesus in a personal way?  How can people hear great sermons for dozens of years and yet cheat their customers and cheat on their spouse?

 

Philip Yancey says, “My deepest doubts about the faith can be summed up in a single question: ‘Why doesn’t it work?’”  In the margin of Yancey’s Soul Survivor, I wrote, “Me too!”  As a leader of pastors, every time I’ve seen one crash and burn with sex, money or pride, I’ve wondered, Why doesn’t our faith work?  And when I’ve watched a parishioner ruin his or her family through foolish behavior, I’ve asked the same troubling question.

 

This question is not for the faint of heart.   But it demands an answer.  Here is my best shot: The problem has little to do with our liturgy, sermons, Sunday school curricula or any other aspect of church life.  These elements are common means of God’s instruction, power and grace.  Our problem has more to do with two other things: first, we have no place, no story and no context with which to act on anything we might hear or receive; second, in our pseudo-religious society we lack the basic intention to act on what we have heard.  Practical obedience hardly crosses the mind of those who merely want to care for the spiritual side of life by taking in an occasional church service or other religious event.

 

When Jesus invites us to share his yoke, he is calling us into his story, into the life-shaping orientation provided by his sense of what the Father is doing.  Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

 

A yoke is a wooden beam used between a pair of oxen to allow them to pull a load.  I loved the mental picture of being in a yoke with Jesus.  The friends Debbie and I shared a home with while attending Bible school knew this and took a picture of a yoke on the side of a barn in West Virginia.  Tim and Susie framed it nicely and placed a small bronze plate in the bottom of the frame with an inscription: “Stay in the yoke… Matthew 11:29.”  In the years since, I have moved offices many times, but that picture has always hung prominently on the wall.  A few years ago my wife, knowing my affection for the yoke image, bought an authentic yoke at an antique store and gave it to me as a Christmas present.  It hangs in an important place on our porch.

 

As much as the yoke of Jesus has shaped my imagination for life in Jesus, its flame was fanned further the first time I read the same words in Matthew 11 of The Message:

 

“Are you tired?  Work out?  Burned out on religion?  Come to me.  Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.  I’ll show you how to take a real rest.  Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it.  Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.  I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.  Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

 

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

In the summer of 2008 I discovered and read Thrilled to Death by Archibald Hart. I was surprised to find within the context of his book a reasonable critique and challenge to the way many of us do church. ‘To my Christian readers, I would also like to add that modern worship styles and spiritual practices, when not balanced with contemplative or reflective practices, can also contribute to the hijacking of the brain’s pleasure system.’

 

Reading that quote for the first time, I had an epiphany. Now I know why I feel drawn to those quiet preludes in the local Episcopal church. I am like a person whose body is short on potassium and thus craves the relief a banana can bring, or a person craving vitamin D who feels the warmth of the sun on her neck and things, ‘Wow, I need to do this more often.’ Preludes and what they stand for – quiet, peace, centeredness and the like – are necessary ingredients to a healthy spiritual life. They are among the means – the vitamins – necessary for a life of centered peace.

 

Unfortunately, reflective times in corporate worship have not been a priority in most contemporary worship services, which are dominated by high stimulation designed to keep the attention of people who are often not otherwise interested in worship. Fortunately, though, there is a renaissance happening across the country that is bringing corporate forms of contemplative practices back into our churches.

 

Hart helps us create a well-rounded way of seeing all the constituent parts of our lives as a seamless and connected whole. In the midst of all the variety in our life, including work, family, social activities, hobbies and so forth, he teaches us we also need to balance our lives with private mediation and corporate worship. Hart recommends Christian meditation and times of quiet contemplation and concentration focusing on the presence of God. He says too many of us are addicted to extreme forms of stimulation, bored with the ordinary, and developing widespread cases of anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure from the typical events of life). Hart says we are being thrilled to death by our endless pursuit of pleasure, and that in so doing we are becoming incapable of experiencing the very pleasure we seek.

 

Hart says anhedonia is true of the church too. Contrary to more liturgical traditions, many evangelicals prefer a worship style that is full of intensity and is stimulation driven. They want an elevating fix at church. But, Hart says, “I need to point out that a stimulation-driven spirituality is not conducive to lowered stress and tension or deeper transformation. In fact, many seek a fix when they go to church precisely because they are so stressed out all week that they cannot stand any lowering of their arousal on the weekend. It just puts them into a post-adrenaline bad humor. Unfortunately, many churches don’t teach and allow for contemplative practices, so Christians aren’t integrating them into their life. A highly stressed lifestyle finds low arousal discomforting, so our evangelical mantra has become ‘Bring on the excitement, and I’ll go to church.’

 

Our overemphasis on stimulation and excitement may come from a desire to connect with our present culture. We who care about evangelism know that we catch fish on their terms, not ours. But this can be a genius bit of missiology or the road to compromise. All evangelism is contextual. The challenge for the church is to be simultaneously geared to our times while being anchored to the Rock, Jesus, and the narrative and trajectory of Scripture. Speaking only for myself, I have to admit that I have erred on the side of trying desperately to provide enough excitement to get people to come to church. I now regret that I may have been inadvertently working against my own passionately stated mission: to make followers of Jesus.

 

We need to find ways to authentically connect contemplative practices into a life of centered peace, which is a powerful form of salt, light and evangelism in our day.

 

From: Giving Church Another Chance – Chapter 2

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

 

In 2 Corinthians 5:19-21 Paul implies that corporate ambassadorship is a loose synonym for church.

 

God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

 

Paul says that in the new way of Jesus, in the Spirit-empowered, Spirit-authorized church, God is trusting Jesus’ people to be his envoys of the kingdom of God.  Ambassadors are focused on the affairs of their own country (the will, agenda and story of God) as they reside in another country (their actual lives) they have been sent to.  As ambassadors of Christ, we focus on the agenda of the kingdom of heaven, which is the rule, reign or action of God.  We ambassadors are alert to the agenda of God in the places we live, work and play.

 

I can hear someone thinking, I don’t experience church as a launching pad for ambassadorship within the rhythms and routines of my life!  Maybe this is a good place for a confession: it is no secret that while pursuing religion it is possible to become something other than the shining example we envision when first heading down that path.  Along the way lies the ditch of smugness, the pothole of judgmentalism, the rut of superiority and the crater of self-righteousness.

 

We don’t have to be particularly sympathetic to the church to recognize that this is an unfortunate state of affairs.  How could the church become crosswise to the purposes of God?  Perhaps the church itself is not so much the problem.  I have been a pastor for decades, so I know that some churches are boring and out of touch, and that others are much more approachable and in tune with the times.  If our critique ended here, the solution would be pretty easy – just get every church to be culturally cool!  And that’s not such a huge job.

 

Unfortunately, something much more profound is going on, something way beyond how cool church is.  Millions of Americans are also leaving cool churches in search of something more meaningful.  The issue is not so much the contemporary nature of the church but its connection to God’s purpose for the church.  If we are to be living within God’s story, and if God’s story can be likened to a map, a narrative or a piece of music, then we should be asking, What map are we on?  What narrative are we living in?  or What music are we playing?  These questions will lead us to see that church is mainly what happens outside of its meetings.

 

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

Over the past decade or so I have been reviewing my sense of what it means to be a Christian.  As I’ve done so, I’ve seen more clearly the story that gives meaning to all my roles in life: husband, father, friend and missionary bishop N.T. Wright has helped me do this.

 

What does it mean to be a Christian?  One way to get at the answer is to rephrase it: for what purpose was the church called into being?  N.T. Wright says:

 

According to the early Christians, the church doesn’t exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential.  Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination.  Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproduct of the main, central overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us… [T]hat through the church God will announce to the world that he is indeed its wise, loving and just creator; that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it; and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it.

 

The kingdom of God is the ultimate drama.  No drug or sex or food or prized possession begins to compare!  Those who work with God through the power of the Holy Spirit to rescue the enslaved, to find lost souls, to create culture or to seek justice find life, the rich life God intended for all humanity.

 

© Todd Hunter, Accidental Anglican, Used by Permission, IVP

Going back out into the street, reengaging with real life after singing the doxology in church, can make us forget what we believe and how we felt while we were singing. To exude the glory of God requires that we have some idea of what that could look like – we need a vision for it, someone who has modeled it. Jesus is of course the most complete model. But if we view him as only a “spiritual” or divine being, Jesus doesn’t do well as a role model. Many Christians can’t imagine Jesus with dirt under his fingernails. So we end up thinking that Jesus is a great savior of souls and a revealer of spiritual secrets, but when it comes to making a living in a dog-eat-dog world or of living in a quarreling family, Jesus is not much use.

 

In the New Testament book of Romans, Paul is amazed that in spite of the sin of the human race, God is not vindictive but showers us with his grace through Jesus. In Romans 11:33-36 Paul breaks out in praise to God, he gushes over with doxology:

 

Oh, the depth of the riches of the of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”
“Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen. (NIV)

 

In this doxological praise to God, Paul is trying to find adequate words to express his amazement at the plan of God to redeem both Israel and Gentiles through Jesus. And his doxology cannot be reduced to “pie in the sky” because chapters 9-11 address God’s plan for humans in this life. Paul is blown away not by heavenly visions by what he sees happening all around him. The Gentiles are in! It is like the end of the hide-and-seek games we played as kids. At the end we would yell “Ally, ally, in come free!” Whoever will place their faith – the confidence and trust – in Jesus, is now part of God’s plan.

 

In Romans, Paul surveys the intention of God, the expression of that intention in creation, the Fall, law, grace, the person and work of Jesus, his own struggle to work all this out, and God’s plan for Israel and the Gentiles. Maybe at Romans 11:32, he put his pen down, leaned back in his chair, rubbed his face and thought, “Wow. This is truly amazing stuff!”

 

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP