Quick To Listen
Back in high school our youth group would go on week long trips to big cities like Salt Lake City and New York. There were two goals when we went on these trips, the first was to learn to have fun, and the other was to offend and turn non-Christians off to Christianity altogether. That’s right we went into the streets and got in peoples faces and offended them. We would tell them things like, “You’re going to hell if you don’t listen to what I say right now”, and “What you believe is ridiculous, ha ha!” OK, maybe we didn’t laugh… while we were in front of them, but this is what they heard. We were taught that this urban guerrilla style evangelism was not only good but the most biblical way to “convert” the un-believers. I now say that’s a load of horse droppings.
I have been reading a lot of what my pastor likes to call, “dangerous books”. The most recent of these books is one written by Don Evererts and Doug Schaupp called I Once Was Lost. One of the concepts they touch on in this book is the fact that non-Christians need to trust Christians before they can make any progress toward having a relationship with Christ. Not to long ago Christianity was the norm, you were expected to be a Christian. If you were a Christian it meant you were a trustworthy person, you were respected. Things have changed an awful lot since then. Now when you hear about Christianity it is mainly in regards to the Catholic Priest scandals, Jimmy Swaggart, and those crazy street preachers. What is there left to trust now? This is a huge obstacle for us, how can we ever gain their trust?
To build trust is a very difficult thing to do. When a husband lies to to his wife, the wife will not easily trust the husband again, there is a lot of work the husband must do. At one point in time the church was trusted, and now society feels like the church has lied to them. There is a lot that we as the church have to now do. To be honest I don’t know what that really looks like as a whole, but I think there are small things that we can start to do.
Don Evererts and Doug Schaupp go on in their book to discuss some mistakes we make when talking with non-Christians and their distrust in us. They call them “the five knee-jerk reactions to distrust”.
1. We become defensive. We defend ourselves by saying we’re not like the other Christians. We even start defending the other Christians, “look if you really understood the crusades…”
2. We become bruised. We become so offended and we just shut down.
3. We avoid the subject altogether. We just figure that if they don’t trust us, why even talk about it. It would just be easier if we avoid the topic completely.
4. We judge them. How dare this lying, cheating, drug addict not trust me
5. We just plain argue with them. We just want to prove them wrong. We look at it more as a challenge than anything else.
If we can just get beyond these reactions I believe we could see so much more progress. We are so quick to speak and throw out our opinions, but this just might not be the right thing to do. I truly believe that we need to learn to listen, and to try to understand. We have to get out of their face.
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