Ben Sternke

Field notes on our life in God after Christendom

Evangelism

The Gospel, Evangelism, and Discipleship

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“Does the gospel I preach naturally lead to people becoming disciples of Jesus?” – Dallas Willard

Put another way: Is becoming a disciple of Jesus the natural way to say ‘Yes’ to the gospel I preach?

This question has been revolutionizing my understanding of the gospel, evangelism, and discipleship. For example, if we see the main message of the gospel as “Your sins can be forgiven,” it does not naturally lead to becoming a disciple of Jesus, because once you’ve got the “forgiveness contract” signed, discipleship seems like an optional extra-curricular activity for people who are into that kind of thing. Gospel-as-forgiveness is an anemic understanding of what the New Testament proclaims.

Here’s the way I am beginning to understand this, and the simple way we are going to be teaching our leaders at Christ Church to practice evangelism. Do you think this adequately captures things? What do you think?

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Discipleship Before Worship?

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As I was reading something from the Gospels the other day it occurred to me that Jesus’ first disciples started following him long before they recognized his divinity or developed anything like a theology of incarnation or Trinity. They were disciples before they were worshipers, technically speaking.

We normally think of things the other way around, it seems to me. Typically we see the first step as “belief,” specifically, belief in certain facts: that I am a sinner, that I cannot save myself, that Jesus is fully God and fully man, etc. First (we think) people must worship Jesus as Savior and God, get a few theological facts straight, and then we can start talking about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. We don’t seem to talk much about following Jesus until people have “crossed the line” of becoming a worshiper of Jesus.

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Zacchaeus as a Person of Peace

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Just a few thoughts from this morning’s Daily Lectionary reading of the story of Zacchaeus from Luke 19.

Jesus spotted Zacchaeus because of the ridiculous effort he took to see Jesus. Climbing a tree hardly seems a dignified way for a grown man to behave, especially a very wealthy man.

A man who climbs a tree to get a glimpse of you is a Person of Peace (see Luke 10). Jesus recognizes this and simply invites himself over to Zacchaeus’ house! This means that Jesus is on Zacchaeus’ turf, where Zacchaeus is comfortable. Jesus is allowing Zacchaeus to serve him and show him hospitality. He eats the food Zacchaeus gives him and simply hangs out there for the afternoon.

Eventually the simple presence of Jesus brings Zacchaeus to repentance. He gives away half of his possessions to the poor and vows to pay back four times the amount of whatever he’s cheated others out of.

Jesus then announces what has just happened: “Today salvation has come to this house.”

To drive the point home, Jesus uses his interaction with Zacchaeus to illustrate and reiterate why he has come: “to seek and save what was lost.”

May we also continue to do the same things, following in the footsteps of our Master.

  1. Find the person of peace, the person who is open to you, interested in you, likes you, wants to be around you.
  2. Go to their turf, where they’re comfortable.
  3. Allow them to serve you, show you hospitality.
  4. Spend intentional time with them, and
  5. Be ready to do the works of the Kingdom and speak the words of the Kingdom (in appropriate ways).

Because if we love Jesus, and we love people, we’re going to want to make that connection. If we find ourselves feeling lackluster about helping people get to know Jesus, we are suffering from a lack of love. Either a lack of love for people (we’d rather maintain our pride than risk looking foolish), or a lack of love for Jesus (we really don’t think he’s worth knowing).

But if we believe that Jesus did come to “seek and save what was lost,” and that being with him to learn from him how to be like him is the path to human flourishing, we will want others to come to know Jesus. Jesus himself gives us a wonderful way to do that relationally, naturally, organically.

3 Questions About Jesus

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What a great premise:

You’ve just met a young American adult who is utterly irreligious. Having been raised by agnostic parents, their family never attended any kind of religious gathering, and – although they understand what “religion” is and have been exposed to different religious practitioners – they don’t really know anything about Jesus Christ or Christianity. But they’re curious, so – knowing you have something to do with Christianity – they ask you three simple questions:

Who is Jesus Christ?
What has he done?
Why does it matter?

Please provide your simple, sincere, and conversational response in 300 words or less.

This was from an email I got from Jason Coker, who is curating a once-a-week series on his blog called 3 Questions About Jesus. I was really looking forward to participating in this project.

Today my entry in the series went up on Jason’s blog. Leave a comment over there if you want to interact about my entry. And thanks to Jason for putting this series together.

Why Evangelism Gives Us the Creeps

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Ever wonder why evangelism gives you the creeps? If it doesn’t, don’t worry about reading the rest of this post.

A few days ago I wrote about where the story of the Gospel really starts, which is an important question. But for most of the kinds of people that populate our community, the mere mention of the word “evangelism” evokes nausea. It’s not because they don’t want to share their faith with others, and it’s not because they don’t think it’s important. It’s because they know it’s important, but they can’t shake the image of it that’s been burned into their minds by the way it’s been done in America for the past few decades.

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