I too have to say that I love the SBC’s cooperative program and I love the IMB’s flexability. I have many friends overseas and they have the freedom to discard the 1950’s approach to reaching and teaching people in whatever culture they are in. Maybe the IMB should send missionaries to us, they might teach us a thing or two.

This is exactly how I feel. You could be reading my mail. I cannot effectively establish real, genuine relationships with people when I’m constantly feeling pressure to look for any opening to insert spiritual nuggets into the conversation or steer it toward some evangelism question like “What does it mean to be saved?” or “If you died today, do you know if you’d go to Heaven?” My parents are neck deep in this sort of programmed evangelism talk and it drives me crazy. How they think it comes off to the average nonbeliever and how it actually seems to them are totally different things, but they don’t get it.

I just try to be normal. I try to live my life in a way that people can see a difference in how I conduct myself, how I treat people and so on. And when subjects come up that naturally lend themselves toward touching on spiritual matters or a Christian outlook on the subject, I don’t shy away from it. But there’s a fine line between not shying away and forcibly shoehorning a bunch of God Talk into any crevice you think you see.

I’ve been reading iMonk for a long time . . . never have you posted a more insightful article, at least IMHO.

I think I know what you mean. As I wrote above, I do believe in contextualization when presenting the Gospel to different people, cultural groups, etc. I *don’t* believe in just continually hitting someone with the Law, if it is clear that that person and I are speaking different philosophical/cultural languages (starting from different presuppositions).

In the end though, I may be more of a Van Tillian presuppositionalist than you are, when it comes to evangelism and apologetics. I do believe that posing thoughtful questions to non-Christians is important (as a part of pre-evangelism). I don’t think, though, that we can’t use propositional truth statements with postmoderns, simply because they believe (in the darkness of their unredeemed understanding) that language is just a game or a series of “power plays.” The fact that they *use* language itself to make such absolute-sounding statements is very problematic for their position! Exploring these inconsistencies can be helpful in evangelism (and/or pre-evangelism). To give up absolute truth statements with postmoderns, or other people, and say that we can *only* focus on community, existential meaning, beauty, etc. in evangelism is to concede too much.

How come I’ve only ran into 1 person witnessing to students at public universities in 13 years? (And he was a retired engineer showing students a DVD on evolution vs. Creationism)

How much evangelism SHOULD be on Sunday morning? How much evangelism should be in the highways and byways throughout the week?

How did Jesus do it?

An SBCer,
Rev.

This is what IMonk talked about with “Wretched Urgency”. Never mind that it’s basically an MLM pyramid scheme — “Amway without the soap”; “Sheep Saving More Sheep so that they can Save More Sheep.” Never mind that the Christian afterlife was originally Resurrection of the Body, not “souls” adrift in a Fluffy Cloud Heaven.

Otherwise, you can tunnel-vision into “Wretched Urgency” mode to the point you can’t see the collateral damage. Or even drift unknowingly into the part of the Inquisitor in Mark Twain’s Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where “If I rack him ’til he die, I shall have Saved his Soul.”

I am NOT “a soul” for the “saving”. I am NOT a potential notch on your Bible for brownie points at the Bema. I am not a red shirt in your Wretched Urgency spiritual psychodrama. I am ME, both “body” and “soul”, intertwined so tightly that only Death can split them into two incomplete parts. (Why is Death considered “The Last Enemy”, instead of the welcome discarder of the body encumbering the Soul? Could the Soul be INCOMPLETE without the body? Without something physical to interface with a physical Cosmos?)