It appears to me that it is becoming harder to ‘share the gospel’ with my non-Christian friends. Any direct approach (i.e. a mention of Jesus) is no longer met with polite (or even impolite) interest, leading to some form of discussion. It is just met with indifference and an unwillingness to continue the conversation.
In his book Death in the City, Francis Schaeffer put forward a different approach. He put it like this: ‘There is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can begin. There must first be the message of judgement, the tearing down. There are times when we cannot expect a constructive revolution if we begin by over-emphasising the positive message… Unless [our friend] understands what is wrong, he will not be ready to listen to and understand the positive. I believe that much of our evangelistic and personal work is not clear simply because we are too anxious to get to the answer without having a man realise the real cause of his sickness, which is true moral guilt (and not just psychological guilt feelings) in the presence of God’.
First example
My first attempt, a couple of years ago, had interesting results. I met up with six of my old university friends and we all went for lunch. The conversation meandered around until the subject of the Iraq war was mentioned. Everyone was scandalised by the apparent lack of justification for the war. I asked them to consider this: ‘From your evolutionary perspective, isn’t this just a case of the more highly evolved nations prospering at the expense of the less developed ones, and shouldn’t you just relax and let history/evolution take its course?’. This, predictably, provoked outrage.
