As Christians, our great task is working with God in moving others in our sphere of influence from alienation through reconciliation to spiritual maturity. The Lord Jesus Himself and his apostles are wonderful examples of how this work can be carried out effectively. One of the characteristics effective Christian workers (whether 1st or 21st Century) share is the ability to connect with their audiences. This requires them to speak the language of their hearers. Speaking the language include things like vocabulary, cultural nuances, and expressions.
Vocabulary is important because if people don’t understand the words we use, we will lose them right away. It doesn’t take very many individual missed words to lose the meaning of the communication. The person speaking may know what he is saying but if the listener hears “Jesus is the mediator of the new will, that by means of death, for the ________ of the ________ that were under the first will, they which are called (called what) might receive the promise of a big inheritance.” The message will be indeed lost.
Cultural nuances are important because the weight of words is constantly shifting and you can inadvertently shut people down by using an indelicate word. Innocent words morph into “bad words” and “bad words” get accepted into everyday speech. I will avoid offering examples (precisely because some readers might be offended and quit reading). Often the context of the words we choose makes a huge difference. When you’re bored some time, compare the way modern translations handle Paul’s statement “for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.” My sense is that Paul chose this word referring to animal excrement (as in the “dung gate”) because he was making a strong statement and wanted to make it memorable. Practically speaking, we avoid words which would be misconstrued as an attempt to be deliberately offensive.
Expressions are important because they knit us together and make us part of the group. From time to time, young people have taken me aside to teach me some new vocabulary. I guess they thought I sounded like an outsider and they wanted to bring me over to the inside. We often know who’s “in” and who’s “out” by the words they use. I once got an email from a believer in the Southern States. He said, “You don’t identify your denomination on your program, but I think you might be one of us. Some people talk about ‘going to church on Sunday,” we say ‘going to meeting on the Lord’s day.’ How would you say that?” For him, it was easier to identify a Christian by his vocabulary that by his love.
Effective communication is based on language, but effective engagement depends on knowing the culture. Culture affects the way people think and what they think. Cyberkids are totally comfortable with technology in a way that their boomer parents and builder grandparents are not, but the influence of that technology is pervasive and has prompted children to think in much more inclusive non-linear ways than previous generations.
Culture also involves the foreground issues of a society and the attitudes toward them. North American secular culture sees Christianity as a threat and often describes Christians as “scary.” They are genuinely threatened by truth claims because their whole philosophical frame of reference is relative. They just don’t get moral absolutes. It’s not that they are rebellious; they genuinely don’t understand what people mean when they talk about right and wrong in definitive terms.
Time for a story. When I first lived in Ecuador, I struggled with the language. Many of the believers had had lots of experience with missionaries, so when we didn’t understand something the first time they said it, they would repeat it using different words. This allowed us to use what we already knew to figure out what they were saying. On the street it was different. I remember a chatting with a man in a wood carving shop. He had some little green fruit and I asked him about it. He handed me the dish and said, “chupa.” I took one and looked at it more closely and repeated his word. Again he said “chupa” this time more loudly. I responded that I understood that it was called “chupa” and was careful to make sure my pronunciation was just right. Now he was frustrated and spoke quite sharply and much louder “chupa.” (He really must have thought I was stupid by now.) “Si,” I said in my best Spanish with a big smile and lots of affirmative nodding, “chupa.” “No, no, no,” he cried, taking a fruit from the dish and holding it to his lips “chupa, chupa, chupa.” This was followed by his biting off a bit of the skin and sucking it vigourously. “Ah,” I replied, “I understand, suck... Yes, it’s very sweet.”
Some Christians cannot come at the Truth from more than one angle. Like the “chupa man” all they can do is say it again in the same way but louder. This can feel like an attack. No wonder some unbelievers find us “scary.” While we understand the truth of God’s word, we don’t always succeed in expressing it in a non-threatening, personally affirming, way as did Jesus and the apostles (well, most of the time, for them).
Culture is also about values. What’s important to us affects how we think. In their search for acceptance, contemporary men and women have embraced tolerance. This value allows them to act as they please with no social repercussions. We who have been “accepted in the Beloved” and know how wonderful if feels to know true absolution and complete acceptance should not be surprised that others want this, too. But they don’t know about the Beloved so they turn to other people for the acceptance they crave. They are spent, empty and crying out to be filled. When the best we can do is repeat in ever more intense tones that they are sinners, they turn us off. Clearly, we don’t accept them. We imply that God doesn’t accept them. So they see Christianity as the enemy.
My personal philosophy in reaching out to the lost in any and every context is to try to start where they are and move them toward the Lord. The good old days when society was based on a moral foundation which taught that right was right and wrong was wrong and enforced the consequences are gone. People don’t understand that some things are just plain wrong - unless it is intolerance. I don’t like this. I don’t buy into it at all. But reinforcing their perception that Christians and their God are intolerant does not win us their ear.
I believe we need to start where they are. They don’t see any relationship between their being sinners and the fact that their relationships are a mess, or that they are always angry, or that they are sad and hopeless, or that they feel betrayed and unloved, or that God, if there is one, seems so inaccessible, just when they need Him most. My ministry objective is to show them that link. I take them where they are and acknowledge with them that their relationships stink, that they have a problem with anger, that they are addicted to something, that they have no friends, then show them that the answer is a relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ.
I took a few minutes and did a “Google” search on the phrase “start where they are” and found that it appears on 627 web sites. The contexts vary. I didn’t want to spend a long time on this but found that sites dealt with issues like: education, activism, decision making, counselling, athletic training, business training, raising kids, literacy, and community reform. It seems you just can’t take people from where you, as the “expert,” are and expect them to benefit. You have to take them from where they are. I suspect that we have become so focussed on “preaching the Gospel” that we have forgotten that we are talking to people. Jesus always interacted with people at a human level - in their sickness, in their shame, in their ostracism, in their worries, in their bereavement - then he told them to go to the priests, or stop sinning, or to go back home, or that their love one was healed, or that He was the resurrection and the life. I do not believe God has left me on this earth this long to preach sermons, but to reach persons.
So if we’re going to start with people where they are, we’d better find out where they are. The web is a handy cultural tool. We, as Christians, have our fingertips on the pulse of our culture when we visit the web. You want to know what people are thinking? Go to the web. I did a few “Google” searches to find out what people in our culture are thinking about. I started with the phrase “our biggest problem is sin” and turned up 3 web sites. Then I checked out some others: “our biggest problem is guilt” turned up 0 web sites, “our biggest problem is death” returned nothing, and with “our biggest problem is spiritual” I came up empty. So I broadened my search and looked under the phrase “our biggest problem is...” and turned up 13,700 web sites. It isn’t that people in our culture don’t know they have problems, they just don’t think they are sin, guilt, death or spiritual in nature.
So what are some of the “biggest problems?” There were lots. Some close to the mark, some trivial. Some providing a starting place for engagement, some next to useless. Here is a random sampling:
| fear | deception | war | racism |
| apathy | hate | terrorism | time |
| poverty | health | talking | communication |
| ignorance | indecision | pollution | unemployment |
| sex abuse | money, | our feet | education |
| lack of trust | accessibility | acting out of habit | low libido |
| lack of information | people breaking the rules | lack of will | lack of accountability |
| illegal immigration | finding reliable people | dealing with parents | getting ego out of the way |
| how we treat ourselves | our offensive line | lack of deeply held values | getting started |
| small self esteem | eating too much | people parking improperly | keeping our pool from deflating |
No doubt if you restricted the comments to the spiritual realm, people would give different answers. Yet I couldn’t help but be impressed that at some level these were “the biggest problems” some people felt they had in life. Many of these, though not all, would be wonderful “jumping off places” to present the truth of the gospel in a way that relates to the life of unbelievers.
What a challenge we have before! What tools we have available! What a message to present! What can keep us from taking up the challenge, using the tools and presenting the gospel to people who need it in a way they can understand?
Ron Hughes
© April 2006