"Evangalism"

I read a bit more of Blue Like Jazz yesterday and wanted to share a couple more passages with you. Donald Miller is an amazing writer. By sharing his stories, he makes me really think about things that I've never really thought about, or maybe never wanted to think about. I'm not even sure what to think about some of the things that I read, but they just call to me and I want to write them out here because I'm not sure how to respond to them.

"[Rick] didn't really see evangalism, or whatever you want to call it, as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life. He saw evangalism as reaching a felt need. I thought this was beautiful and frightening. I thought it was beautiful because I had this same need; I mean, I really knew I needed Jesus like I need water or food, and yet it was frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture, and I absolutely hate bothering people about this stuff.

So much of me believes strongly in letting everybody live their own lives, and when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy trying to build my down line." (pg. 114)

As a Christian, I've always been told that it's my duty to evangalise and spread God's word to the world, but I've never been sure how to do that. I feel about evangalism kind of the way I feel about sales. I know I probably have a weird skewed vision of sales (because when I worked in sales it was really nothing like this), but I imagine a salesperson to be someone who's trying to shove a product down your throat. You may not need this product or even be interested in it, but they need to sell it so they're going to be pushy and aggressive and downright annoying. And that's kind of how I feel about evangalism. Which isn't fair because God isn't an unnecessary product, but in this PC world where we respect everyone's views and beliefs, I have just never been comfortable bringing up my beliefs and shoving them in people's faces. I know that's not what evangalism is actually about, but that is just how it feels to me.

Some of it probably has to do with my need to please people, and "Christianity" is not something that pleases a lot of people. Most of my non-Christian friends (if not all of them) have had unpleasant experiences with Christianity at one point or another and it's not something that I want to bring up and defend. The passage that I want to leave you with addresses this a little and I think it's a beautiful passage just to think about. It's definitely something that has been on my mind ever since I've read it...

"In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn't do it, and moreover, that I didn't want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. 'Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?' he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won't do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God." (pg. 115)