Communicating To Those Outside The Church
‘Repent you sinners for the Kingdom is at hand. Come all you who are heavy laden and he will give rest for your souls; come all you who are thirsty; forsake your wicked ways; take up your cross and follow the Master; be washed by the blood of Christ and be his disciples; be clothed in his righteousness and justified by his blood, that you may become inheritors of eternal life and live for the Lord’s glory!
How am I doing? Anyone likely to be persuaded yet by my attempt at evangelism. Would anyone without any king of Christian or church background have a clue what I was talking about? A comment by Ruth on my posting about the words Christians used really got me thinking about this issue again. How do we communicate the gospel to people who don’t know our jargon at all? In my response to Ruth I suggested that we at least need to explain and unpack our terms so that they begin to make sense. But I also suggested that we should even be willing to start not with the biblical words, but find modern words and analogies to begin with in order to make those first connections.
I would be interested to hear back from readers as to any ideas that they have about how you would go about finding contemporary analogies for concepts like repentance, sin, righteusness, Kingdom, disciple etc. etc. Or would anyone argue that we should only use Bible words?
May 16th, 2006 @ 3:47 pm
Hi Trevor…
I was reading ‘The God Who is There’, by Francis Schaffer, recently and was really intrigued about what he said about guilt (I think it has some relevance to your question - specifically as a way to talk about sin).
Schaffer notes that a ‘modern’ understanding of guilt tends to be limited to feelings of guilt that one might have about things that they have done that they later regret (Like that time I said something really nasty to the girl at work who drives me nuts. She cried and I felt like such a heel).
Schaffer encourages his readers to challenge people to understand guilt in the Biblical sense.
“Christ died for man who had true moral guilt because man had made a real and true choice.”
In this sense, people are guilty because they have done something wrong (not feeling guilty because they did something they wish they hadn’t). This is the Biblical sense of sin; not acts that we feel bad about, or things that are generally agreed upon as harmful to society, but actions that make us guilty before God.
I remember many productive conversations at University that surrounded such topics. I didn’t have Schaffer’s knack for putting things just so, but I do think that this is a helpful way to make the concept of ’sin’ understood.
Looking forward to seeing you in Cardiff.
Cameron Fraser