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Embarrassment and Evangelism

“I like their way of doing it more than your way of not doing it.”

Written by Andrew Wilson | Wednesday, March 6, 2019

“I’m not sure if James heard a noise about seven minutes into the film, but if he did, it was my hopes being dashed on the floor. You see, James was a hip and modern college dude who had seen far more of Hollywood’s latest offerings than I had. The Jesus film, meanwhile, is on the cutting edge of 1979. Sure, the script is a verbatim presentation of Luke’s Gospel, but I felt embarrassed to be subjecting James to what I saw as subpar acting and cringeworthy cinematography—Is that Jesus levitating?—for two long hours.”

 

I have a theory about evangelism. Many Christians—and this includes me—have a habit of saying that things would be cringeworthy or embarrassing to our unbelieving friends, when what we really mean is that they would be cringeworthy or embarrassing to us. This can be benign, and lead to good outcomes: appropriately contextualised events, liturgy, music, websites, language, and even typeface (looking at you, Sans fonts). But it can be more insidious than that. Preaching on X would put off unbelievers (or more accurately, Christians). Spiritual gift Y is just way too awkward to be used in front of visitors (or more worryingly, us). Most commonly, I suspect: evangelism using Z would embarrass the pants off those who aren’t Christians (or more pressingly, me). So let’s not do it.

If that sounds familiar to you, then you might find this story from Matt Smethurst’s (forthcoming) Before You Open Your Bible encouraging:

When I lived in China, I got to know a college student named “James”; we’d met playing basketball and had become fast friends. But, just like virtually everyone around him, he had never heard about Jesus Christ.

Over the course of several weeks, I shared the gospel with him a few times. He seemed interested, and asked great questions, but he couldn’t disavow the atheistic worldview that had been ingrained in him for his entire life.

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