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Why Did Jesus Have To Die For Me?

by Editor

THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

At the heart of the Christian faith lies an incredible claim: that Jesus died on a cross to forgive our wrongdoing, our evil, and our brokenness, what the Bible calls “sin”. From the very beginning of the Christian church, Christians claimed that Jesus had died for our sins.

THE SCANDAL OF THE CROSS

It is all too easy to miss how startling this Christian focus on Jesus’s crucifixion was. Jesus had claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. The first Christians—most of whom were Jewish—claimed Jesus was this Messiah. However in common Jewish belief, the Messiah was supposed to overthrow the Roman’s who had conquered and oppressed the Jewish people—not supposed to get crucified by them.

Furthermore, in the ancient world, crucifixion was one of the most painful, and most humiliating ways to die – reserved for criminals and outcasts. Thus for Christians to claim that their Messiah, their Lord, their God, had been crucified was scandalous.  Indeed, the New Testament recognises this:

We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. (1 Cor 1:23)

Why did the early Christians boldly and shamelessly and in the face of persecution preach that Jesus had been crucified, killed for our sins? There is only one historical explanation: because that is what happened and however unpalatable it was to Jews, Romans and to Pagans, Christians faithfully stuck to the historical story.

Jesus himself had also predicted his own death on many occasions, for example in Mark 10:45 where he says that he, did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. According to the Bible, Jesus himself, 2,000 years of  Christian witness and the testimony of two billion Christians today; Jesus died for us.

OBJECTIONS TO THE DEATH OF JESUS

But to many modern people, this seems ludicrous. I hear two common objections. First, “I’m not a sinner, there’s nothing wrong with me. How dare you suggest I would need ‘forgiveness’. The second is “Why can’t God just forgive us?” Why did Jesus need to die? Why was his sacrifice on the cross necessary?”

ALL HAVE SINNED

Let’s start with the objection to the death of Jesus for our sins “there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m a basically good person.”

The truth is that human beings go wrong in all kinds of ways—I do and you do, we all do. You are, if you’re honest with yourself, basically a pretty mixed bag, as am I. Or as best-selling author and film writer, Nick Hornby, put it:

I’m a good person. In most ways. But I’m beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn’t count for anything very much, if you’re a bad person in one way.

In 2009, golfer Tiger Woods gave his first press conference, after his multiple affairs and lies had been uncovered. A journalist asked him: “How could you lie to so many people for so long?” He replied: “Because I first learnt to lie to myself.”

Imagine if you had to watch a cinema screening of your entire life; every thought, word and deed. Some bits would be great, other bits would make you cringe with embarrassment—all the stupid decisions, all the rude hurtful things you said about others, all those secret thoughts and selfish ambitions. All the things you did—but also the good things you didn’t do. Imagine then, if everyone you ever met was invited to the screening and asked to judge you. The truth is that God sees every aspect of our lives like this and says:

 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)

He says that every one of us, needs forgiveness. No exceptions.

WHY CAN’T GOD JUST FORGIVE US?

So why can’t God just forgive us? Why isn’t it enough for us to simply say “sorry, God” and for God to forgive us—why did Jesus have to die?

Well, notice something for a moment. Real forgiveness, genuine forgiveness is always costly. Imagine you reverse your car into mine in a car park and dent it, causing a thousand pounds worth of damage and your insurance has expired. Taking pity on you, I forgive you the debt and let you off—you have been forgiven but your forgiveness came at a price. I paid the price so you could be forgiven. Your forgiveness was not free.

Or consider a wrong that isn’t economic. Imagine somebody insults you, shames you, and damages your reputation. What happens at this point?

You could make the person suffer. In this age of Twitter shaming, for example, perhaps you could engage in hash-tag justice and round up a social media mob to hound and harass the person who hurt you, in order to get even.  Or, in other parts of the world, maybe you even take things a stage further and employ vengeance to get even at the person who hurt you..

The only alternative to the spiral of hatred and violence that comes from responding to violence with violence, or hatred with hatred, or betrayal with betrayal, is to forgive. But forgiveness always carries a price. If you choose to forgive the other person, you have to carry within you the cost of forgiving them and turning away from vengeance. You have to pay the price for forgiving and not holding onto your pain or your honour.

Corrie ten Boom lived with her father and sister in the Netherlands, where her father ran a watchmaker’s shop. Committed Christians, Corrie and her family began helping to smuggle Jews away from the Nazis, hiding many in their home. In 1944, they were discovered and were arrested and shipped to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where her sister Betsie died an agonising death.

Corrie survived and began a post-war career as an evangelist, speaking about God’s love. But one day, something shocking happened. Let me quote Corrie’s own words:

“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing centre at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain- blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fräulein”, he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”

His hand was thrust out to shake mine. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your Forgiveness.

As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on Christ’s.”

Forgiveness always comes at a price. Corrie discovered she didn’t have the resources within her to pay that price, faced with one of the guards who had done what he had done. But she found in Jesus somebody who was able to provide them.

Couldn’t God just forgive us?

Nobody just forgives. You can’t just forgive, because forgiveness always comes at a price. Always. Forgiveness means that you bear the cost so that the perpetrator doesn’t.

When you forgive somebody, you effectively bear sin—you bear the wounds so you can forgive them. So it should come as no surprise that when God chose to forgive us, rather than to punish us for all the ways we have wronged him and wronged one another, that he would go to the cross in the person of Jesus and die in our place.

As New York Times best-selling author Tim Keller writes:

On the Cross we see God doing visibly and cosmically what every human being must do to forgive someone, although on an infinitely greater scale. I would argue, of course, that human forgiveness works this way because we unavoidably reflect the image of our Creator. That is why we should not be surprised if we sense that the only way to triumph over evil is to go through the suffering of forgiveness, that this would be far more true of God, whose just passion to defeat evil and loving desire to forgive others are both infinitely greater than ours.[1]

In Jesus Christ—whom Christians have always understood to be God in the flesh—God took our pain, our violence, our evil, into himself, absorbed it, bore the wounds and paid the price, so that he could forgive us and, eventually, destroy all evil without destroying us. That’s why Jesus, God with us, God in the flesh, God who stepped into space and time, gave his life on the cross as a sacrifice.

THE PERFECT SACRIFICE OR A LIFE THROWN AWAY?

If you’re walking with a friend on a bridge over a river and your friend suddenly says, “I love you, let me show how much” and they dive over the side of the bridge, into the river, and drown. I think your reaction would be “What! Why? Why did you do that stupid thing. How did killing yourself possibly show you that you loved me?”

But think of another type of sacrifice. For example, in 1916, Billy McFadzean, a 20 year old soldier was fighting in the First World War in the Battle of the Somme. A box of hand grenades slipped into a crowded trench, dislodging safety pins in two of the grenades. Realising what was about to happen, McFadzean threw himself on top of the grenades, which exploded, killing him, but his action saved the life of dozens of his comrades. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

What makes the difference between throwing yourself pointlessly off a bridge, or what Billy McFadzean did? What matters is if you sacrificed yourself because it was the only way to save others.

When we look at what Jesus did when he went to the cross, we have to ask the question. Was Jesus foolishly throwing his life away in some meaningless action? Or was Jesus doing it because he knew it was the only way to save me, to save you, the only way we could be forgiven?

The Bible puts it like this:

God demonstrates his own love for us in this—while we still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

When it comes to forgiveness there is always a cost. There is always a price. And that’s why Jesus paid the price he did, for our forgiveness, because of God’s great love for us.

FREEDOM FOR THE CAPTIVES

In his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes two characters, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton – who look almost identical. The climax of the complex story comes when Darnay is imprisoned and facing death but Sydney arranges a swap so that he is imprisoned and faces death in his place. Sydney loved Darnay’s wife Lucie to the extent that he was willing to die to save her from widowhood.

I don’t know about you, but I find stories like that incredibly powerful. They move us deeply, But they don’t change us.

Stories of great self-sacrifice in history or literature often make me wonder if I’d be that brave if ever the test came. But examples can’t change us.

Even ethics can’t change us either because we consistently fall short of our own standards. We look at Sydney Carton’s story, or Billy McFadzean’s, and we gulp and we feel small.

But the historical story of what Jesus did is different. It’s not supposed to be an example that stirs us to do better. Or inspires us. Or makes us go misty eyed at Jesus’s love and courage. Or make us want to be nicer to our neighbours.

The story of Jesus isn’t that kind of story. In fact it’s not just a story, it’s our story. We need to see ourselves in it. We are the Charles Darnay figure, imprisoned and facing judgement. We are imprisoned, condemned, by our pride and self-centredness, by our privilege, by our meanness, by our pettiness, by our desire for power and to be god in God’s place. But Jesus comes to us and whispers “Let me take your place. Let me pay the debt you can’t pay. Let me set you free. Let me give you forgiveness as a gift.”

Jesus offers us forgiveness, peace, reconciliation and friendship with God but he does so at a tremendous cost. He did it for us.

Stories of great courage can inspire us. Stories of great sacrifice can move us. But when you realise that you’re part of Jesus’ story and part of the reason he went to the cross was for you, it can change you. So often as human beings, we’re driven by fear and by pride. But Jesus’s story, Jesus’s death destroys both.

You and I are so bad Jesus had to die for us. That destroys pride.
But we are so loved, that he was willing to die for us. That destroys fear.

Don’t let fear or pride hold you back from all that Jesus has to offer and from discovering what Jesus’ death, for you, means and from the new life that can flow from that.

[1]        Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) p.192

PEP Talk Podcast With Craig Dyer

by Solas

Today we hear from Craig Dyer about how the popular Christianity Explored courses have adapted to life in a pandemic. How can we best use these evangelistic tools, still make connections online, and meet people where they’re at during a difficult period for us all? Craig also shares about the unique opportunities his home church in Glasgow has to reach out to asylum seekers.

With Craig Dyer – PEP Talk

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Our Guest

Craig Dyer is the Training Director for Christianity Explored, where he provides evangelism training for gospel-hearted churches around the world by developing a network of qualified trainers. Prior to this position, having graduated from Irish Baptist College in Belfast, he served as Pastor of Bellshill Baptist Church for just under 6 years and Harper Church in the south side of Glasgow for 13 years. He still serves there as an Associate Pastor. Craig and his wife Margaret have three daughters.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

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London City Mission Training (26 June 2021)

by Andy Bannister

Andy really enjoyed teaching for London City Mission on 26 June 2021. Below, you can find links to Andy’s slides and some other resources.

Download copies of Andy’s slides (all three talks) here.

Have a read (or a listen) to a free sample chapter of Andy’s brand new book, Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

Two other great books to read around today’s themes are:

Watch a Solas Short Answers video:

For more information about the Solas Centre for Public Christianity that Andy leads, visit www.solas-cpc.org. In particular, do check out our SHORT/ANSWERS video series. Over a million people have now watched, downloaded, or shared one of these videos with friends. They’re a great, free evangelistic resource. 

If you’d like to help support Solas’s work of evangelism and evangelism training across the UK, you can do for as little as £3 a month and we’ll send you a choice of one of several great books as a gift.

The Guilt Gap

by Editor

Of all the things we talk about in church, there are three subjects in the Bible which I have seen make people especially uncomfortable. In each of these areas, I have sat in the pews trying to avoid the preacher’s gaze; and also been the preacher opening the awkward text. The three I have in mind are lust, financial giving and evangelism. Those topics don’t have a huge amount in common, other than this: many Christians feel a secret sense of shame about failures in these areas, and wouldn’t especially want those failings to be made public!

This article is about the third of those things – our failures in evangelism, and how we process the sense of guilt we so often feel when the subject is raised.

The problem is that as well as being draining, joyless and exhausting; guilt can be utterly paralysing. I am aware of ‘evangelism-training’ events in which a fearless and extrovert evangelist has berated ordinary Christians for their timidity and left them so battered that they have been even less likely to speak for Jesus after the event than they were beforehand! And yet – the guilt we often feel about evangelistic failures is not easily dismissed because we recognise the sting of truth in the warning of Jesus about those “who deny me before men”. Because we all have.

I can remember some specific times when I was given opportunities to talk about my faith in Jesus – and bottled out. One was with a friend who I had prayed for over many years, hoping for the conversation to head towards a gospel opening. But when my prayers were answered I failed. Worse still, I can remember a period of my life when I concealed my faith from my colleagues. Peter’s dreadful night of denial before the cock-crowed three times was nothing compared to my year of treachery. The result was that when anyone spoke about our role in the Great Commission, all I felt was paralysing guilt.

In the Bible, in myself and in others I have observed three ways of responding to this sense of evangelistic failure. The first two are unhelpful ways of processing guilt, but the third I have found to be liberating.

The first of these responses is hiding. This should hardly surprise us, as the first sin mentioned in the Bible was almost immediately followed by the first human attempt to hide from God. It is sometimes more comfortable to have a debate about the literal nature of Adam and Eve’s hiding, than it is to face up to the fact that we spend too much of our lives doing exactly that now. Lingering in a sense of inadequacy and sin, we shrink back from prayer, shuffle uncomfortably in our chair during communion, and trudge joylessly through life with little thought of sharing Christ. Unsurprisingly we find this folly of fallen humanity elsewhere in scripture too: the great King David (no less!) described the period after his sin and before his confession as like his “bones wasting away” and of “groaning all day long”. (Psalm  32:3). Now, that imagery is strikingly and poetically vivid but, which of us has not sat in unconfessed sin feeling dirty, shamed, tired and frankly a bit grumpy!? When we have denied Jesus, and failed to take up the cross and play our part in telling others of him – then denial and hiding is a self-destructive way of processing guilt.

The second and equally dangerous way of processing our sense of shame or cowardice is by seeking to take ourselves in hand; applying ourselves to the task and doing evangelism by sheer force of our willpower. Go back to the guilt-trip evangelism-training session from the ebullient-evangelist I described earlier. The medicine he prescribed for those failing Christians who weren’t doing evangelism, was works. He might as well have said, “you are guilty, sign up and join my mission-team and your guilt can be removed.” Such an approach is devastating, because while he might have preached a gospel of grace to sinners outside the church, he laid a burden of works upon sinners in it! And that is no gospel at all.

What then is a more helpful approach?

I am convinced that one of the reasons that we so often fail to speak for Jesus is that we haven’t really grasped the extent of the grace of God towards us in Christ, the power of the cross to reconcile us to God, or the implications of that for the Christian life. King David’s guilty-misery described in Psalm 32:2-4 didn’t persist however.  Verse 5 continues, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.” David ended his Psalm in song and rejoicing, not because he worked off his debt to the Lord; but because The Lord forgave him.

And here is perhaps the key sentence in this article:

The same gospel which we seek to tell our friends; that Jesus’ death on the cross can do away with all their sin and reconcile them to God; is the same gospel which deals with all our failures – including our evangelistic disasters and denials.

I am not saying that sanctification and discipleship don’t require effort in a way that justification doesn’t! Progress in the Christian life is a co-operative effort requiring input from us in a way that receiving forgiveness does not. However, our reliance on God’s grace, for forgiveness of sin is the same throughout. In fact, as we mature in the Christian faith our sense of our reliance on God’s grace grows all the more. All the good works we do (including evangelism) must flow from this, not come before it. One of the scenes in the gospels which moves me the most is John 27:15-17 in which Jesus meets Peter again after Peter’s denial. Jesus firstly restores Peter’s relationship to himself and then recommissions Peter to speak for him. The gospel we share that says that all our friends’ sins can be washed away by Christ, is the same gospel which deals with our sins too.

The fact is, we cannot share what we do not have! If the reality of our daily Christian lives is that we think we need to earn away our sin – we will be paralysed with a sense of guilt that seems irremovable. Furthermore we will be gloomy, introspective and anxious and not exactly a walking advert for the Christian faith. These blessings don’t come from trying harder, doing more, or pushing ourselves ever further – they come from confessing our failures to the Lord, asking for His forgiveness and allowing Him to restore us.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones addressed the subject of miserable, ineffective Christians in his 1964 classic book, “Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure”. While stylistically it is very much a product of its era, it is nevertheless a source of continued help to many people today. In it he says: “Have you realised that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?”

What did he mean and how is it of help to us here?

The point is this. If we listen to ourselves we will hear guilt, failure, and condemnation. But what we can speak to ourselves is the gospel of Christ with all its cleansing power. “If I confess my sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive my sins and cleanse me from all unrighteousness.” (1Jn1:8-9) is a sermon I have had to preach to myself many, many times!

When we ask God to apply the gospel, with all its beauty, grace and liberating power to us first – then we will not find ourselves hiding, nor making evangelism an irksome burden of works-righteousness; but rather a privilege and a joy.

Guilt paralyses us, but Jesus liberates us. So if like me, you find evangelism difficult, and you have a tendency to beat-yourself up with guilt about every missed opportunity and failed conversation. Don’t hide from God, don’t attempt to expunge your guilt through effort – first come back to the cross and bask in the love and grace of God in Christ. “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace 8 that he lavished on us.” (Eph 1:8). We need to learn and learn again that God does not begrudge the grace He gives us – which He wants to “lavish” upon us.

Now that really is something to share with a dying world!

Further reading:

When We Get It Wrong by Dominic Smart
From Fear to Freedom by Rose Marie Miller
Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortland
Spiritual Depression by D M Lloyd-Jones

Christianity’s Unique Response to Suffering: Andy Bannister’s talk at Jesmond Parish Church

by Editor

Viral pandemics and the lockdowns which followed in their wake, have caused great angst and suffering across the world. Of course, human suffering and anxiety are nothing new and people have wrestled with trying to understand this for thousands of years. Andy Bannister was invited to speak about this at Jesmond Parish Church, in the heart of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Sadly, he wasn’t able to travel there in person, because of the restrictions in place, but joined them online from his study in Dundee.

In his talk, Andy noted that the global health crisis of 2020-1, has exposed the fragility of the belief-system that most people use to navigate life. Many people live today with the assumption that reasonable job security, sustained economic growth and personal freedoms are the norm and that as ‘decent people’ they deserve them all. The sudden loss of many of these comforts has lead to a resurfacing of the great questions of life – which as Douglas Murray notes – our society “has left largely unaddressed”. With the unfolding crisis, Bible sales have gone up, spiritual searches on Google have too – and media outlets and commentators from The New Statesman to Russell Brand have commented on the resurgent thirst for spiritual answers.

The fact is that people who reject God do not cease to be worshippers, they simply enshrine at the centre of their lives, substitute ‘gods’ such as money, sex, power, career or family. The crisis of 2020 has done enough to reveal that under pressure these false gods fall short at providing answers to the great questions of “why?”, or resources with which to navigate life’s trials. Secular gods are hollow. Other faiths and worldviews are problematic too. Atheism denies that the great “why questions?” (the asking of which is one of the key things which mark humans as a unique species) even really exist. Naturalism seeks to reduce everything to physical causes and can only describe a world in which things are as they are, and has no genuine space for questions of meaning and purpose. Other faiths wish to suggest that all suffering is the result of judgement or karma, and is essentially blame the victim, which is problematic too.

What then is the unique Christian response to the question of suffering, or to put it in a more contemporary way: Where is God in the Coronavirus World? Andy looked briefly at four things.

  1. The resurrection of Jesus means that Christian hope is not vague optimism or wish-fulfilment but a real, concrete thing. Andy said, “We can know, with confidence, that death is not a broken world’s last sneering laugh, but that the power of death has been broken because of what Jesus did.”
  2. The Bible provides a realistic account of the state of the world which makes sense. The brokenness of humanity and creation (stemming back to the ‘fall’) means that the world is not functioning as we all deeply feel it should. As a result Christianity has endured countless wars, plagues and crises – and today is thriving in the world’s most difficult places. Andy noted: “Christians believe that God has a dramatic plan, put into action through Jesus’s death and resurrection, to redeem and renew our world, and to heal and forgive us.”
  3. Christian hope is a lived-experience because Jesus is present with His people now. Andy noted the way in which the ‘secular gods’ of money, wealth and security have fled in the face of the pandemic. Jesus is the opposite. The solidarity with us that Jesus demonstrated in his incarnation; and his death on our behalf to save us from our sins, is foundational to our relationship to him. That relationship is not now a distant or remote one but a living reality. “Jesus carries us through the darkest times” Andy said.
  4. Finally, Andy explored the way in which Christian hope animates us in the middle of the sufferings of life. Drawing on his own testimony he said, “it was only the comfort and hope that Jesus brought that carried us through the darkest of days”.

Andy concluded his time with the folks at Jesmond saying, “God hasn’t moved, it’s we who have at times turned our backs—and sometimes it takes something dramatic, like a pandemic to wake us up to the fact that without God, there is no hope, no meaning, and no peace. But with God, there is. In and through Jesus, we can have all of those things. To those of you this morning who are hurting, or struggling, or despairing, or searching, Jesus said: Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you peace.”

 

 

Why Are There So Many Different Bible Translations?

by Solas

Does the fact there are so many different Bible translations mean we can’t trust the Bible? In this Short Answers film, Dr. Andy Bannister tackles a question commonly asked by (among others) our Muslim friends — and shows how far from causing us to doubt the Bible, the wide number of especially very early translations increases our confidence. We also discover a fascinating connection between the translation of the Bible’s text and an even more remarkable act of translation by God himself.

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Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.

God in the Workplace: Why Faith on the Frontlines Matters

by Editor

“You can’t get prayed-for in this church unless you are a ‘Reverend’ or a missionary” – she said to me, with obvious frustration. Her church was good at praying for people in so-called full-time Christian ministry positions, both at home and around the world, but had clearly missed something important along the way. When I enquired further it turned out that she had a boss who was a big-fan of the new-atheist writers like Dawkins and Hitchens. He had no interest in engaging in any thoughtful conversations about the big questions of life and origins – but had an apparent need to mock and humiliate Christians in the workplace, using his power within the organisation as his platform. The church at that stage seemed disinterested in her struggle, their prayers focused on their pastor and his ministry in the church.

What was going on there?

I suspect that part of the problem was an unspoken understanding that ‘real’ ministry is the preserve of the clergy, and Bible-college graduates. That was coupled with messages from the pulpit that suggested that paid-work should be got out of the way as quickly as possible in order to get on with the real business of church activities. The mindset seemed to be that there is a hierarchy of occupations, with secular work at the bottom, Christian-volunteering next, and paid-Christian work at the top. The inference was that prayer should be focused on those at the top of this hierarchy, because they faced the harshest battles and produced the fruit for the kingdom. The fact that such a view bears almost no relation to anything found in scripture hardly needs to be stated. What perhaps needs to be said is that it had a dreadful effect on the woman who’s story I began with. Her church sent her into a spiritual battle, under heavy bombardment – with no covering fire at all.

When I have mentioned that story in various places around the country, I have been amazed by how many people say that they have had similar experiences. But why has this happened? I don’t think that there has been a conscious rejection of the priesthood of all believers, or a stated denial that God calls people to be dentists, librarians and builders. Rather, my observation is that as a church we have just been slow to realise that the frontlines of the gospel have shifted somewhat.

Those of us who are a little older can nostalgically lookback at times when a significant proportion of the population were connected to the churches. Marriages, funerals, baptisms, Christmas and Easter filled churches with people with no definite faith in Christ. In such circumstances the frontline between the church and world – the point of contact when the word of God pointing to Christ was declared, was situated between pulpit and pew. When the world came to church, we focused all our prayer, training and resources on the preacher who would share the words of life. However, just as the battlefront moved from Normandy to Berlin from D-Day to VE Day; so the gospel battlefront has shifted in our times. Now the world largely does not come into church, the seeds of the gospel must be carried out into the world by painters, nurses, farmers, accountants, plumbers, scientists – and a hundred other occupations. That is going to mean several things such as training all Christians in good communication, not just ministers; it is going to mean praying for our day-jobs as much as we pray for our clergy, and it must mean celebrating Christians serving faithfully in the secular workplace, as much as we have lionised famous preachers.

Frontlines is a series of articles which we will be publishing at Solas as a small contribution to this pressing need in the church. We have interviewed lots of Christian people who are active in sharing their faith in Christ in their day-jobs. Each interview is different, as the life of a builder is quite unlike that of a farmer for example. How they go about sharing their faith is equally different, from businessmen doing lunchtime Bible-studies, to a sports-administrator answering questions about her faith at staff social-gatherings, to a construction consultant praying with and for his colleagues.

However, we want to do four things here. The first is to celebrate the courage and faithfulness of Christians in the frontline. The second is to showcase some of the ways people are sharing the gospel around the country, as some of their ideas might inspire you to try something new in your context. The third is to encourage Christian folks to recognise where the battle-lines are increasingly drawn and to pray for each other as we go into the world as Christ’s ambassadors. Finally we want to mention that part of our work at Solas is training, equipping and encouraging all Christians in sharing Christ, faithfully, wisely and winsomely in our day –so please do speak to us if we can help you here.

Does all this in any way denigrate church leaders? By no means! Recognising the real spiritual battles that Christian people in the workplace face, is not something that is done at the expense of praying for the pastor. Rather – it is something that the church must do as well as that!

So please join us as we speak to different Christians, about their work, its joys, challenges and opportunities to be a witness for Jesus. The first one will be Rebecca – a pilot who chats to her co-pilots about Christ 35,000 feet above the Atlantic!

Read Rebecca’s story

[Read the stories of how other Christians stand up for their faith here]

The Gospel In Secular-Scotland: In Conversation with David Nixon

by Editor

Regular readers will be well aware of the name David Nixon, because he has been a great friend of Solas and regular contributor to this website. His articles about Philip Pullman were very well received, as were his contributions to our Beginner’s Guide to Apologetics. He will be featured again soon in our “Mind the Gap – overcoming barriers to effective evangelism” series soon, and will be a guest on an upcoming podcast. Today we’d like to introduce you to the man behind all the great writing, so Gavin Matthews spoke to him for Solas.

Solas: Hi David! So tell us, what are you roles and responsibilities at the moment?

David: Hi Gavin! Well, I’m married to Kirsty who is a GP, and father to Joel and Daniel who are 4 & 2. I’ve recently discovered Lego with Joel which is lots of fun! I am a minister at a church in the centre of Edinburgh in the Old Town, called Carrubbers Christian Centre. I do a lot of preaching there, as well as mentoring and leading the student ministry which gets me involved in university CU’s and missions, as well as some writing for Solas!

Solas: And how long have you been at Carrubbers, you attended there as a student long before you worked there…

David: Yes, and I’m now in my eleventh year on the staff there – after studying law at Edinburgh University.

Solas: So going back to the beginning where does your own Christian faith start?

David: It starts in Belfast where I was born and brought up, what I call “The Bible-belt of the UK”! I was born into a Christian family but my grandfather was the first ‘Nixon’ to become a Christian. He had been sick and bed-bound for a number of months when he was given a pamphlet about the life of the Christian Olympic runner Eric Liddell. He was contemplating his own mortality and brokenness; and the meaninglessness of his life at that time and was impressed with the fact that Liddell didn’t just run in the Olympics; but was ran in a far greater race. He had a far greater purpose and significance in his life which came through The Lord Jesus. So my Grandfather became a Christian, and eventually became a minister. My Mum and dad were Christians too, so I started with a legacy of faith in our family.

However I grew up in Northern Ireland during “the Troubles” – essentially a civil war between the two communities there. Now my family were on the more extreme side of that divide, (for many reasons) and they opposed the peace process and Good Friday Agreement in 1998. I grew up in the church of Rev Dr Ian Paisley, who was a firebrand and whose sermons mixed the Bible and politics. So when today we look across the Atlantic and see Trump and “Christian-nationalism” and all that; then I’ve seen that in my childhood in a different context. I’ve seen just how dangerous that is.

When I was very young I got involved in politics – and into increasing amounts of trouble with the authorities. So in the year 2000 my family decided to leave Northern Ireland for Scotland. That was quite an experience – moving from “Bible-belt-Belfast” to secular Scotland! I went from being surrounded by Christians at school to being the only one in a school of a thousand. I remember saying to my parents in the car one day after we moved over, “the church in Scotland is dead!”, there certainly wasn’t one my parents were happy to join. So I was young, with no Christian peers, without a church community, and that was ‘make-or-break’ time for me. Although I was confident and outspoken – and didn’t mind being different; I will never forget one lesson in RE. The teacher announced that they were going to have a “grill-a-Christian” event, and that the Christian in question was me! So all my classmates spent the next period putting me on the spot. But that was the first time that I ever had to give a reason for the hope I had in the Lord Jesus, and the first time I experienced the reality of Jesus’ promise that “When you are brought before…., rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say,  for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.” I experienced it that day!

And that is how I discovered apologetics. In my mind, I was having to work through big questions: “is this really true, because no-one else believes this” – it was a very lonely experience. When I was about 16, I told my parents that I was going to go to church. They were not happy with the churches, but I needed church so walked a couple of miles every Sunday to the local one.

Solas: So presumably along that journey somewhere you had to pull apart a focus on Jesus himself from the political-cultural structure you had been brought up in. So how did you begin to sift and sort what was important there?

David: That would have been much more difficult to do had I still been in Northern Ireland where the line between cultural Christianity and the person and work of Jesus would have been too muddied. But to be taken completely out of the cultural-political situation was the providence of God. It’s actually been in the last ten years that I’ve started to unpick some of those things.

Solas: And none of us are totally objective, we all have culture (it’s easier to critique others than our own!). How do you process what is central to the gospel and what is peripheral, then?

David: My training as a lawyer is really helpful there. In law you take a case, and are trained to look at all sides of it. The best lawyer is actually the one who can present a good case for either side! So, I deliberately seek out the opposite viewpoints to the ones I naturally hold, and want to see what there is to them. So I deliberately read broadly across newspapers, theology, philosophy and history – trying to understand different sides of every argument and challenge my biases.

Solas: So that must be really helpful when you are doing student missions on campuses and you face critical (or hostile!) Q&A sessions! And sometimes, you’ve already thought through their objections..?

David: Yes! It means I have a lot of sympathy for people who are expressing arguments I have studied, understood and felt the weight of. It’s so important never to “straw-men” an argument – to weakly misrepresent an opponent’s view in order to knock it down. That’s never convincing, just insulting. The opposite is “iron-manning” which is to respond to the very best case that someone puts forward. That enables you to take the person on a journey from what they are thinking towards what you are thinking, because you have understood their perspective well.

Solas: So in all the objections to the Christian faith you have heard, which do you think are the most forceful and how have you processed them?

David: There are a variety. One, which I find difficult to answer is “maybe it is true, but so what, I don’t need this right now.” Last year at a student mission in Glasgow who seemed persuaded by the truth of the gospel but too apathetic to respond to it! I told her not to forget the gospel, because even if she couldn’t feel her urgent need of it them, she might well if difficult times arrived. A week or two later Covid hit us and I’ve often thought and prayed for that girl – that she would remember what she heard that night.

Questions around suffering are always very sensitive too. The abstract question about why God might allow suffering aren’t so much the problem, there are good answers for that. It’s more of a problem when I have been asked about abuse situations, sexuality and gender. It’s hard to minister truth into people’s pain in a way that doesn’t make things worse – or not recognise what they have been though.

The issue I go back to personally starts in that RE classroom in 2001. What came up there was, “you’re only a Christian because you’re Irish. If you were from here, you’d be like us. If you were born in Saudi, you’d be a Muslim!” When I was a teenager, I could totally see the logic of that. I hadn’t yet seen the obvious comeback to these secular Scots which was “and you’d been born in Ireland, you’d be religious too!”

Solas: But what does that prove about what is actually true? It’s just a sociological observation about people…!

David: The reason why I have come to believe something is one question; but a second question is “what good reasons are there to believe that Christianity is true!?” And the motivation behind so much of my reading, is because I’m always challenging myself about whether I have good reasons to be a Christian! Is this just all down to family and culture, and wishful thinking – wanting it to be true? Of course, atheists have many reasons for wanting it not to be true, as Thomas Nagel wrote “I don’t want the universe to be like that.” So my apologetics is rooted in separating out why I have come to believe; and whether there are good reasons to believe it or not, in the light of all the objections.

Solas: So if you were given a sabbatical or study break now – what would you study?

David: Oh, neuro-science and then consciousness and the mind. I’ve been reading Sharon Dirckx and others, but I’d love to do some detailed work on that. Partly, of course because of Philip Pullman. I’ve written a number of articles for Solas about Pullman – and all his works are about consciousness. I’d also love to go much deeper into studying ethics, natural law, and how the enlightenment has failed to provide a basis for right and wrong, justice and injustice. You know I’d love to re-do some of my law courses, on things like the philosophy of law; because back then I just didn’t have the tools to engage with it properly. I’d love to do more on the Christian foundations of our legal system, and philosophy of law and justice.

Solas: So in your city centre church ministry, what challenges do you face in Edinburgh in 2021 (other than lockdown!)

David: I see two very different worlds. I see a lot of opportunity amongst students and enthusiasm for mission there. Then I see a really complicated picture after that.

We’re not a community church, we are a commuter church – gathered from across the city, so we don’t see how people are missionally involved with their communities. We don’t have a local primary school that we can seek to reach – our people go to many different schools. So a lot of what we are doing is resourcing and encouraging and sending people – but we don’t always see what is happening. So that’s challenging.

But students are here, and they are as open and interested as they have ever been. Covid has opened up all kinds of big questions for them too – about what really matters. Their plans and prospects have been threatened, and they are asking why. They aren’t necessarily asking direct questions such as “Where is God in a coronavirus world?” However they are asking, “is there a meaning and purpose to be found in life? Or “is there hope?” and “Where can true happiness be found?” Interestingly the questions have changed over the last decade or so – they are no longer asking “Has science disproved God?” or “Is the Bible reliable?” Instead they are asking, “why I am here?” “what hope is there?” Questions around activism are big too, such as “How can I make a difference, and impact the world?”

Solas: Interesting –in our interview with Kristi Mair she said very similar things. That for many people the truth questions come later..

David: We’re back to Pascal who said, “Men despise religion because they fear that it is true!” So what you have to do is make people see that the gospel is attractive, that is speaks to the deepest desires of their hearts; and then you show them that it’s true.

Solas: So does that mean you have to add an apologetics to your preaching, looking at a text and anticipating the objections of your audience?

David: Yes! If anything I have to be careful not to do it too much! But for example if I’m in the gospels and come up to a healing or a miracle. Well a hundred metres from our church building is a statue of David Hume – “Mr anti-miracles” himself! So we have to anticipate that people will read that text and simply assume that it is just fables. Yet, by providing an apologetic for miracles the sceptical listener can see that we actually think and don’t just accept things on blind faith. It shows that that they are in a place where questions are welcomed, not stifled. They can keep listening and keep learning. It’s like disarming bombs before they explode! Or next week when I’m in Romans which talks about our “obligation to God” to “put sin and the flesh to death” and that immediately raises all kinds of objections around freedom. So I have to start with an apologetic ‘sidebar’ to explain how as Christians we understand freedom. So I contrasted Orwell and Huxley! Orwell’s 1984 is based upon his fear of a totalitarian state, whereas Huxley’s fears in Brave New World that we will enslave ourselves with our own desires and pleasures. It was Neil Postman who suggested that Huxley was right – and that our own desires can enslave us! So true freedom is freedom from and sin – and freedom to obey God. Life lived with and for God is in fact freedom! So I have to engage with those kind of objections and issues, as I open the text.

So, it’s really important that we are always engaging with the questions people are actually asking, rather than the ones they used to ask. Sometimes people are more willing to believe in the resurrection of Jesus when they see someone’s life transformed by it, than when they just hear credible facts about it, for example. We’re not just “brains on a stick”, and the gospel touches every aspect of our humanity.

Solas: What are you own hopes and prayers for your ministry?

David: Here in our city-centre church, I’d love to be part of raising up an ‘army of people’ who are confident in the Lord Jesus who are able to go out and engage with the culture; with friends, family and neighbours. We are in the middle of a society which is hostile to the Christian faith, and are seen as ‘the bad guys’. But if we can have a group of people who have wrestled with the hardest questions in church – they will be willing to discuss them with others, and not be afraid. We need Christians not to doubt the goodness of God, but to be confident about it. Evangelism is most powerful takes place when people are glad of the gospel, not just feeling compelled to tick off a bit of evangelism on their ‘to-do list’! When people really feel that the gospel is good, true and beautiful, then they will share it well. I would love to be part of that – sending people out to ‘do some damage for the Kingdom!’

Northern Ireland is still relatively ‘Christian’ in that you could plant a new church with no problem – people would come; whereas here ministry is blood, sweat and tears – it’s long-term hard work. So in a post-Christian Scotland we need to draw from the example of the early church. The New Testament church was founded in a non-Christian culture, a hostile world in which they were on the margins, they were a tiny minority who were feared and considered to be weird, and persecuted – but yet the gospel triumphed; so there is hope!

The Early church outthought the pagan world, they outloved the pagan world, they outlived the pagan world, the out-died the pagan world and were willing to suffer, staking their very lives on Jesus; and they out-prayed the pagan world too. So these five things must be our focus in this era as we seek to go forward. We need to grasp that we can’t win culture wars, or take short-cuts through reclaiming power, but rather that it is through prayer that there will be change in our society. That’s really my ethos, and aim –and anything we can do together to assist with that is good.

Solas: Thanks David – that is an inspiring but also challenging vision for ministry.

David: Thanks for chatting to me – I’m off to record a Solas podcast in a few minutes too!

David Nixon is a minister at Carrubbers Christian Centre in the centre of Edinburgh.

PEP Talk Podcast With Stephen McAlpine

by Solas

What happens when presenting the Gospel puts you on the wrong side of ‘cancel culture’? In places like our work or university, we can sometimes feel like the ‘bad guys’ when we try to espouse Christian truths. Today’s guest has thought long and hard about how we can adapt to these difficult environments with his book Being the Bad Guys.

With Stephen McAlpine – PEP Talk

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Our Guest

Stephen McAlpine is a blogger and ex-journalist who writes on issues of theology, culture and the church. He is a pastor at Providence Church in Perth, Australia, and also works at a national level for City Bible Forum, developing and presenting evangelistic material for a project called Third Space. He is married to Jill, loves running in his spare time, and blogs at stephenmcalpine.com.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

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The Friendship Gap

by Editor

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:29-32)

It was a wet autumn evening in Belfast as I sat in my car outside the home of my then girlfriend (now wife), waiting for her to return from spending the weekend with her parents in County Armagh. My phone ping’d as a text message came through: “Got delayed. I’ll be with you in 15mins,” it read. With nothing better to do, I decided to scroll through the contact list on my mobile. I’m one of those weird, obsessive individuals who is uncomfortable with digital clutter – the kind who struggle with anything but essential folders, symmetrically-arranged on my desktop, and who unashamedly remove themselves from Whatsapp groups the second they have served their purpose – so I thought the next quarter of an hour might offer me a welcome opportunity to refine my iPhone 4 of any contact fodder (i.e. “5-a-side Mark” who organised the weekly kickabout I stopped going to three years ago, or the U.K. number of a friend who had recently moved to Thailand). As I fastidiously scrolled through the list, an inconvenient truth struck me: Out of a contact directory of nearly two hundred names, all but a couple were Christian – and one of those was the New Century Chinese takeaway I frequent on Saturday evenings!

How had this happened? I was a staff member of a large church, I preached regularly in churches around the country, I knew Greek and Hebrew, and I considered myself to be someone who took evangelism seriously. After all, I had done evangelistic mission trips every summer for the past six years! I could stand behind a lectern and preach evangelistically to an audience for strangers, or even go onto the streets and “do evangelism” by giving out gospel literature, apprehending passers-by in spiritual conversation whether they wished to or not. Yet somehow my entire social network – the people I would go for coffee with, or shared a changing room with before and after a soccer game at the weekend – the people I had real relationship with had inconspicuously become monolithically Christian.

No matter what our knowledge, experience, gifting, or enthusiasm when it comes to sharing the Gospel may be, it is going to be almost impossible to do any kind of effective evangelism if, in reality, we simply don’t know or are not in significant relationships with people who do not share our worldview. The Lord, of course, can graciously use our sporadic missional efforts in things like open-air preaching or door-to-door literature distribution. Yet, if I am honest about my own experience, these types of momentary, “sacrificial” ventures where often more about appeasing my own evangelistic conscience than they were about a genuine love for lost people. Indeed, more often in the history of Christianity, the most effective strategy for Gospel witness has not been the charge of the Gospel light brigade in sporadic evangelistic “campaigns”, but the consistent and curious public witness of individual believers prepared to both display and discuss the Christian hope within them among friends, family members and colleagues whom they sought meaningful relationship with (cf. Matt 5:16; 1 Pt. 2:12; 3:15).

Of course, the antecedent to this type of evangelism is the expectation that each of us actually have meaningful relationships with non-Christians. Why not take a moment – either now or later today – to scroll through your mobile contacts, or make a list of your closest and most consistent relationships in order to appraise just how coherent our own lives are with this biblical expectation? This is not an exercise designed to guilt-trip, but simply a fresh, private opportunity to evaluate just what sort of relationships we really have with people who don’t know Jesus. If your honest assessment is anything like mine was that night in my car, you may be experiencing what we at Solas are calling the “Friendship Gap” in evangelism. Simply put, our evangelism is stalling because we aren’t invested enough in healthy relationships with those outside the Christian community.

Undoubtedly, there are many reasons motivating why we might be experiencing Friendship Gap, and we must personally consider what the influences might be for our own lives. Perhaps two of the most universal determinants, however, involve what we, first, might identify as a specious theology of Christian distinction and, second, the practical problem of a Christian-saturated social infrastructure which may or may not be a product of this fallacious theology. Let’s consider the theological challenge first.

The New Testament is very clear about the anti-Christian spirit or mindset at work within our fallen world (cf. 1 John 2:16; 5:19), as well as the importance of Christian believers remaining distinct in their thinking and morals from this spirit, both for their own flourishing and as a faithful witness to the world of the beauty and truth of God’s better story. The Old Testament account of the nation of Israel is a cautionary tale to the power of the world over God’s people. Israel was chosen to play the unique role in history as God’s instrument of “light to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:6), illuminating the pagan nations they lived among to the truth and superiority of Yahweh via their ethics and practices. Yet, all too often, the tide of influence flowed in the opposite direction and the people of Israel, to their detriment, found themselves adopting the values and worldview of these nations. As sobering a warning as Israel is to the power of worldly influence, we should not conclude – as some Christians have mistakenly supposed – that there is, in reality, only danger, and nothing of heavenly value in healthy mutual relationship with non-Christians, and that the only surefire way to ensure the maintenance of our faith is to, in effect, socially distance ourselves from any meaningful non-Christian contexts. This erroneous theology of godly distinction was precisely the prism through which the Pharisees and theologians of Jesus’s day interpreted his investing time and interest in “tax collectors and sinners”. For them, godliness was about separation from such people. Consequently, they simply could not reconcile their self-aggrandising notions of holiness with Jesus’s genuine love for non-believers and concluded that the holiest human the world has ever known, God incarnate no less, must himself be a sinful fraud. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Far from Jesus’s active engagement with unbelievers being an evidence of spiritual compromise, it was, in fact, a tangible reflection of God’s incalculable love for those He longed to make His children. Contrary to the perceived need to guard oneself from being contaminated by the darkness a rebellious world, Jesus knew that the Light that he, and his followers after him, carried into that world and put on display, was a light that no darkness could overcome (John 1:5) – a light that, as the Gospel narratives bear witness, bore an unyielding power to positively contaminate any person’s heart with the very life and love of Almighty God. It is on this very basis, equipped with the same divine power, that Christ commands his followers to hold up that same light in today’s world through purposeful and consistent friendly engagement with unbelievers.

A second major contributing factor to the Friendship Gap in evangelism is the practical challenge of, often unconsciously, allowing our social lives and relationships to orbit almost exclusively within a Christian solar system. By this, I have in mind things like church-based exercise groups (5-a-side, badminton etc.), Christian book or movie clubs, or the proclivity to only invite believing friends round for dinner or coffee. Indeed, in our largest university in Belfast, we have not simply Christian, but denominationally-specific student halls of residence, each with their own active social, devotional and recreational activities, meaning that a Christian undergraduate can spend their entire degree bubbled together with their believing peers, running the risk of being practically inoculated from any need to spend meaningful time with coursemates who do not share their worldview.

Admittedly, these challenges are not always the product of the aforementioned fallacious theology of avoiding worldly influences (though for some Christian parents of students certainly they are!) Often, the Friendship Gap occurs unintentionally, simply as a result of our natural human propensity to prefer the comfort of socialising with people who share our values and thinking, or as an upshot of being so busy with “Christian” activities that we have no time or space for anything or anyone else (a particular problem for those in so-called “full time Christian ministry”!) Yet this is a far cry from the incarnational foundation of the Gospel: the story of the God who so loved the world that he actively laid down his rights and privileges and, at incalculable cost to himself, stepped meaningfully into the lives of those who did not believe, and would ultimately reject him. Jesus is all the precedent we will ever need to bridge the Friendship Gap!

So if, in all honesty, our personal evangelism is haemorrhaging momentum due to the basic problem of the Friendship Gap, what can be done about it? Let me conclude by offering some suggestions that might help in bridging this particular gap.

First, pray for tangible opportunities to build strong relationship with people who do not share your faith. The Lord delights to answer these kinds of prayers and it is amazing how many “coincidences” happen the more we pray. Ask God to bring people to your mind that you could (re)connect with, or to make you attentive to people in work or other contexts who might deeply value someone taking a genuine interest in them. Often in these areas we simply are hindered by a lack of imagination about who, or what, or where we could cultivate the Christian value of being a great friend, so invite God’s help in this.

Second, try to prioritise taking opportunities to build healthy relationships with non-believers. Prayer will certainly sensitise our hearts and minds to the importance of opportunities. But, more often than not, the Lord will not magically do all the work for us. He wants us to take the responsibility and risk of trying things that will connect us with others. This could mean making a phone call or sending a Facebook message to someone you’ve lost contact with. It might involve inviting a work colleague for a drink or to your home for dinner. It may even mean deliberately choosing not to join the church society for recreation, social activity, or community service and, instead, enjoy these opportunities within contexts where you will be mixing with non-Christians. If that seems intimidating, why not ask a Christian friend to join you and do it together? Simply remember that there are lots of fascinating people out there who have many of the same interests and experiences that you do. What they don’t have is Jesus. And who is to say that God may not have given you the interest and skillsets that you have precisely because it will connect you with similar people whom their heavenly Father is calling home? Try something.

Third, appreciate that you are going to need to be sacrificial and generous with your time, patience and interest with people. I once had someone I worked with in a charity tell me how delighted they were that I had joined as a volunteer because I was a Christian, and the last partner they had occasionally used foul/blasphemous language and only ever talked about Gaelic football and the parties that they attended at the weekends. If we’re really going to bridge the Friendship Gap, we are going to have transcend our personal interests, political persuasions or worldview and value others as image-bearers of God, not on the basis of what we get out of the relationship. This means that we invest in people not as some evangelistic project (which they will sense almost immediately!) but on the basis of their inestimable value as an individual willed into existence by God; that even if their interests or how they might think or choose to live differs significantly from our own, we do not relate to them on this basis but, rather, enter into what they care about because we value them. This is not always easy to do, but there is every precedent for it in how God relates to us. So ask for the Lord’s help and, for the Lord’s sake, be the best possible friend you can be.

Finally, don’t give up! Remember that so much of the dynamics good friendship evangelism depend upon the qualities and art of any good friendship. Invest consistently and sacrificially in truly getting to know the other person; ask good questions that express genuine interest and move the relationship beyond the superficial; be trustworthy with information; forgive generously; and let your light shine before them, always being ready when the opportunity arises to give reasons for the hope within you.

C.S. Lewis in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (2015:122) wrote: “Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none less a wonder; as great a wonder… as first love, or even greater.” What a privilege to be that friend in the life of another person. And how that wonder must be magnified infinitesimally when, in the dynamics of blossoming friendship, we have the divine privilege of introducing that person to the Friend who sticks closer than any brother.

 

At CBMC-Belfast

by Editor

CBMC – Belfast is a network of Christians who work in the business sector, and in the marketplace in and around Belfast. The event was organised by Andrew Wallace who is one of the leaders of CBMC-Belfast.

The invitation was for Solas to come and present some advice and ideas for doing helpful evangelism while lockdown restrictions prevent us from doing our normal work. Around 25 members of CBMC Belfast joined Andy Bannister and Gareth Black on the webinar. Between them they broke the night into three parts.

Gareth Black kicked proceeding off with a session looking at some of the obstacles we face in evangelism. He talked about some of the unhelpful ways Christians can view people who do not share our faith; as well as the fear some Christians have that they might lose or weaken their faith if they engage too much with the world. There is a lurking fear that the world has more power to contaminate Christians, than the Christian-gospel does to win people in the world. So Gareth addressed some of those fears. Then he looked at some of the practical difficulties some Christians face such as, not knowing what to say, or how to conduct a meaningful gospel conversation.
Andy Bannister took the next two sessions. He looked at how to ask good questions to further gospel-conversations which are helpful. Questions such as “why do you think that?” and “have you ever wondered…?” can be incredibly useful in opening up and developing positive conversations with friends who not yet believe in Jesus and his gospel.

Andy then looked at eight ways people are doing evangelism over the Christmas period, when this webinar took place. He talked about everything from ‘carols-by-carlight’ to evangelistic Christmas-cards, to examples of people running Christianity Explored or Alpha in their workplaces.
Then there was a good Q&A sessions with some insightful and probing questions – and it made a good start to a series of evangelism and evangelism-training events Solas has planned with CBMC Belfast.

Andrew Wallis said,

“CBMC Belfast is so thankful for Andy and Gareth delivering an online event for us on ‘Sharing Your Faith During Lockdown’. We are an organisation that is passionate about equipping marketplace leaders in sharing their faith in their business or workplace context and the guys from Solas were great in making the session relevant to our group. The mixture of practical examples from Gareth and the theological grounding from Andy was perfect for our group and we pray that the group can take the lessons and put them into practice in the coming days and weeks.”

For more about CBMC-Belfast, click here.

If God is Good, Why is There Natural Evil?

by Solas

If God is all powerful and all good, why do we live in a world where we see ‘natural evil’—everything from earthquakes, to floods, to pandemics? Andy Bannister tackles this common question — and shows how (unlike atheism) the Christian worldview offers powerful resources both for naming and identifying evil, as well as giving us a concrete hope that evil is not a broken world’s last laugh.

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The Fear Gap (1)

by Editor

There are many things that I’m good at, but sport isn’t one of them.  I used to hate PE lessons at school, especially when playing games.  You see, I wasn’t the only one in the class aware of my lack of sporting proficiency.  So, inevitably, I would be among the last picked by the reluctant team captains.  Even though I had long before made peace with my sporting failures – still it’s hurtful to not be wanted!

As human beings we have deep needs to be liked and appreciated.  Most of us fear being rejected or judged by others in life.   That’s also true in evangelism.  Just as old theologian Augustine in his pre-conversion hedonistic days prayed “Lord make me continent [chaste/pure], but not yet” –sometimes (perhaps before the visit to the hairdresser or jumping in the taxi or going out for the night with your friends) our secret prayer might be: “Lord, open doors for the gospel, but not tonight”.  That evangelistic reluctance very often stems from fear.

There are two fears I want to address in this article: The Fear of Being Rejected and The Fear of Being Unequipped.  We’ll answer them from the little New Testament letter of 1 Peter, in which we find the famous apologetics / evangelistic text: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).

(1) The Fear of Being Rejected

Many of us know what it is like to struggle with nagging questions of self-doubt like: what do other people think about me?  We wonder if I speak out as a Christian, how would that change peoples’ perceptions of me?  Our social media profiles are carefully curated to present ourselves in the most favourable light and our best angles.  But we’re not the first to worry about what others think of us…

Peter begins his letter to “the elect exiles” – to these Christians scattered throughout the Roman world, who are tempted to feel ashamed about the gospel.  They are so small in the eyes of the world, and their churches which feel so insignificant compared to the power of the Roman Empire – by reminding them of who they really are.  Yes you are “exiles” and strangers in this world… but you are “elect” and embraced by the Living God: “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood”.

Peter tells us that from before the foundation of the world, we have been “foreknown”.  The background of this word in the Bible is not simply an intellectual knowing in abstract, but an intimate knowing in relationship.  God the Father has freely and gladly set His love upon us – wishing to draw us close to Him and lavish upon us His goodness and love.

This love of God the Father has been brought into effect in our lives by the “sanctification of the Spirit”.  The goal is “for obedience to Jesus…for sprinkling with His blood”.  There were three times in the OT that blood was sprinkled: for making a covenant, for cleansing a leper and commissioning a priest.  And through faith in Jesus, we enter into a covenant relationship with God, we receive cleansing for our sin, guilt and shame, and we receive a commission as His ambassadors in this world.

The gospel tells us of the loving Father who has given all He has to draw us back into His arms of love: His Son to die for us and His Spirit to live in us.  These realities are the things that truly define us.  Our culture tells us to base our identity on our performance and popularity, on what we do and what people think of us.  However, the gospel sets us free by telling us that God – the ultimate authority and the final opinion maker – accepts us on the basis of what Jesus has done and not all that we have failed to do!

All of that means that when you are in a gospel conversation – you need to remember that your performance cannot change what God thinks of you or how He feels about you.  You live for an audience of one – there is no one whose opinion could count more – and His mind is already made up about His children!  You have nothing to prove to Him.  So you can speak from a place of safety and security in the knowledge of His eternal and unchanging love.

If you’ll forgive the extension of the sporting analogy: you’re already on God’s team – you’re already on the pitch – so go play under His watchful smile.

(2) The Fear of Being Unequipped

If you’ve never been forced to do door to door witnessing, then count your blessings!  I’m not knocking (no pun intended) that form of evangelism – instead I greatly admire some of my friends who do it courageously and effectively.  It’s just that I don’t rate myself at being very good at it – after all, I start with the handicap of being an introvert at the best of times!

However, old theologian John Calvin famously began the Institutes by saying that godliness consists in two things: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self.  We’ve already thought about how growing in our knowledge of God and His approval can help us overcome our fears of rejection.  Now I want to consider how growing in our knowledge of our self can help when we think of evangelism as a team sport.  Perhaps there are omni-competent people who can perform well in any role on a team – but I’m not one of them.  I play well to my strengths and need team mates to compensate for my weaknesses.  That’s why I’ve found it liberating in recent years to think of evangelism as a team sport and my church friends and family as my team members.  I have my own “evangelism / mission style” but it is complemented and enhanced by the styles of others around me.

We see that in the New Testament too.  In 1 Peter 4:9-11 we read: “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. 11 If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.”

It’s a common mistake to imagine the apostle Paul as a lone-ranger super-evangelist.  Rather always Paul worked in teams and mission bands – and was at his lowest when alone.  The book “Becoming a Contagious Christian” pulls out six profiles of different evangelism styles in the NT:

  • Confrontational: Peter (Acts 2) – perhaps you are bold and fearless about proclaiming Christ and calling people to make a response
  • Intellectual: Paul (Acts 17) – perhaps you enjoy a discussion or debate around the hard questions
  • Testimonial: Blind Man (John 9) – perhaps you find it easy to talk about your own experience of God working in your life and bringing you to faith in Christ
  • Invitational: Woman at the Well (John 4) – perhaps you find it easy to invite people along to things where they can see and hear more about Jesus
  • Inter-personal: Matthew (Luke 5) – perhaps you make friends easily and want to share the good news of Jesus with those you are close to
  • Practical: Dorcas (Acts 9) – perhaps you have a passion for serving those in need and through showing your love it makes it easy to talk about Christ whose love you are sharing

If you’re not sure, you can try an “Evangelism Styles Questionnaire” online to discern your primary evangelism style(s).

Therefore, you don’t have to be afraid that there is one size fits all evangelism – that God enjoys squeezing square pegs into round pegs – or making everyone go door to door.  Instead, you need to find the evangelism style that fits you, so you then can go and fit into God’s great mission in this world.

PEP Talk Podcast With Tony Watkins

by Solas

In today’s episode we think about the relationship between the Gospel and our culture.  Is there merit in finding touchpoints between the two, or should we always seek to share the “pure”  or “transcendent” Gospel?  Our guest Tony Watkins finds that arts and media can provide helpful inroads for the Gospel into individual lives, as we consider the values, needs, and aspirations found in our shared culture.

With Tony Watkins – PEP Talk

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Our Guest

Tony Watkins helps Christian leaders relate media and the Bible through his writing and teaching, and is studying for a PhD exploring connections between the media and the biblical prophets. He is the Media Engagement Network Co-ordinator for the Lausanne Movement.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

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