Curious Christian

6 responses to “Life Decisions”

1. 

   mary

   2009-01-19

   I personally heard truth spiritual Truth but the ones sharing it were not ppl i could relate to or feel comfortable with. This Truth i heard over and over again from diverse individuals (religious types, non-religious types and even a political activist) God sends the message – the Holy Spirit convicts us and finally when we is broken enough in our arrogance we say yes…
   For me i aint big on demanding ppl make a decision for Christ. NB I ain’t God.
   Plant the seeds and let God deal with the person… Sometimes it makes me wonder have i got it wrong. But i do know that i have spoken the truth of who God is to friends who would never listen to any Christian preaching. One of them said to me she listens/they listen to me because i am real. Well i never have hidden my sins from them put it that way ahaha
   I actually hate all that mission stuff even the word… it conjures up righteous types pounding your brain with their belief. It also reminds me of colonization and genocide in the name of Jesus.
   It is sharing the Good News… and letting God do the rest…

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. 

   Matt Stone

   2009-01-20

   Oh, I aint big on “demanding” people make a decision for Christ either. I am talking more “invitation” here, as opposed to never sowing seeds at all.
   I gather from your comments that you’ve probably been exposed to all sorts of agressive pressure tactics. Could you elaborate further? It would help me understand.
   To explain my story further, the “challenge” I had was that I met this Christian girl, who I really liked and who really liked me, but having become good friends she declined to go out with me, citing her faith as the reason why. I couldn’t understand, at the time, why me being so anti-Christianity and deeply so deeply into Zen, the occult and other stuff should matter so much to her. Live and let live I thought. Well, her standing firm revealed to me the depth of her faith, and with some divine intervention and the invitation of a third person, I was challenged (by everything) to take a deeper look. It was a challenge because for me the decision what not small, it was life changing, and I knew it. The rest, as they say, is history. She’s now my wife.
   Now in all of that there was never any demanding I change. In fact she never expected the change, I had to convince her the conversion was genuine. The only thing she insisted on was her not compromising herself. The challenge was just her standing firm to who she was, listening patiently to my questions and struggles, and inviting me to look deeper when I was open to it. Does that make any more sense?

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. 

   mary

   2009-01-20

   yeah it makes sense 11pm so am abit slow… Re aggressive pressure tactics… Well there have been too many to list but a primary one was a minister yelling at me i was the whore of babylon when me and my boyfriend went to a church on a Sunday. We were young, damaged, chronic addicts… It was my idea to go to the church and man did i regret it… My boyfriend of the time thought it hilarious. The minister told him i would take him to hell. Just like that Took one look at me and judged me that way
   Um i have learnt not to disclose all my thoughts round churchified christians. I am highly distrusting of many christians. More relaxed round non believers who are less likely to feel the need to shape me to what they want me to be.
   Um i got ‘saved’ alone & stoned off my face in a commune (eastern cult sorta place) I figure God knew it would be a one to one with me… by the time i accepted Him i had exhausted my search for truth and trusted no-one.
   O i just remembered something which is pertinent… I was a patient at 16 in a detox run by religious people. This woman she sat by me bed whilst i was withdrawing and in a living hell and says “Can you see Jesus died for you? Can you not see it?” over and over…
   Well i imagined a man being crucified and said to her Look its a bummer OK it’s terrible sad but it aint my fault…
   the rest of what i told her you would not want on this blog. She left the room very quickly!
   See people like that dont understand when you are lost in the vortex of darkness you cannot hear/see what it is they know. They should be discerning and not pressure that way because it causes more resistance and anger in the recipient…
   *Like you i was deep into various occultic whatevers for a long time…

   LikeLike

   Reply
4. 

   Matt Stone

   2009-01-20

   whore of babylon – OMG! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that’s so awful.
   We’ve had a few addicts and crims through our church (some now ex-addicts and ex-crims) and all we had to hose down were a couple of raised eyebrows at the smoking going on during morning tea. The minister later said during a sermon, he prays to God for more smoking during morning tea because that means we’re making connections with the community beyond ourselves.
   I think what people sometimes forget that it’s up to the holy Spirit to convict people, not us. Sometimes we’ve been helping people and a moral issue has come up, and the question has been raised, “Should we deal with that?”, and we’ve prayed and discerned, no, they’re got bigger things to deal with, lets just keep walking them through the stories and the ways of Jesus and give the Spirit some space to work. Then two weeks later the person has come back and asked, “Is there a moral issue with this? I think there is and I want some help.” Works a whole lot better when we stop trying to be God.

   LikeLike

   Reply
5. 

   Jarred

   2009-01-20

   Matt: I’ve enjoyed the conversation between yourself and Mary. (As an aside, from the comments I’ve seen by her, I think the world would be greatly benefited if she were to start/share her own blog, too.)
   One of the things that I’ll note is that asking someone to “make a decision for Christ” sounds terribly formulaic to my ears. This is probably because when I was a Christian, I was involved in churches and groups that tended to take an extremely formulaic approach to evangelism. “Witnessing” meant taking someone step-by-step through the Romans Road, the Wordless book, or some other standard technique. Even the recommended approach to opening the discussion up to witnessing was formulaic. Many of the church leaders (and there’s a joke about this being the standard “opening line” of Baptists in general over here) would recommend coming right out and getting the ball rolling with the question, “If you were to die to night, do you know with absolute certainty where you would go?” My IVCF staffworker (and the IVCF organization in general) preferred the less confrontational opening question, “Are you interested in Spiritual things?” But in both cases, it was still very formulaic with a orderly outline for the conversation to follow from there. The problem is, of course, that conversations rarely follow such a predefined outline for long.
   Granted, even over there, there are exceptions. For example, I absolutely loved Rebecca Manley Pippert’s book, “Out of the Saltshaker.” In Pippert’s book, she focused on forming relationships with people and setting a groundwork were real religious and spiritual discussions could unfold and develop naturally.
   Of course, all this is to say that I don’t object to the idea of asking someone to make a decision for Christ. I just think people need to learn that making that invitation can take many different forms and doesn’t have to worded exactly that way or treated as the closing question of a formulaic witnessing technique.

   LikeLike

   Reply
6. 

   Matt Stone

   2009-01-20

   Jared
   I am aware this can sound formulaic, particularly when formulaic is all many people know, but lurking behind this conversation is an ongoing dilemna about language and identity. Many words and phrases associated with Christianity and Christian teaching have been distorted beyond recognition by centuries of misuse.
   Take the word “church” for example. Originally it just meant “gathering” or “assembly”. It referred to the people, wherever they were, not the property or the hierachy of religious professionals we these days call “clergy”. It was not even a particularly religious term. These days however, that’s all some people hear when you use the word. Buildings, hierachy. Centuries of misuse have cemented these sub-biblical meanings in many peoples heads. So the question arises, why not just abandon the word? Well, I often do, but not completely. Because if we, who understand it has deeper meanings, abandon it to those Christians who do not … well, lets just say my experience is that non-Christians fail to make the connection between what we say about alternative community and what these others say about church. They hear it as two separate conversations, when its not. The end result is only the sub-biblical teachers are heard as talking bible talk. No a helpful situation.
   So the question arises, can we recover the original meaning? Can we present an alternative within the public sphere? This is something I think we indeed must do – even at the risk of being misunderstood. This is where I return to words like “witnessing”, “evangelism” and “deciding” to follow Christ. I am extremely critical of formulaic approaches. So when I use the words I mean something very, very different.
   And maybe those of us who reject the formulaic approaches are not as rare as you might think. You see, we don’t tend to get us much attention in the media because we don’t shout so loud. Yet we’re here. The very fact that I was recently elected as Ministry Leader for Mission and Evangelism at our church, when its well known I reject formulaic evangelism, should say a thing or two.

   LikeLike

   Reply