Doing life with gospel intentionality
One of the central things we do at the moment in Redeemer, in the lead up to launching, is Citygroup. We meet as a community of people every Wednesday in the Oh Yeah Music Centre, right in the heart of the Cathedral Quarter in Belfast city. It is one of my favourite parts of the week. We chat over coffee, worship together, spend time in God’s presence, talk about our values as a community, and encourage one another. About every 3 or 4 weeks, we do a session called Total Church. Total Church is a great book that we’ve been working through together; its subtitle is “A radical reshaping around gospel and community”. Certainly reflects our goal within Redeemer Central, to be a church that reshapes the way communities see church and encounter Jesus. Last week’s session was really great. We were looking at evangelism, and talking about living ordinary life with gospel intentionality. A lot of what we discussed resonated with me, and my own particular story.
I went a little off the rails when I was in my late teens. Lots of people do. Lots of people who grow up in traditionally Christian Northern Irish families do. My parents became Christians when I was just a few months old, so in a way, I sort of feel like I grew up with them, in terms of understanding of Christian faith. We went to a staunchly traditional church. One of my early memories is of my 8 year old self having an argument with my dad and one of the church elders in the car park. My mum worked night shift as a nurse, and was having a well deserved lie-in after working through the night. I decided to use the opportunity to ‘accidentally forget’ to bring the beret I always had to wear in church. My dad was never going to notice – he’s a man. Unfortunately the church elders were well trained in the art of spotting young girls trying to sneak in to church without their heads covered – and we were promptly denied entry. A full blown row in the car park ensued. They wanted me to use one of the lacey things that the old ladies used to cover their heads – there was a ready supply available at the church door. I was most indignant. Eventually, (with a number of whispered threats from my father about the trouble I’d be in when my mother found out), we were allowed into church – on the condition that we sat in the back row, and left 5 minutes before the service ended.
Traditional church didn’t work so well for me. I know there are lots of great traditional churches around. There are many traditional churches that are open to the spirit in the same way as some charismatic churches, and I’ve had great experiences in some of them. Maybe ‘traditional’ is the wrong word to use to describe the church I grew up in. ‘Legalistic’ might be a better word. It seemed like I was always getting into trouble in this one. Church was just a big old set of rules that I always seemed to break.
So when I got to about 15, I decided that I didn’t want to be a Christian any more. I didn’t feel like it had ever been my decision – I felt like it had been imposed on me. I always had a pretty strong sense of independence, and this imposed Christianity conflicted with my own sense of autonomy. Monday mornings in school were a big issue for me. My friends would land in to school on a Monday morning, full of crazy stories about their weekends – great parties, with lots of drinking and random snogging. When you are 15, that sounds so much better than saying you spent your weekend going to youth club, church, bible class, church again, then youth fellowship, drinking diluting orange and singing choruses. So I dropped out. And then, like many people do, I went to completely the other extreme.
At the height of my journey to the other extreme, I was working at an outdoor pursuits centre as a canoeing instructor, which was good, and drinking most nights of the week, which wasn’t so good. I mean, it was fun at the time – but the aftermath was never much fun. But it was during this time that I got to be at the receiving end, for the first time, of churches and their evangelistic techniques. My colleagues and I used to go out every Thursday night to a local pub – we usually made it down in time for cocktail happy hour, and would stagger out the door about 8 hours later. On the way back to the outdoors centre, we would pass a local church which had started doing a late night coffee table. Wonderfully committed people would stand in the street between midnight and 4am, handing out coffee to people like myself, taking lots of abuse, and trying to engage people in conversations about Jesus. I used to do a similar thing some years later, when I was a fully signed up committed Christian, studying at Queens and trying to come up with ways to impact the student population of Belfast.
Most of the people I was with on these occasions weren’t too interested in chatting to the folk manning the coffee table. They’d swing by and grab a free coffee and a custard cream, and try to make a fast exit. But I liked chatting with them. Not because I wanted to hear what they had to say. More because I wanted to challenge them, and make them question their faith. I’d grown up in a Christian environment. I knew exactly how to panic them. I’d ask them about evolution, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, war, genetic experimentation – everything I could throw at them. I’d question them about grace, pulling out scriptures that had been ingrained in me as a child, and using them to counter their feeble arguments. I think they were excited to see me coming back week after week, perhaps thinking that I was weakening in my resolve to oppose Christianity, maybe thinking they were getting through to me. But the truth is that every encounter I had with them convinced me that Christianity was weak and irrelevant. I commend them entirely for their intentions – but it just didn’t work for me.
My journey to the extreme hit a major snag when I was fired from my job at the outdoors centre, due to my excessive drinking. That was a big blow for me. I’d already been kicked out of university a couple of years earlier, having failed every exam. I was planning on building my career in outdoor pursuits – I couldn’t quite believe that I’d screwed that up as well. Getting fired turned out to be more than just losing my job – I had to move out of the centre I’d been living in for 2 years, away from colleagues and friends. I moved back home with my parents for a few months – no mean feat when you’ve been used to complete independence and living life your own way.
The late night coffee table evangelism hadn’t worked for me. People reminding me of my sin didn’t work for me. The gospel tracks my mum conveniently dispersed around the house didn’t do it for me. What finally did it for me was a demonstration of grace.
I was invited one evening to a Christian concert that a local church was putting on. I wasn’t too keen on going, to be honest. The band were called ‘Reality’, and that instantly spoke to me of Casio keyboards and lots of cheese. My initial assessment wasn’t far wrong. But I desperately needed friends – I didn’t know anyone back home any more, and I was getting lonely. I’d been given a free ticket by some people I’d met a few times – it seemed like a good opportunity to get to know some folk. So I didn’t go to find Jesus – I went in search of friendship. It was the need for community, and the ready offer of friendship, that got me through the door that evening. And it turned out that Reality had some good stuff to say. They spoke about God’s grace, and how nothing you could do would ever make God love you any less than he already does. That night was the beginning of a journey for me – of gradually opening myself up to the prospect that God wanted to be in a relationship with me, and realising that it was what my heart had been seeking all along.
Last week’s chapter in Total Church looked at living ordinary life with gospel intentionality. I experienced an element of that with the people who invited me to that concert. Their offer of friendship was genuine. It wasn’t based on my acceptance of faith, but on me as a person. Evangelism worked for me when it wasn’t all about running events or answering awkward questions. It worked for me when it was centred on relationship, and valuing me as an individual. It worked for me when I saw ordinary people doing life in ordinary ways, and loving God and the people around them while they did it. People living everyday life with a missional approach. I didn’t give my life to God that night at the Reality concert. It took me some time. But over the next few weeks and months, I spent more and more time with my new friends, watching how they lived their lives, seeing the ways they interacted with one another, listening to them talking about God in ways that were so real, seeing them value me for what I brought to the group – it impacted me. I was drawn in to the community of believers, my antagonism against Christianity faded, and gradually I began to encounter God in a way that was entirely new to me.
I’m not much of an evangelist – at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I’m not good at answering the difficult questions. I’m not good at arguing the finer points of doctrine. I’m not comfortable with approaching people I don’t know and proclaiming my faith to them. I’m pretty sure I would be terrible at street evangelism or door to door. But what I can do is build relationships and live in community. I don’t want to be in a Christian community that becomes a Christian bubble. I want to be a Christian within the community. The difference is significant. My own experience of evangelism shows me that relationship works. Relationship is key. When evangelism becomes more than just events, when we make gospel intentionality part of our ordinary lives, when we engage people in community and value them as they are and not as our latest project, then we are on the right track, and individuals and communities will be impacted in radical ways.
Tags: Christianity, Church, CityGroup, Life, Relationship
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