Hospitality: Meet Others

These next posts will talk about how we can effectively communicate with all people about our beliefs. Later on, we will talk about communicating our beliefs with people who hold to religious belief.

Really and truly, people don't care what you think or believe if you don't know them.


Communication begins by creating a safe place to communicate. Otherwise known as a relationship. But it's hard for some particularly religious followers of Jesus to have relationships with unbelievers. There's this belief that we shouldn't be around certain types of folks. And while it is good to not entrust yourself to unbelievers, it is not good for us to abandon them altogether.

Meeting people in our individual culture is sometimes hard. Can I just say, "Please talk to God about this?" People at work may or may not be open to meeting a coworker outside of work. People meet at bars, coffee shops, meetup groups, neighborhood or apartment associations, concerts, festivals, COLLEGE, volunteer organizations, online, libraries, civic centers, etc. You were also born into this thing called a family. More than likely, some in your family don't really know Jesus.

So, dinner at home is good. Inject food into a situation, and people are automatically talking. You might have to eat out if you live in a tiny apartment like mine in the big city. (Can I get some love for Small Space, Big Style?) Hospitality is an art form. If you didn't grow up being hospitable, there is a steep learning curve. Basically, you have to think about how to make others comfortable and you have to find out what they like. I know people who are experts at being hospitable, so I always ask them advice on designing a room or an experience. Play it by ear, but have at least a loose plan.

Learn to find the good things in people's lives and reinforce them. Nearly everyone has some good quality or innocuous hobby. You don't want to find yourself compromising your beliefs by just accepting everything that people do. That's not good for anyone. It doesn't mean you have to point out the faults of others, but you surely don't want to encourage sin.

Be kind. Send people cards. Give gifts. Become a part of their family. Watch their kids. Visit them in the hospital and go to weddings and funerals. Truly love these people. After all, God did this with you. He, in His kindness, pursued you and loved you. It wasn't because He wanted to score against the devil, but because He genuinely cared for you.

This is not a numbers game.

Please comment on some creative ways you have met people or have provided hospitality.

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Religious word of the day: Redemption. The only thing we redeem in America is a coupon. But redemption is a term that is much harder to define. At it's basic core is the example of a slave who is bought and freed. This is the act of redemption, being bought and freed. In the New Testament, we are shown to be slaves of sin, having been bought with the death and punishment of Jesus and freed by unity with his resurrection.

Preparation: Understanding Religious Beliefs

The previous posts are about preparation: knowing the right motivation for sharing Jesus, understanding the unnecessary barrier of religious words, and finding out what the end goal of discipleship is.

Let's look at some of the basic religious beliefs we are at odds with.

1. Guilt/shame religion: Religions teach you at a very basic level that God is way up high and you can't get to him unless you are a good enough person. Penance or self-punishment is done to "make up" for the evil you have done. At the end of life, you will have a reward if your good outweighs your bad.

The problem with religion is that you can't ever be good enough. God is perfect, and He demands perfection. You know deep down that you can't possibly measure up, even if you try so hard it hurts.

Guilt religion is just absurd. How can your good make up for the evil you have done? It's like saying, "My 20 years of incarceration will make up for me killing your loved one." No, punishment does not make up for evil.  Justice and "penance" is found in the cross of Jesus Christ, where Jesus took our sins away and forgave us. Now life is a life of gratitude, not guilt. We measure up because we have been united with Jesus.

2. Encompassing religion: Ever heard, "All roads lead to heaven. You believe what you believe, and I'll believe what I believe. I'm okay; you're okay."?

This type of religion is marked by an absence of absolute truth. In this, truth becomes about inner intuition and superior spiritual knowledge. This knowledge is not obtained from God giving you direct revelation, like the Bible, that can be read and applied to all people. No, this is gained through meditation, spiritual experiences, séances, magic, etc.

By the way, saying "all roads lead to heaven" is one of the most disrespectful things to say about other religions and shows you really have no idea what you're talking about. The problem with that phrase isn't just that Jesus said "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6). No, the problem is that heaven after resurrection to be with a personal God isn't even a concept in other religions. For example, in Hinduism, to be resurrected again is actually hell. Reincarnation is seen as a bad thing because it means you must not have measured up to where you need to be yet. The ultimate reality you are aiming for in Hinduism is actually the dissolution of your individual self and becoming energy that unites with the elemental force or creator force of Brahmin. Heaven is not even a thought. See what I mean?

3. Non-religion: This is atheism, the belief that there is no God. It is usually expressed in a very scientific, modernist way. This means that if something cannot be proved scientifically, it doesn't exist. In essence, truth cannot be known if it is not scientific truth.

Atheism comes from two places: a reaction to the oppressive Medieval "Christians" or from Theravada Buddhism. The more common form is the reactive one. It is therefore an anti-religion that is often very negative. You get the feeling they feel superior to everyone for having come to accept the brave thought that there is nothing after death. Agnostics believe that you cannot know if there is or isn't a god. It's basically diet atheism. This is not a humble and more enlightened belief. Rather, it is a cowardly and bland belief.

The problem with atheism is their mechanical way of understanding truth. Love cannot be defined scientifically. Morality cannot be proved or asserted under scientific law. In fact, science cannot tell us "why", it can only tell us "how".
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Comment if you want to talk about any of these you have seen or tried to confront. I've done this a lot, both successfully and unsuccessfully. I'm sure the other readers have similar stories that we can all learn from.
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Religious word of the day: Hallelujah - it means "praise YHWH" in Hebrew. YHWH are the letters of the unpronounceable name of the God of Israel in the Bible. Sometimes it's spelled Yahweh, or erroneously as Jehovah. Praise means to lift up or worship.

Preparation: What Are You Aiming For?

In previous posts, we explored how our proper motivation to share the good news of Jesus with others is joyous gratitude, not duty and pride. We also explored some of the religious terms that might get in the way of communicating the good news.

This post is about what you are aiming for. The adage goes, "If you aim for nothing, you'll hit it every time." We actually have the most compelling goals ever known to mankind wrapped up in the person of Jesus. The reason it's important to have an aim and a vision is so that you aren't trying to just convert people. Let me illustrate this point.

This is what happens a lot of times. People attend a church service or they go to a stadium. They hear an amazing speaker or have a spiritual experience. Then they "convert" by praying a prayer accepting Jesus as their Lord. Then they go home. Then... well, who knows? 

I call this "popcorn conversion". You heat the person up with emotion. They pop and convert into something new. Then .. it's just fluff and stuff that sticks between your teeth, the person isn't really deeply changing or connected to God. Honestly, we who are leading people to Jesus have the responsibility to disciple them. There is no call in the New Testament to just leave people alone after they give their lives over.

The problem is the word "convert" and what that means. It is a one time part of a person's life wherein they convert from being unsaved to saved. Convert is not a word used very often in the Bible; it's used a total of 8 times. The word disciple is used an amazing 296 times in the Bible. Jesus said for us to make disciples, not converts, and there is a mind-blowing difference there. Disciples take time; they are welcomed into the family of God. They learn with this amazing support group how to live in God's presence.

We are hopefully aiming for the full vision of God that sees perfect union between Him and His family, the church. It is something you have to confront culturally, because we are very individually minded people. But the Church is a collective, family-minded people. There should be no such thing as an isolated Christian because we are essentially pack animals. When we think of conversion, we have to think this way. We are not just welcoming people to a relationship with Jesus, but also a relationship with us.

We are aiming for being an entire group of people who are looking like Jesus more and more everyday, becoming closer and closer in unity with the living God.

Preparation: Reform Religious Vocabulary

Prayer, repentance, faith, confess, preach, evangelize, disciple, convert, sin, baptize, church, Christian, Lord. 

These are words that are religious. They aren't inherently bad, but they might confuse the uninitiated. Even worse, it might conjure up images of a violent religion with a sordid past.

Let's go through these words one by one and talk about why we would actually be loving people to find a new way to say what we mean so people don't have an unnecessary barrier to learning about Jesus.

Prayer. Prayer can be simplified as talking to God, but I believe it is a lot more than that. Prayer is listening to the Lord, and it is also bending to what He wants. Prayer can have the unfortunate connotation of being a ritual that only the religious can pull off. For more information from Jesus on what prayer is, read Matthew 6. There is so much more to read on prayer, so comment if you want to have more information on it. My suggestion is that we refer to prayer as a "conversation with God".

Repentance. Repentance just means to turn away from something and turn towards something. It comes from the Greek word "metanoeo" just in case you care. Jesus famously preached, "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near." So it's a 180. It's handing your life over to God. It's letting God turn your life around. There are so many ways to say it.

Faith. Faith can mean a few things. It can mean religion, as in "I would like to share my faith." It can mean believing something unseen. Faith is not really Biblically defined as a religion. Other religions were never defined in the Bible as being "faiths". Faith is more defined as trust. Trust has this element of believing that God is good, that He is real, that He keeps His promises, that He loves us, that He revealed Himself to us and that we are to act on this trust. Trust encompasses not just belief, but also action. After all, trusting someone has an element of win or lose. You either win because you acted in a way that trusted someone, or you act and lose because someone betrayed that trust.

Confess. Confession is a word used in the justice system. It has this flavor of crime, police, jail, courts and judges. But confession to us is more about being humbly open about your shortcomings and your mistakes. It can be about expressing guilt, even guilt for actual crimes committed, but more often than not it is about letting God and the trusted community of believers lovingly work with you in your shortcomings. It is not about being open about the mistakes you made and just accepting them as something that will never change. That helps no one.

Sin. Sin is a difficult thing to understand. In broader culture it means a religious offense. But for us, sin is the destructive force that is rooted in disobeying God's loving and perfect ways. It creates a vast and impassible gap between God and man, ruining the relationship that we were destined to have together. In Greek, the term is "harmartia", which means to miss the bullseye in an archer's target. But the Biblical writers took it further than that to show that sin was what brought death to a perfect world. It's about disobedience, so it is any selfish action that contradicts the two main commandments, "Love God; Love others as yourself."

Baptize. I can hear the controversy already brewing. The English word "baptism" is actually a word steeped in controversy because it isn't a translation. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, a trade language of the time, and the word for baptism is "baptidzo" in this Greek. Outside of the Bible it was a word used to describe boats that had sunk in the water. It was not translated correctly because it went against a religious tradition. Basically, someone was a coward and didn't want to translate it right.

Before the fireworks start, let me tell you a couple of things about myself. I was raised in the Lutheran church, a church that participates in infant Christening or baptism. This is a practice of sprinkling water on a child to signify their future faith in the Lord. I was sprinkled when I was 13, though, since I wasn't really born into that church. In college, I was baptized through immersion in water, and I'll tell you why. Romans 6 and Mark 1 give pretty good simple explanations. Romans 6 explains that baptism is a unity with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ - so it has to symbolize that somehow. Immersion is probably the best way to bury someone completely without killing them, as long as you raise them up out of the water... Mark 1 gives us the picture that Jesus "came up out of the water", which isn't really a picture of sprinkling water but rather of having been down in the water. At my church they just call it "dunking". It's important to understand because it is one of the things Jesus wants us to do. If you haven't been baptized, let's talk about that.

Church. The word in the Greek is "ekklesia". It just means "gathering" or "community". It does not mean a building. Most Christians were meeting in homes during the times of the New Testament, and there is no evidence that there was a separate religious building owned by the Christians. Church is the people of God living in community to journey on the mission of God together. It is within us as a group that God has chosen to express His presence in this world (Matthew 18:20, Ephesians 4). There are many wonderful expressions of who the Church really is in the New Testament, and I encourage you to research it further in the Bible. The Church, however, is also not one singular denomination (1 Corinthians 1:10-17). It is only evidenced as the collective people who have turned to God and place their total trust in Jesus Christ. Beware the word "church", because it has the added baggage of being a religious institution that murdered thousands upon thousands of people in the Middle Ages. This is still very much felt in Europe and the Middle East. This was absolutely not what God wanted from His people as Jesus commanded us to love our enemies.

Christian. It was actually a derogatory term that someone else named the believers. So if it feels derogatory to you, it feels right! :D Christian obviously comes from the word "Christ", which means "anointed one". What's "anointing"? It's sort of a pre-coronation ceremony with oil poured over the head of the person who is becoming King. I guess it's kind of like calling someone "president-elect". A Christian, though, is one who follows Jesus. We were also termed as followers of the Way, the believers, the saints, etc. There are lots of ways to say Christian without saying the word Christian. The one thing you have to watch out for is that if you claim to be a Christian, you may find yourself having to defend some of the actions of people claiming to be Christian who never really followed Jesus...

Lord. The word Christ is discussed in the previous paragraph, but the word lord has this British thing going on. It's a title that tells us someone is royal or important. However, we don't really have that in America, unless the word president works. Maybe boss is a better term. We just don't have lords and masters in America. Ideas?

I know this was a lot to read, and I promise the future posts will be shorter. But the next time you hear some religious words, don't take it for granted that you know what the words mean. Other people who never grew up in a Church culture won't know what you mean, or they might think of something bad. We can clear up our language and instead bring understanding and intrigue to our discussions if we avoid such terms.

Preparation: First Things First

First things first. We have to each take a personal inventory. What are our motivations for sharing about the Lord Jesus and making followers? I always like to journey from dark to light, so bear with me as I write about the dark things first, then hopefully turn on the lights.

Let's start with some of the ones we might need to avoid: duty, fear, anger, ethnocentrism, and pride are a few motivations that are pretty common. Duty and guilt appear very spiritual, but they are not. They are drawing on this notion that God will accept us when we have done everything right. This is how some people enter into sharing their faith because many ministers have pressured people to do so. Fear and anger are deeper expressions of that insecure relationship with God, fearing that he will punish those who do not "evangelize". Ethnocentrism is an expression of pride. It means thinking that your culture is better than others and expressing that in thought and deed. I can resonate with this one, having gone on a few missions trips with the idea that my way of life needed to be taught to others because they were from "backwards" cultures.

How do we approach these problems? These are mainly religion-problems. What I mean by that is that they are based on a system that believes you have to be good enough to reach God. (As in, you have to do what He says to be accepted.) We really have to dig deep into our spirits to understand our motivation, because this is the wrong place to start, and it isn't the good news of Jesus. 

The good news of Jesus is that, yeah, we are messed up and we can't measure up, but that Jesus not only paid the price of our mistakes, but He also raised us to new life to be able to please God. This means that duty and guilt are dead. Our lives are simply gratitude to God for saving us from ourselves when we didn't measure up. This speaks to the fact that obedience is not a burden, but a joy. Obedience, then, is a joyous participation and adventure in gratitude, not a bitter duty to be done like a chore.

Matthew 28:18-20 shows us one of the amazing ways we can participate in the Kingdom of God. "Then Jesus came to them and said, 'All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.'"

John 3:16 sums the proper motivation up nicely, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life." Our reason for sharing is love. We have been loved so much. Have you experienced that love? If not, know deeply and accept that the Lord indeed loves you. He truly does. Ask the Lord to show you His love and kindness. He will. Accept Him as the King of your life, and walk into the amazing purpose He has for you (His purpose in you is not just to convert people, by the way). 

It is a hard road, because there is a lot of evil in the world that tries to prevent you from understanding this deeply and accepting Jesus as the King of your life. But Jesus summed it up nicely, "Then he said to them all: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self?' "

Before we can spread the good news of Jesus, we actually have to accept it. We also can't act out of religious motivations of duty, fear, and pride. It just doesn't make sense. We share about Jesus because we ourselves have experienced His great love, we know the amazing worth of obeying this great King, and we see this as an adventure in participating with the Lord in His quest to save the world.

Does that make sense?

Introduction

Welcome to the "Announce the Kingdom" blog. This blog is going to document the journey my wife and I are taking to spread the good news of Jesus and make disciples.The reason we want to document it openly is because we know that it is hard, and many are discouraged because they feel they don't know what to do or what to say. We do want to emphasize that it's difficult. In fact, it's impossible. But, we have a God who does the impossible.

Why would you listen to me? I'm not really an expert, and I'm certainly no Billy Graham. We are just common people who really want to follow Jesus. That doesn't make us amazing; it means that Jesus is amazing. I think it would be good for us as a group to see ordinary people going through this journey who aren't employed by a church. It's good because I think sometimes we let others do the job, thinking that we really should let the professionals do this.

About the format of this blog: The last thing we want to do is make these articles and reports about patterns that are easy to repeat. Patterns sometimes make us less dependent on God because we feel like "we can do it ourselves" if we have a good pattern. Following Christ is never about being independent from God. We need His Holy Spirit everyday. We also need each other. God has worked a wealth of wisdom into the people of the church, and I hope that you will feel free to jump in and comment.

:D