The Blind Beggar

This is a repost of Webb’s Guest Blog Post From December

John Lunt commenting in the last post, Missional Evangelism, brings up a very good point about how the church so often pushes someone into making a decision. I have never been comfortable with that, and for that reason, I failed for many years to see my own gifting as an evangelist. Even today, I am reluctant to use the term to describe what I do because it holds such negative connotations for me. In my formative Christian years an evangelist was someone who came to town and preached to a group of people who were mostly Christians. Even though they would not admit it, or perhaps were not even aware of it, many of the believers I knew who organized those crusades would get the evangelist to come and preach so as assuage the guilt of their own neglect of their duty to spread the Gospel.

Of course it was a different generation and there were some like Billy Graham whom God used mightily. But that old buck-stops-at-the-pulpit style of ministry puts one person in charge of the task of evangelism and is grossly inefficient at best when one considers the number of believers in the world and how effective we could be if we all heeded the call. True, we may not all be evangelists–I’m not certain that I am in the deepest sense of the word–but if our gifts and lives are not pointing others toward the love and salvation we have found in Jesus, we must ask ourselves: why?

The other forms of evangelism such as street side, door-to-door and the use of tracts such as the 4 Spiritual Laws or the Roman Road are equally inefficient and one would probably discover that they turn more people away than they lead to Jesus. These methods create an us-against-them image of the church when, as the not-yet-Christians are always so quick to point out, we are all sinners, and when it comes down to it, some of the most egregious sins are often found within the Church.

When we try to push someone into making a commitment, it is obvious that the Holy Spirit has not yet brought them to that point and our efforts to do so may actually prove to dampen His efforts. We don’t see that model portrayed by Jesus, who epitomized patience and compassion.

My generation, it seems to me, has been more concerned with the numbers game and church-growth-at-any-price than it has been with being the hands and feet of Jesus, extending his unconditional love, mercy and grace to an increasingly desperate world, and allowing those things to be His witness to ‘Judea, Samaria, and to the utters most parts of the Earth’ of just how wonderful his Gospel of the Kingdom really is.

I once corresponded with a college student, an exemplary math major, who thought he was supposed to quit college and become a missionary with an agency that had been recruiting at the university where he was attending. I asked him if he had led anyone to the Lord among his peers on campus. He told me he had tried, but that they were ‘unreachable.’ I then asked him how many he tried to befriend and he told me that he would never consider associating with kids like that because they were ungodly and would be a bad influence. I then said, “So, you fear Satan’s power more than you trust the love of God flowing from you to penetrate the darkness in their lives?” I continued, “If that is so, then if you can’t reach them, how are you going to reach people with whom you have no understanding of their language or culture?” He replied, “Oh, they will teach me how to do that in my missionary training.”

Yeah, right. And we wonder why God has written ‘Ichabod” on the door posts of so many ministries, for the Glory of the Lord has surely departed.

In one of my ‘prophet’s lament’ moods years ago I penned a song about this:

Break Us and Shape Us

So many broken promises, our word we seldom keep,

So may go without His love, while His Church is sound asleep. We say we’d help, but we’ve got no time, We have our own kingdoms to build, We say we’d give, but there’s nothing left, we’ve spent it on ourselves.

Every time we fail to respond, our hearts get harder still,

Oh Lord, it seems so hard to believe that we might ever do your will.

We’re like the man who looks in the mirror then turns around and forgets, We say ‘amen’ when we go to the altar, but that’s as far as we get, We sit and wait for the lost to come, but we won’t go to them, And they won’t come because we don’t have anything to offer them. The only One who can set them free, we have set aside. How can his Kingdom ever come when the King is hidden by our pride?

Oh break us, Lord, and shape us, Lord, in the image of your Son. Help us to see the victory you promised your Holy Ones.
Help us to build on Your foundation, a life devoted to you,
So that all of Your creation will know that Your love is true.

C. 1991 John Webb Kline

Once we realize that we are all, at best, stumbling into the Kingdom, we begin to treat everyone as fellow stumblers. I always assume that everyone is somewhere along the journey between lost and found, including myself. Accepting Jesus most certainly doesn’t give us an instant handle on the truth. If you think so, just ask the souls of the millions of people who died at the end of a sword with a cross emblazoned on its handle.

I never question a person’s salvation until they get to the point where they question it. Rather, I assume that, like me, he or she is somewhere along the path and is confused by the inconsistencies of religion, thus trying to make sense of it all. Everyone wants to talk to someone is willing to share their insights from their own journey. When I start a conversation with someone, I do so by listening to them and I look for ways to make the wisdom of God relevant to their situation, because that is precisely where they need Him to be relevant at that moment. At that point, they are all ears.

I can honestly say that it has been years since I have found someone who was completely closed to how God felt about them. I am a part of the process and I am comfortable with that fact. In the end it is not about me or anyone else; it is about the Holy Spirit. The more we learn to understand that, the better we know when we need to stand back and get out of His way.

I firmly believe that this whole return to missional Christianity is God’s way of tearing down the walls that have kept His truth from reaching the streets. These are exciting times, but we must never lose sight of the fact that these are God’s times, not just another fad of pop-Christianity.

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A note from Rick Meigs: Webb has just started his own blog, Stumbling Into the Kingdom. Hop on over and leave him an encouraging word as he starts his own blogging adventure.

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