The following is a post from the old blogger version of "A Resting Place" that Glenn Lucke read that influenced him to send me a copy of Common Grounds to review, which review I typed up last night and then subsequently lost (see previous post). These thoughts are illustrative of why I loved the book. The original post was from 7.12.2005:
We showed up to a church last Sunday having found online the theme for the service for last week – "Interview with a Pagan." The proposed idea was that the pastor was going to model for the congregation how to converse with people of different beliefs by loving them instead of tearing them apart.
Almost the entirety of the service consisted of the pastor interviewing an old friend from high school who was a self-identified pagan. I thought we were in for a real treat. The "pagan" man had grown up Catholic, but when his particular church offered no real answers for his frustrations with the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., he bailed. The conversation was set up beautifully for an opportunity to ask questions about, "What was it that Christianity didn’t provide that paganism did?" Or, "What exactly are your beliefs and how do you find comfort in them?" Or any other thing that would have told us something other than, "I call myself a pagan, and I was dissatisfied with the church."
Then it happened. Rather than finding out anything at all about who this guy actually was, the pastor left all of that and moved immediately into a "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" line of questioning.
1. Would you admit the Bible is historically accurate? ("Sure," answers the pagan).
2. Given that you admit to the historically accurate nature of the Bible, and given that Jesus claimed x, y, and z, would it not then stand to reason that He was either a lunatic, a liar, or who He said He was?
*sigh*
We left quite frustrated. I just don’t see how you can walk around with a scripted presentation to jam into any and every conversation and call that loving. People who love care to listen to what other people have to say. I get the feeling C.S. Lewis would not be thrilled with this use of his apologetic.
If you’re going to love people, you have to be interested in them. You don’t have to agree with them, and you can think their beliefs are quite dangerous. But you can’t simply ignore what’s important to them.
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Travis,
Thanks for bringing this out of the archives. I remember it and I think you had a friend named Amy who was also writing comments about your post.
Yep, it’s that sort of agenda cum cluelessness that motivated Ben and me to write Common Grounds. Not that we’ve got it figured out. Of course we don’t. But we’ve been learning how to love people for who they are, listen, take them seriously, and again, love them. I guess we have an agenda, too, but love as love seems a better one than you depict from this event in this post.
Yeah, that’s just the thing, isn’t it? Too many of us don’t see love as an end in itself, but as a means to some greater end. I think iMonk’s essay “Wretched Urgency” is what broke me from all the evangelistic guilt trips laid on me, and I’ve started to learn (though I have a long way to go) that communicating and acting upon the love of Christ is its own great work.
As it is now, we often look like a bunch of insecure people who are desperate for converts.
Strangely enough, right before I read this post I received an email from a friend satirizing how too often Van Til’s apologetic comes across in the hands of his warrior children. He imagined a Van Tillian interacting with the author of a book that happened to be written by a homosexual. “You can’t know any truth because…well, because you’re a homosexual, and hence a suppresor of the truth!” Of course, the homosexual repented and received Jesus on the spot
Aye, I agree with this. Too many Christians I know are more focused on proving the ‘other side’ wrong than loving and understanding them. You don’t have to agree with the person to get to know them. A lot of people I know have a more ‘us vs. them’ mentality that misses the point of what we are supposed to do whilst on the earth.