Crossing Cultures: EECWTC2C

Today a friend said that he had just been through a presentation of Creation to Christ with a local. When the local friend did not say they wanted to believe, our friend wondered. In our conversation, he was asking himself whether or not it was appropriate for him to simply stop meeting with this person, in fear that time spent with him might be less time spent with more receptive local friends.

Questions: What if faith is actually very near this person? What if he needs some more time? Our friend is learning the local language, what if he misunderstood some important questions that this local person had about Christ or His story?

We know that there are examples in Scripture of where Jesus did tell His disciples to move on; when there was rejection of the Gospel in some of the towns He had sent them to, for example.

How do we know for sure if God’s telling us to move on and find new local friends to share faith with, and should we stop being friends with lost people, ever?

I’ve been trained in EE and CWT and have even been part of writing other such presentations of the Gospel, tools to be used in calling people to faith and repentance, and in training others to do the same.

But I think we are wrong when we see C2C or any other tool simply as a filter to find receptive people. It should rather, I think, be used as a good resource, among many, to help us know how to dialogue about our faith better with local friends.

In discipleship, we have to have a level of language and cultural learning so that we can understand what questions our friends have about the Story, from creation to Christ, from questions about other religions, about the practical aspects of faith, about ancestors who have died apart from knowledge of Christ, about idols, and hundreds of other real life issues. And discipleship really begins, not at the point of conversion, but with lost people who are encountering the Biblical worldview for the first time.

If it’s hindering you from getting to really know people and making them followers of Christ, then throw away your canned Gospel presentations and start fresh with your Bible and God’s Spirit.

Dinner table discipleship

I’m helping coach the International School’s girls’ basketball team. Local School Number Five defeated the girls today. I had this silly notion going into the game that Number Five would have an all-girls’ team, too. But while I was watching their team warm up, I was sure that at least three of their players were not girls. But then my wife, generally much more observant about such things than I am, informed me that at least one of the boys was wearing a bra.

We were talking about this at the dinner table tonight. I said, “Some boys need to wear a bra,” after which my son let out this really big, silly laugh-giggle. I was being naughty at the dinner table. It was worth that moment.

I like it when our family eats dinner together at night. We catch up on the day, what student friends of theirs did what, what teachers really bugged them. Our children are perfect, so I know that all the International School teachers are idiots, if my kids say they’re idiots. I could be biased toward my children.

But we’re communicating with each other, and almost always end up laughing together at the table about stuff that we probably wouldn’t talk about to anybody else outside our immediate family.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Family life gets pretty real, pretty raw, if real communication is taking place. We all see each other’s best and worst moments, our best and worst attitudes. Nothing’s really hidden. And, if we can’t love each other after all that, then it’s doubtful we’re going to be able to really love, unconditionally, the people in the world out there, like those bra-wearing boys from School Five.

Family is your first and best discipleship group. Who knows, but God, whom these kids are going to influence one day.

“Discipleship” is so crazy to define, because definitions are either way too complicated or far too simplistic.

But, I think if you look at Jesus, He got so close to a few friends, that His communication with them was raw, real, and open. They spent a lot of real-time hours together (as opposed to virtual, Facebook, Twitter, blogging hours), seeing each other’s responses to life with and around Jesus.

They were experiencing together the miraculous, as well as the everyday mundane stuff. But Jesus, the Creator and Sustainer of the whole Universe and all of life, was walking with them through it all.

So, I think that this level of interaction has to be the foundation of “making disciples”. There are no shortcuts.