It's funny how the prospect of having one's reality changed can wake you up to what you should already have recognized as one's spiritual and moral obligation. John Gilbert sent me today a link to a video on You-Tube depicting demographic changes that were taking place in Europe in fertility rates that would over a short period of time lead to those countries becoming dominated by Islam. (View here)

It was frightening. The solution (according to the video)? Christians having more children, of course. But also, evangelizing Islamic people and culture.

Evangelism in the west - particularly in the United States - hasn't been something that the church has shown much passion for. Largely, the United States is viewed already as an evangelized nation. So our efforts have been much more along missional lines in other countries or what we might call "social" missions at home. Evangelism in mainline churches is almost non-existent. Evangelism in non-mainline churches more resembles a trip to Disneyland than it does a sacrificial commitment of one's life to Jesus Christ - through good times and through times of suffering.

Part of the reason for that is that we're not too sure what it is we're supposed to be evangelizing about. In liberal churches, seminarians have been taught to avoid language or thinking that denigrates the identity and value of another. Sounds great in theory. But this has led to questioning whether Christians have any basis at all for critiquing the value systems of others. That has not been particularly helpful.

Conservative and charismatic churches have been all too willing to make that critique - but often its been from the standpoint of an historical and highly dogmatic point of view - often that has no real relevance to scripture or the gospel (or history, for that matter) and done in a spirit of arrogance and spiritual elitism rather than compassion for others.

I'm not so sure I even want to consider a "middle ground" as much as I want to ask God to reveal a completely "out-of-the-box" manner of sharing the story and power of Jesus with others.

The key, for me, is found in 1 Corinthians 2:1 where Paul tells the Corinthian church that he didn't come to them with wise and persuasive words but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power. I don't think anyone today has any clue what that looked like specifically. We have hints of it throughout Paul's letter to the Corinthians because of the corrections he felt like he needed to make within that church's practice of the faith.

But here is what we can be certain of.

1. Believers have experienced life transformation through Jesus Christ that is worth sharing with others.

2. We can be confident of what God is doing with us as we measure our experience against the "law of love." The check against arrogance and elitism is - Do we love others? (Not in a "we'll love them as long as they become like us" sort of way).

3. If we hunger and pray for it - God will gift believers for the ministry of sharing our encounter with Christ with others. In Matamoros - God's display of His power might look different than it does in Jackson, TN - but we can be confident that God will grant the gift. He wants the good news to be shared.

4. We have a mission, if not an outright mandate, to share the experience and teaching of Jesus with others. Our God is a relational God. He revels in connecting people with each other. Sure, God could choose to download into the memory banks of every person absolute knowledge of Jesus's teachings. Instead, God chose to use "jars of clay" to communicate the good news. If God knew that ahead of time, He also knew our imperfections, our doubts about our being "up to the task", our lack of resources at times, and even that at time we might "get it wrong." Still He chose us. Blows my mind, actually.

5. And finally, if we don't share our message, someone else will certainly share theirs. There exist a number of versions of what life ought to look like in the world - some of which are growing at exponential rates. Ask yourself - does the version I've been taught and now live bear any truth to it? Whether liberals want to recognize it or not, there are versions of truth in the world that are fast growing acceptance that would seek to eliminate entirely any "liberal dream" of an open society. Whether conservatives want to recognize it or not, there have been times in history that believers have tried to impose something other than the gospel on other people.

How important is your story - the story of your experience of Jesus - to share with the people you know who don't know Jesus in any meaningful way? Can we avoid sharing it any longer?