By April Terry

My sister gave me a calendar of religious pictures for Christmas and June happens to be a picture of Jesus sitting facing a woman, both sitting on the edge of a well, sheep surrounding the two on a hillside of green.  In the picture, the woman is a beautiful woman sitting in front of Jesus and smiling beautifully at him.  In my mind’s eye, I don’t see that story that way at all.   To me, it seems too perfect and she is far too beautiful.  The way I see the story is with a woman who is aging rather ungracefully, her dress slightly more seductive than it need be, her eyes worldly and guarded, but a strange man has suddenly captured her attention in a way that she could never have predicted.  We tend to like to pay attention to the pretty people of the world and we are often attracted to beauty, but we don’t know how to handle those who aren’t. 

I am currently reading “Save Me From Myself,” an autobiography by Brian “Head” Welch, former lead guitarist of Korn.  Brian isn’t what people would call pretty, and his life is far from it, but he tells a compelling story of coming from a life of sex, drugs, rock and roll to a life of faith in Christ.  It’s not a pretty story, but it’s a true story.

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We spent Friday painting the living room and hallway of my in-law’s home. When we couldn’t quite finish, we had to continue on into Saturday, then leave quickly and meet much of my side of the family for a BBQ. Sore, tired, and almost without any energy left, we then woke up this Sunday morning to face a full day for our senior ministry. Three services in one day. We started our morning with a last-chance practice at 8:00 am and made it to the first of our services at 9:30 am, a half hour drive away. It was quiet, but that service usually is. The seniors there haven’t quite gotten used to us and they are fairly conservative. The next one came at 11:00 am, and then we took a break for lunch. The third senior ministry started at 2:30 pm and so I suppose it’s understandable that by the time that service rolled around, we were dead tired.

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by Jacci Turner
Pastoral Care Specialist
Intervarsity Christian Fellowship

I’ve been reading a book called “Love is an Orientation” by Andrew Marin.  It is about building a bridge from the Christian community to the Gay community.  I’ve been struck by how similar Marin’s suggestions for building these bridges are to those we use in Doable Evangelism (DE).  Often with the gay and lesbian community, Christian’s feel that they have to push an agenda (i.e. stop being gay/change your behavior etc.). This is obviously a huge turn off to gays!

Most of us know what it feels like to be approached by someone with an agenda. Perhaps you were accosted by someone with an “evangelistic” agenda,” or my least favorite, the “I’d love to tell you about a small business opportunity” agenda.  It feels yucky, slimy and bad.  We don’t like being approached by someone with an agenda, so why do we think gay people would like it any more than we would? Why can’t we practice the doable evangelism skills when interacting with our gay friends?  Just notice, or pray; or ask how they’re doing and listen!

Marin encourages the use of open-ended questions to build bridges.   He says,

“Open-ended questions, by contrast, require not only thought but responsiveness.  A great open-ended question is, “What’s it like to be you?”  Such a question owns the reality that heterosexual people can never fully identify with the life experience of gay people.  We take the position of the eager audience.  This automatically puts us in a humbled state of listening and learning.  The know-it-all perception is shot out the window, and there is no better place to be in order to start building a bridge with the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) community.” (pg. 163)

This is advice that Christian’s can use in all of their friendships, but especially when meeting people that we may perceive as very different than us (ie, Mormon’s, Muslim’s, Atheists, Gays). Instead of allowing our fur to go up, and entering a defensive posture as we mentally rehearse all the arguments about “why I’m right and you’re wrong,” how about we come to people as humble learners?  If we would assume that all people are loved by God, and created in His image (even if they disagree with us), perhaps we can learn to listen to their stories…and find that we are not that different after all.