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With Andy and Kristi
76 Plays2 years ago
In this guest-free episode, Andy and Kristi reflect on the many questions they've heard in discussions of faith over the years. Traditional apologetic questions about the rationality of faith, once so prominent in the era of Richard Dawkins, have largely been replaced by questions of desirability, longing and meaning. How has this impacted the approach we make in listening to and responding to sceptics and seekers we encounter at work, school or in our families?
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Transcript
Introduction to Persuasive Evangelism
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. Try saying that when you're tired in a hurry. I'm Andy Bannister from Solas. I'm joined as ever by the, by the, F of S is the usual adjective I use as a name. Christy Mayer from, from Oak Hill College today in, in London. How you doing, Christy?
00:00:31
Speaker
Thanks, mate. Well, yeah, it's good to see you. And I'm joined by yourself, the fantastic Andy Bannister, who is now in Hobbiton slash Rivendell and no longer a part of the sunny northern Welsh Scottish climate. That's right. I moved south and that was a reference to, yes, I'm recording from a little wooden hut in the garden that we've christened. We've christened back in. I was going to call it Rivendell, but my daughter, who's nine
Shift in Evangelism Focus
00:00:55
Speaker
and
00:00:55
Speaker
charming and full attacked when daddy Rivendell is the home of the elves they are six foot tall and blonde you are five foot chasing grey so um so um so christy what exciting guests have we got on pep talk today well andy i think we are interviewing each other are we not we are we are there is there is no guest um kind of thing it's tempting to name and shame the person who would have been in the slot but decided that you know i don't know lying in a beach and
00:01:25
Speaker
in Cardiff Bay or something was far more exciting. But no, we actually thought it was a great opportunity. We did interview each other, didn't we, at the start of pep talk? Yeah, we did. We had a really good chat, didn't we, around some issues there? I thought it would be really interesting to talk for a little while about what are some of the contemporary questions, right? Because I spend a lot of my time out in the culture doing evangelistic events, all kinds of settings. You spend a lot of time, especially on university campuses, you do more university stuff than I do. And I guess it'd be interesting, I just thought perhaps chat a bit about
00:01:54
Speaker
You know, maybe start by me asking you, Christie, what have you seen a shift in some of the questions? I mean, I know when I started, when I started university ministry and evangelism ministry 20 years ago, it was a lot of, does God exist? Science and faith. You know, you can always predict the questions. Is that the same? Is it exactly the same today? Is it the same old, same old, same old? Or are we seeing some different questions outside the four walls of the church?
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, I have. I think one of the things that I've noticed, even from the time when I first started public proclamation like evangelism on campuses, is that maybe like 13 years ago or so, the questions were much more around credibility, evidence, reason-based questions. And a lot of that came out from the new atheism
00:02:46
Speaker
that was, you know, that was doing its rounds at the time of Sam Harris and Dawkins. And I think after that, that kind of created this kind of, I don't know, there is a nature of balls of vacuum, doesn't it? So there was a never this kind of moral vacuum.
00:03:01
Speaker
I think students started to see that the logical consequence of new atheism was actually, you know, just morally abhorrent and started to kind of think more about, well, huh, well, what is desirable about faith? Like what is it that people actually believe? And I think with that came this shift from credibility questions to desirability questions of how is this relevant to my life? Like what difference will Jesus make?
00:03:29
Speaker
to me. How is faith personal and applicable? What does that look like? And I think particularly, you know, I don't know, yeah, I'll stop there. I'm starting to ramble on. What do you think about that?
00:03:48
Speaker
Well, it's great because of course, you know, you are a lecturer and you just do it so well. You just go into teaching mode. Don't say that. People can't see what I can see. I can see Chrissie. She's got a flip chart out. She's drawing diagrams. There's a handout. No, I think I would say I broadly align with that. I mean, the role, I suppose the
Addressing Subjective Questions in Faith
00:04:10
Speaker
The other word I'd throw in, which is a big, long sort of scary word, but isn't really where you unpack what it means, of course, is the whole shift to far more existential questions, questions to do with meaning, questions to do with identity and feelings. And what we might say would be more subjective questions. And one of the things I think is interesting, I think,
00:04:29
Speaker
You know, that can make us nervous as Christians, because particularly as Evangelicals, right? We like propositional truth. You know, here is a five step argument for the resurrection. Follow with me. One, two, three, four, five. And there's still a place for that. But yeah, like the last big mission I did was the St Andrews University kind of mission.
00:04:48
Speaker
earlier this year, I was struck. I mean, I've seen this trend developing, but there was not a single question on any of those traditional areas. I had a couple of science-y conversations like offline, as it were, sitting around tables. A couple of students raised some of the more trad questions. One of them was a Muslim, which was interesting. And Muslims, I think, are still old-fashioned modernists in some ways. But the questions that came from the floor at the end of lunch bars and evening events
00:05:17
Speaker
much more, as you say, you know, okay, what difference does this make? And then I think a lot were, there was quite a lot of pain and angst in there as, as well, perhaps there are hope, and suffering, and identity, and sort of dealing with negative feelings. And I mean, some of the stuff that came out, it was
00:05:36
Speaker
And once it's quite exciting, because you felt like you were dealing with real issues, not surface stuff, but also, you know, tougher to navigate as well, because there was a heavy dose of pastoral stuff in there as well, quite honestly, not just let me give you an argument. Well, right. I mean, on the pastoral element, I mean, what do you think it looks like to engage with those kind of existential, desirable, desirability kind of questions? Because I guess what's quite easy, isn't it, about
00:06:05
Speaker
the more trad kind of versions is that you can just learn a set of like propositional statements or arguments to kind of present to someone. But these kind of quality of questions require something else. Like what have you, how have you entered those questions? How have you presented Christ?
00:06:25
Speaker
I think one thing I've learned, Christie, is becoming more relaxed with asking questions and just then pausing a little bit because, you know, again, as evangelicals, we're often very good at going, let me give you the answer. And I know I'm a loudmouth, so I'm, you know, fond of doing this. And ironically, I've been, for years, I've been teaching people how to ask questions in evangelism while not always being perhaps as good as it myself as I might
00:06:49
Speaker
be, but on some of these things, especially when you've got people who would outwardly not say they're interested in religion or spirit or faith or whatever, but you use the spirituality word, they sort of lean in, being willing to ask questions and then pause. And actually, I was telling you the story before you started recording, I'll share it here. Actually, last week, before we were recording this, I was on Jersey.
00:07:11
Speaker
and the Channel Islands for a week, which actually confused quite a lot of my American friends because they thought I was in New Jersey. One American friend got really confused that I talked about. I was posting pictures of the sunset on the ferry back from Jersey. They were like, you're getting the ferry from Jersey to Europe? Yeah, yeah, the Channel Islands, the Channel Islands, mate. But anyway, one of the things I did there was I had the privilege of doing sort of seven or eight lessons in schools, my schools with 15 through to 18 year olds. And one of the lessons they had to teach was on human rights.
00:07:41
Speaker
And so I just told the story of a human rights abuse and told this tragic story. And then I asked the students, okay, who here thinks this is wrong? And like every hand went up. It's never good when there's a psychopath in 5B.
Power of Thought-Provoking Questions
00:07:53
Speaker
Well, there was no, everybody was on form. And then I just asked the question, okay, why is it wrong? And then what I did rather than sort of teach that, I immediately threw them into discussion groups. I went, okay, why is it wrong?
00:08:06
Speaker
Would it have been okay if this particular episode was fine in the country that happened? If culturally it was okay, would that make it okay? Is it right to impose ideas of human rights on other cultures? And is there something distinct about human beings that might give us a foundation for human rights? Let them discuss that for 10, 15 minutes. And then we sort of came back together and you could see there were all kinds of knots and rabbit trails and
00:08:32
Speaker
And people aren't really struggling. They knew that these teenagers knew they didn't like injustice. They knew that injustice was wrong. They'd be passionately injustice and rights and dignity and all this kind of stuff. But they couldn't give a reason. And then over the class, basically, I just had the privilege of just gently introducing the idea. And that was the other thing I did there, I think, was not go... The answer is I went, when it comes to this issue, I think we need to think very carefully what we believe.
00:08:59
Speaker
Because if you believe that if you are an atheist, then this is a real conundrum. Whereas on the other hand, if you believe in some kind of God, then that does at least give you a framework for this. It doesn't prove that God exists. That's why we're going way too far. But it sits much better. So think about what you believe. And everything in me wants to go further. But A, it was a school setting. And I thought, no, let them sit with it.
00:09:26
Speaker
you know, trust that there are other Christian teachers in the school as a good RS department. That's so good as well, isn't it? Because what you've done there is you've encouraged a
00:09:37
Speaker
a strong sense of self-reflection and ownership of their own views and how to form, how to think essentially, which is one of those things which just reflecting on some course of evangelicalism just generally we can be quite weak on. We've kind of just thought, okay, this person will give me a particular model of how to kind of talk to people about Jesus and what does it mean to form a
00:10:07
Speaker
to form a mind, to form a Christian mind as it were, I think you've given them really good tools to engage just generally with life, but also in particular with Jesus and his word when they get there, God willing. So to turn the question around, what about yourself, how do you find some of these things
00:10:29
Speaker
has it shifted some of the ways that you engage in conversations or that you structure a talk if you're speaking evangelistically? How has this sort of shift to the more existential type of question caused you to perhaps adjust some things? Because you're a philosopher, right? So you're trained, again, traditionally, here are the arguments, bang, bang, bang, bang, culture shifted a bit. So what are you doing?
00:10:55
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah. Thanks, Andy. I think I've usually kind of come even when...
00:11:04
Speaker
things were a little bit more kind of classical approaches. I've usually gone through kind of desires and longings and mainly I think that is because of the philosophical kind of slant and things and seeing that as human beings you know we aren't pure reason that there's more to us than that. So I think I've always found myself slightly
00:11:27
Speaker
rubbing up against some of the more traditional forms of apologetics anyway, and haven't felt quite at home in it. So I don't know what the next kind of permutation will be after this. So at the moment, I feel like I'm in my wheelhouse. So something else might happen. I think, oh, gosh, I'm not sure how to communicate. But I think very much, as you mentioned, the role of asking questions, and even a number of years ago, what I found really beneficial in some of the
00:11:56
Speaker
the talks that I was giving in the Midlands was kind of structured in such a way that if it is a talk from the front, having like five minutes of talk question, five minutes talk question and each question is going kind of more deeply into the topic, helping people to apply that is immediately
00:12:16
Speaker
engaging them with the topic and helping them to see the relevance and the goodness of who Jesus is. So you're kind of funneling things a little bit. So I think I've found that helpful in public stuff. And again, just in personal conversations, you know, this is what Randy Newman has always done so well is talk about how
00:12:39
Speaker
Evangelism is really hard and we often don't admit that, I think. And I think that's what I've really appreciated about his work is that even asking questions can be very difficult because you're almost exposing yourself in a way, aren't you? Like, will this person answer it or won't they? And it's easier just to fill the silence with words.
00:13:02
Speaker
And I think his approach of, you know, looking at how does Jesus ask questions in the Gospel, I think continues obviously to be such a wonderful way to honour the other person's humanity and to move the conversation onwards. It's not a concession of conviction if you don't immediately bring Jesus into the conversation.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah,
Openness to Spirituality and Faith Traditions
00:13:29
Speaker
I think those are the things that I found helpful in that. And also, I think just putting ourselves in the position of the person that we're talking with. When we think about our own interactions with other people, what is it that we find? Your mind just switches off a bit in any kind of communication. And then just having that kind of self-awareness of, oh, how might this person be receiving this conversation?
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah there was something else that we were talking about wasn't there Andy before we started filming and I remember saying we need to we need to pause this so he can bring it up later and I can't remember what it was now can you? Oh was it the fact I was talking about the fact that I certainly told you the fact that I'm off to Oxford University to do a thing for the CU there on on other religions um so they uh so the CU there is a really good really active very missional CU I know you've spoken a lot for them
00:14:23
Speaker
and I think it's my first engagement for them actually because the last six years I've lived in Scotland so it hasn't really worked and yeah so when I asked them what topic I was almost expecting one of these more sort of existential ones but they've they've gone for they want me to come and address to Muslims and Christians worship the same God which is interesting. That's right.
00:14:39
Speaker
How, because we were mentioning, weren't we, that, you know, of the five kind of big apologetics questions, that this is, I think, I think I expressed just an element of surprise that these questions, particularly the one about, you know, other faiths, and as in more than one way to God, that this is still a, this is still kind of a really important question that the students and others are asking. What are your reflections on that? You mentioned the different, yeah. Well, there's a couple of things going on out there. I think the
00:15:10
Speaker
I think the first thing is obviously when you encounter folks from other faith traditions, they can often be much more
00:15:17
Speaker
they can be a lot more sort of traditional in the way they view reality. So, you know, don't go in trying the desire approach with Muslims to go. Invariably, it's probably not going to work. It may do. I mean, you may find a very Westernized Muslim, but more traditional Muslim is going to look at you like you're slightly bonkers. And when I first went to speaker's corner, I remember it was great because you hadn't got a pussy foot around. You're very quickly straight into right. Is it Jesus or Muhammad, the Quran or the Bible? It's like, gosh, okay, not in Kansas anymore.
00:15:48
Speaker
But then for, I think for, but outside of that set of students, and so anyway, that means addressing that question for them is important. The other thing I think Christie is going on is I had this hunch, and I haven't got the data to back it up, it's all anecdotal, which is annoying, because I like to be able to, it'd be great if I could go, well, based on a longitudinal survey of a thousand conversations. I think a lot of people, I think a lot of Westerners,
00:16:16
Speaker
are increasingly open to the idea of spirituality. We've talked around that, right, to go that I think, you know, the new atheism has failed. It has died a death. It was a sort of zeitgeisty thing. Some of the questions it popularized, sure, they're out there still, but it failed. So I think a lot of people open spirituality, which can frighten Christians, right? Because we're like, well, that's so nebulous. Well, yeah, so it is, but so was the altar to the unknown God, but that didn't cause poor problems. He went, great, I'm going to work with this.
00:16:46
Speaker
But then what happens, once people start thinking about spirituality, I then have this hunch that then there's a sort of rabbit in the headlight type panic of going, there's all these different things out there. What do I do? Do I just, you know, choose the half remembered?
00:17:02
Speaker
you know, Anglicanism from my youth. Do I try something really funky? I've got to make it work as a Buddhist. You know, what do I do? And I think, I think that sort of panic sets in. And so that often will lead people to then go that sort of, you know, it's easy to criticize the post-moment approach of take a bit of this and a bit of the other. But I think it's just based on I just don't know where to go next. So I think the other religion's question then inserts itself into that space for people who have figured out there is something spiritual. How do I then find a way
00:17:33
Speaker
forward. Do I pick anything? Are there some contenders out there? And then, of course, you're also heading an issue off at the pass. If they start looking at Jesus and they come across his exclusive claims, you know, you can help them get ready for that. So they don't go, gosh, Christianity is exclusive. I'm going to throw it out the window because we don't want exclusivity. So I think that's where the question generates. And the God, I was glad they asked me to do that talk, because that talk that I do in the book
00:18:03
Speaker
that it's based upon, IVP 2021 available from all good booksellers and even some bad booksellers too. I mean, I use that question as a way to zero in, not just on the abstracts. I look at the nature of God in the Bible and the Quran and pick some key attributes. The God in the Bible is relational, knowable, he's loved and he has suffered. And that doesn't just make a distinction from Islam. If you can't get to the gospel of those categories, you probably ought to be not be doing
00:18:33
Speaker
you know, these kind of sort of evangelistic messages, quite frankly, because what I like about it is Jesus just so naturally merges out of that talk of going, you know, it's in Jesus that we see those attributes of God so clearly, relational, noble, love, and suffered. So it nicely differentiates and it points to Jesus at the end. And maybe that's the other thing in all this, Christi, is, you know, relaxing and being willing to go
00:19:00
Speaker
let Jesus do his thing. We can raise the questions, we can help people on the journey, we can ask interesting questions, we can get them thinking, all the running human stuff. But you know, maybe we just need to relax a little bit and go, let the Holy Spirit then do what the Holy Spirit does, rather than feeling if we don't clinch the deal, we've somehow done something wrong.
00:19:19
Speaker
We've got a couple of minutes left, so go on, final thoughts on that. I was just going to ask you how do you stay spiritually refreshed and formed to continue to be speaking at kind of like the forefront and the cutting edge of these questions?
Maintaining Spiritual Refreshment
00:19:40
Speaker
And I'm partly asking that for myself and those who might be listening.
00:19:46
Speaker
How do you ensure that your evangelism, my evangelism and apologetics continues to flow from, I guess, a heart that's at rest and on fire with the love of God, as well as kind of being ahead of some of these questions? That's a good question, isn't it? I think the older I get, and I turned 50, so I have got... Yeah, you did. Happy first.
00:20:12
Speaker
It sounds a cliche, but trying to stay focused and meditate as often as you can on Christ and the cross. You know, the text I always like to come back to is, I mean, Romans five verse eight is such a special passage. God demonstrates his love for us and this while we're still sin as Christ died for us, because, you know, so much is in there of the fact that we're sinners, the fact that we're elevated from God through our own stupidity, but the fact that we are so radically loved.
00:20:41
Speaker
And so to keep that, to keep that for instance. And also then for those of us who, who either like the life of the mind, like you and I do, or like, you know, sharing our faith and getting out and engaging with others, like many who listening to this podcast. I think the thing we need to get into our heads is that God doesn't love us more if we evangelize more. Because you can, that's the trap. Thinking, well, if I do more ministry and if I'm more effective and I study more and read more and have more conversations, God's not allowed to be more. My number goes up the rankings.
00:21:07
Speaker
Okay, no, no, no, no, it absolutely doesn't. As you said, it has to come out of loving and being loved and going, that's why we do it and having a passion for people. And I want to take you an interest in people. That's the other thing I found, you know, I think I got probably like you, I get lots of young folks who are asking me, how do you get started in evangelism?
00:21:27
Speaker
I would say, actually, if you love God and love people, which was funny enough, Jesus is reduction of the law to those two things. A lot flows, right? If you love God and you know that you are loved, even when you mess up, something that you love people and you find them interesting, you want to get to know them, you want to take an interest in their lives. It's amazing how much people open up and they realize you actually care about them and you find them interesting and whatever, rather than you see them as a project. Amen, brother.
00:21:54
Speaker
Amen, brother. And that final thought and those final words, it's time to bring this episode to a close. It's been a real joy chatting with you, Andy. Thank you so much. Well, likewise. Wish us again, shouldn't we? Who needs guests? That's the new motto for pest talks. Chat and record. Chat and record. Yes, exactly.
00:22:18
Speaker
And thank you to you dear listeners and thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of PepTalk and we look forward to joining you probably in a couple of weeks time with a guest. Thanks so much for tuning in and we look forward to you joining us soon.