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With Mark Mittelberg
123 Plays1 year ago
When most of us think of an "evangelist", it's usually a heroic example like Billy Graham or else a bit of an oddball operating on the fringe of our church. We don't see ourselves as Billy and we don't want others to think we're the oddballs, so we shy away from evangelism altogether. Our guest on PEP Talk today wants us to realise that different types of evangelism can match our unique personality and gifts. It's a liberating idea that means we rely on other members of the Christian body as we support each other in reaching out with the gospel.
Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, international speaker, and the Executive Director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University. Mark recently released his all-new book and training course, Contagious Faith: Discover Your Natural Style for Sharing Jesus with Others
He also wrote the leadership-oriented book, Becoming a Contagious Church, which presents an innovative blueprint for church-based evangelism, as well as several
books on apologetics. He lives with his wife Heidi near Denver, Colorado.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:11
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from the Solar Center for Public Christianity, and I'm joined all the way from the other side of Atlantic for this edition of the podcast by Mark Mettleberg. Mark, how are you doing today?
00:00:30
Speaker
Doing great. Great to be with you, Andy. It's fantastic to have you with us. Now tell folks who are listening, where is
Life in Colorado
00:00:36
Speaker
it you are from? Because the USA is a big country where abouts do you call home? Yeah, I'm kind of in the middle of the West, near the Rockies in just south of Denver, Colorado. And love it here. We get a lot of snow, but a lot of sunshine. It's a great place to live. Yeah.
00:00:53
Speaker
I've been to Colorado in the snow and I have to say the mountains there are spectacular. Someone who loves mountains. So I'm slightly envious of your geographical location.
Mark's Roles and the Lee Strobel Center
00:01:04
Speaker
Now Mark, you wear a number of hats and have over the years, but I suppose the big one you wear as well as being an author and a speaker and all those things, podcaster. You are also the executive director of the Lee Strobel Center for evangelism and applied apologetics.
00:01:20
Speaker
Colorado Christian University. Why don't you tell us a bit about that and then what we really want to talk about is a really exciting new book you've written and some of the stuff that comes out of that, but what is the Lee Strobel Center and what is it you do for them? Sure. Lee Strobel and I have been best friends and ministry partners for over 30 years. We kind of mentored each other in various ways. We've been doing the stuff forever, but we kind of formalized that with
00:01:45
Speaker
launching this training center in a partnership with Colorado Christian University. And what it is is we deal with reasons for the faith, Christian apologetics, as well as how to express the faith, how to do persuasive evangelism. How's that? And here's what's cool. It's all online training, and it's accredited. And so folks from the UK, folks from all around the world,
00:02:12
Speaker
can take advantage of it and get an undergraduate or a master's degree in these areas. And we also have lower price certificate courses for people that say, I don't need college credit, but I want to get the learning. So we've been doing this now for several years. We launched it right before the pandemic, which was a little challenging, but it's going really well. And I would just urge anyone that wants to learn more about it. We have a website at strobelcenter.com.
00:02:42
Speaker
S-E-R-O-B-E-L centered. Oh, wait, I have to spell centered too, don't I? You do, because we spell it correctly over here, of course. Yeah, well, the misspelling that we use is C-E-N-T-E-R.com. But StroubleCenter.com, get more information.
Contagious Faith and Evangelism Fears
00:02:59
Speaker
We just have some of our first graduates getting their degrees and it's just been great response to it. And Lee Strouble and I are thrilled to kind of quarterback this.
00:03:11
Speaker
Well that's great to hear and we will put a link to the struggle center into the show notes along with also information on your book but let's talk about your book mark your, your new book is called contagious faith.
00:03:26
Speaker
One of the things that interests me, I think as we were chatting before I pressed record, one of the things that you and I have in common is that we both notice that people are afraid of evangelism. Obviously, you know, pep talk the audience, people sort of self-select, people listening to this podcast are already keen on evangelism.
00:03:43
Speaker
But many listeners will know, especially pastors and leaders that try to get people in your churches interested in evangelism is tough. We've noticed that here. You've noticed that. Talk us through some of that, Mark. What are some of the reasons that you've come across, I think, why people are struggling, why people are fearful when it comes to evangelism? And then what is it particularly in this new book that you kind of press into that you think can help a bit?
00:04:08
Speaker
I'd love to. I think the two main reasons that Christians don't share their faith, assuming they know Jesus told us to, you know, this is something we're all called to, we're all members of the church to which Jesus gave the Great Commission. So I think most of us know we should. I think the two main reasons we don't is one, we just haven't been prepared. We haven't been through any training. But I think the more common one and often overlooked is
00:04:36
Speaker
We don't see it as something that fits our personality. We feel like, you know, the person God made me to be, the talents and, you know, personality and experience I have just doesn't lend it for me to do. And the reason we have that view is we have stereotypes of evangelism that are usually extreme and don't fit us. I think the average Christian has decided evangelism is for one of two kinds of people.
00:05:04
Speaker
either the superstar Christian who can do it really well, you know, and then think of some well-known evangelist, you know, Billy Graham, or, you know, J. John, or whoever comes to your mind, you know, those guys have special gifts and talents that I don't have. Or, you know, it's either for superstar Christians, or it's for people who are just obnoxious enough to do it anyway. You know, and we've all seen those types, you know, that just voice themselves on everybody and
00:05:32
Speaker
kind of cram the gospel down their throats. And I think the average Christian, and I've been into this for a long time myself, that says, I'm not a superstar, but I don't want to be a weirdo. I guess I'll leave evangelism to other people. And I think, you know, nine out of 10, if not more, people in churches just say, you know, it's not my job. You know, maybe the pastor can do it. Maybe the evangelist can do it, but not me.
Evangelism Styles and Personal Experiences
00:06:00
Speaker
The interesting thing about the first of those categories that you mentioned, the kind of superstar, I mean, identify that tremendously, because I think when I was young and you finally mentioned Billy Graham, I remember dear old Billy Graham coming to London, came to Crystal Palace, you know, not far from where I lived when we took coaches up from the church and was sitting there watching that, thinking my word, that's unbelievable. I don't know how he could do that. So it wasn't inspiring. It was terrifying. It was encouraging, but terrifying.
00:06:26
Speaker
But then the other thing that intrigues me, Mark, I think like all of these things around evangelism, these myths, there is no limit of truth. I mean, it's clearly the case that Billy, it's clearly the case that J. John, clearly the case that others we might mention, have a particular gifting, and that's great that God's given them that. But then the challenge, we universalize that, don't we? And so unless I have that absolute gifting as
00:06:49
Speaker
a big on stage evangelist. I can't do evangelism among my friends, my neighbors. And I guess is this where your book comes in with the fact that maybe there are very different styles of evangelism and that maybe God can use each one of us, but we need to do it in our way. Exactly. And I think beyond just viewing the, you know, people on the big platform doing the big events, a lot of us have had experiences that didn't fit us. And I was mentioning to you before we started the broadcast that
00:07:18
Speaker
I had some experience, ironically, right there in the UK, early on in my Christian walk, where I was part of a church in South London for a whole summer. And it was a great church. I loved the people. I didn't have that great of an experience. In hindsight, it was a wonderful experience, but as I was going through it, it was really tough because we were doing cold contact, go around the neighborhoods, knock on doors, try to talk to people about Jesus.
00:07:47
Speaker
And people were shutting this down and I actually had one woman tell me, basically said, why don't you go back and pester people in your own country? So, you know what, at that moment, it sounded like a good idea.
00:08:03
Speaker
You know, because it's just like this is not going well, I don't like this. And by the time I was flying back to America at the end of the summer, I just in my mind thought I'm done with evangelism. This is not my deal. But the problem was I was trying to do it in ways that didn't fit my God given personality or what I would call now my evangelism style. Yeah.
00:08:25
Speaker
And I think I can say I can very much identify I think, you know, my case, there was Billy Graham, but then my for me, my other horrific experience and I talk about this in my book, but we've already talked about that. So that's just about you and your book.
00:08:40
Speaker
When I was probably 16, 17, the kind of youth pastor at our church kind of got the bug for evangelism and decided to use the youth group as, you know, cannon fodder. I think we probably called it looking back. And so we tried door to door and we tried street evangelism and both went badly, badly wrong. You know, really terrible drama sketches that, you know, I remember one old lady giving us money to just go and buy ice creams and shut up. And then on one case, you know,
00:09:04
Speaker
Knocking on the door knocking on doors and getting doors chapped land on our face and in one case having you know dogs set on us another case the door being opened by you know, 300 pounds entirely naked man and It was just horrific. That's a bad day. It's a bad day, right? You come away going
00:09:20
Speaker
This is not for me, because again, it was that idea that evangelism is something special. But I want to talk about your style thing. But I think a big learning lesson for me, and maybe there's an overlap with this, was that evangelism, when it's going well, and it should feel normal. It shouldn't feel that you're doing something weird and freaky. It should be normal. It could feel like a stretch. It feels natural. Your heart beats a little faster. You know how important it is. But yeah, it should feel like, you know, you're not being someone you're not or trying to
00:09:49
Speaker
wear some kind of costume or something. And so here's what began to change for me. Even during that experience in London, I was there with my wife and I was part of a small team and I stumbled onto an innovation a little bit. And then this got confirmed when I got back home. But I finally, partway through the summer, just began to realize
00:10:14
Speaker
you know, first of all, why am I the one knocking on the doors? Because I'm the one that hates the samos in our group. So this is dumb. And I finally thought, my wife Heidi is she's a gregarious, outgoing people person. I like to describe her as someone who makes new best friends on an elevator ride. You know, because she's just like that. And she's always meeting new people. Her name's Heidi.
00:10:39
Speaker
She's a petite, short Scandinavian gal, and attractive. I finally thought, let her knock on the doors. I'll crouch down, hide behind her, and maybe she'll have better luck than I do. And sure enough, instead of people telling us to go pester people in our own country, they would see Heidi and her smile, and they'd say, oh, would you like to come in and have some tea? It's like, I'm back there going, this isn't fair, but I'd just rush in behind her.
00:11:08
Speaker
And all of a sudden, things are working. And I learned some lessons. It's like, I'm not alone in this. I don't have to try to be the end all everything. We can play to our strengths. That was what I began to see. And sure enough, we'd get in, we're having tea.
00:11:25
Speaker
Um, that Heidi would talk about the church we were from and, you know, mentioned a couple of things. And then people would almost inevitably ask a hard spiritual question and Heidi holding your cup of tea would kind of look and go markets here, Karen, you know, and that was fine with me because I was at the time getting my master's degree in philosophy of religion. I, you know, I studied Christian apologetics. Um, and I loved answering questions once we were in the door.
00:11:53
Speaker
Well, those were clues. And then when I got back home, I went back to my church. I went to a midweek service at our church where I heard a message from the pastor on how even in the pages of the Bible, they took a variety of approaches. They didn't all do evangelism the same way. And we can take our cues from them and learn from them. Well, that was to me liberating. It was revolutionary.
00:12:18
Speaker
And that led to me writing my original book and training course that a lot of people in the UK have used. And that was called Becoming a Contagious Christian. In fact, that went around the world. Two million people trained. It ended up in more than 20 languages.
00:12:35
Speaker
And God really used it, but that was years ago and they needed up, you know, not just updated, needed reworking. So that's what I've now, you know, put into this new book. So you talk Mark about the fact that if we look at the Bible, we see different examples of evangelism, different evangelism styles. Can you give us an example of that? Perhaps just pick two to sort of contrast, you know, sort of two different styles we see shown there in scripture. Sure. Maybe I'll just.
00:13:02
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to sneak a third one in here. I didn't want to steal the book, basically. I don't mind listing all of them. But I mean, one of the first one I talk about in the book is the broadest. It's the one that my wife Heidi has, and I call it the friendship building style.
00:13:20
Speaker
And it just means you build relational bridges. You're not out knocking on doors necessarily. By the way, I'm not down on that. That's the fifth style, which I can talk about. I think some people are good at direct evangelism, just most of us aren't. And when we get forced into it, we get turned off to the whole enterprise. But back to Heidi, she's friendship building.
00:13:48
Speaker
Um, the example in scripture that we use is Matthew, the tax collector who wants to reach his tax collecting buddies. And it tells us in Luke five 29, he decided to have a party at his house. And so he has this party. He invites the guys from the tax office. He invites his new friends, the disciples of Jesus and Jesus and mixes it up relationally and uses that relational context to talk about spiritual matters.
00:14:15
Speaker
And that's what Heidi did. She just does. I mean, she did it in the neighborhoods of London. She does it now in the neighborhoods where we live in Colorado. She just opens doors and builds friendships, builds trust, and it opens the way to spiritual conversations. And by the way, Jesus was called the friend of sinners. And Jesus, you know, often was highly relational in ways that would get him in trouble. And that's why they accusatorily called him the friend of sinners.
00:14:44
Speaker
But he wore it as a compliment, and that's the way we should view it as well, that we're out to build trust and relationships with people that need to know the Savior. So that's one. Now, I'll contrast that to mine. Mine's the reason-giving style that's in the book. That's the fourth one. And reason-giving style is the person who's more like the Apostle Paul.
Teamwork in Evangelism
00:15:09
Speaker
who constantly gave reasons. And he says in 2 Corinthians 10 that we demolish arguments and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. I mean, this is a debater. I mean, this is a guy who would often say we persuade people. And our place we look at in particular is Act 17, where he, you know, presents and defends the gospel in front of these philosophers in Athens, Greece on Mars Hill.
00:15:39
Speaker
And I relate to that totally. I don't want to knock on someone's door, but I'll sit with a Muslim for five hours and talk to him or an atheist or a skeptic or someone with an LDS background or whatever and talk truth and talk reasons. And I don't get mad about it. I don't get heated up. I just say,
00:16:00
Speaker
Hey, I think we all want to ultimately know what's right. Right. What's true. Well, let's look at the reasons. Let's look at the evidence. I'll, I'll share my evidence. You share your reasons and let's compare notes. And so that's, you know, I already was that when I got to England, but, but I still felt like I was less spiritual because I didn't like knocking on doors. And I think I just, it took a while to get over that feeling like I'm
00:16:25
Speaker
I'm a less courageous soldier for Jesus because I don't like to do things that other people like to do. And again, that's part of the liberating message of contagious faith is that it's okay not to do what you don't like to do. And we can work as a team.
00:16:42
Speaker
I love the liberation message. As I said earlier, my story is not dissimilar to yours. After the door knocking stuff in my teens, then in my early 20s, I started going to Speaker's Corner in London and standing on ladders and trying to do public evangelism that way with Muslims. And I learned a lot and enjoyed it. Did it for five years, most weekends. But increasingly feeling I didn't fit there.
00:17:07
Speaker
And then I think, you know, my style will be the same as yours. And something you said interested me, actually, that I am also married to someone who's more of a friendship, relational person. And is there something, Mark, about actually the way God puts us together in couples here, for those listening to this who are married? Because I'm very conscious that Astrid and I work really well, I realize, as a team, because she's very good at building relationships, a bit more outgoing than I am in that sense. I'm a shy extrovert. She's an outgoing introvert. But then within the context of those relationships, when stuff comes up,
00:17:36
Speaker
It works very well that she's then married to somebody who can, you know, come in and go, well, it's interesting you would say that. So actually, then it lets us realize that we're not lone rangers, whether it's husband and wife, or within a church team, you can mix and match the gifts. Absolutely. And everyone can play straight. You might get extra credit for leading people to Christ alone. You know, Jesus sent them out. I mean, first of all, he had 12 disciples, you know, he had a team of 12, and then he sent them out two by two.
00:18:03
Speaker
So, yeah, I think it often is the case that in a marriage or in a friendship, you hang out with people who are different. And this is part of why I get excited. I'm kind of jumping ahead. I get excited to have whole churches read the contagious faith book, but also go through a six-week video training course.
00:18:25
Speaker
And this, again, this is kind of a new 2.0 version of what we had years ago with becoming a contagious Christian training course, where, you know, people can all go through together in a small group or a class at their church. And it's beautiful because then you start, you know, everyone kind of goes around the room and says, well, now that we've kind of learned about these and I filled out the questionnaire that's in the course.
00:18:49
Speaker
I think I'm probably this and then this, you know, my main one is the reason giving, but my secondary is truth telling or whatever. And there's, like I say, there's five of these and we don't try to limit you to the five. You may be number six that we didn't think of, but what a liberating thing for everyone to say, okay, this is why, John, when you always want me to go out door to door with you and I always resist,
00:19:13
Speaker
I'm not made to do what you do, but I celebrate you doing that. But here's what I'm made to do. You run into an atheist at one of those doors and he wants to talk, text me and I'll be right over, you know, and we can work together. And that is such a liberating thing. And let me just quickly inject this because I know we'll suddenly be out of time. But the fifth style is the truth telling style. And that's the more direct, hard hitting,
00:19:42
Speaker
get to the point kind of personality. Our example in scripture of that one is Peter, who, as we know, was just like bold and hard hitting. And our examples of the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2, where he stands up in front of thousands, mostly Jewish audience, and basically tells them God sent his Messiah and you killed him and you're in trouble. And, you know, really, you know, confronts him with truth in a very direct way.
00:20:10
Speaker
And God uses it, and we all know the rest of the story. Over 3,000 came into the family and were baptized into the church that day. So I celebrate all of these styles, and that one is not mine, the direct one, but I love being around people that have it, you know, because they tend to open the doors and stir everything up for the rest of us, and then we kind of go in their wake and, you know, patch people up and become their friend and, you know, answer their questions.
00:20:40
Speaker
show hospitality and serve them. And I'm giving clues to some of the other styles here. But together then, together as a team in the body of Christ, we can all work together to try to reach all of our friends, all of our co-workers and neighbors and family members and classmates and so forth. And I think as we come into about the senior loss,
00:21:02
Speaker
Two or three minutes. Mark, I think what I love about that is that emphasis on team. Because I look back to what, you know, why I was afraid of evangelism when I was younger and why I meet many people I think who are afraid of evangelism today. We've talked about style, but also I think there's this sense you have to do on your own. It's you out sharing your faith with your friends and your workplace, unsupported, just you. And if you don't get it right, everything goes badly wrong.
00:21:27
Speaker
And anything that can help people reorientate and go, you know, God has places into families and teams and churches and communities because we have all these gifts together. And if we can learn to work together, no one is trying to share their faith unsupported.
Taking Risks in Evangelism
00:21:41
Speaker
Evangelism as a team is a team sport. It's more like it's more like football or hockey than it is rock climbing.
00:21:48
Speaker
I agree totally, but I do want to put in a caveat and that is you don't have to wait till you're always with your wife or your group from your church so that you're like now together. A lot of times the best evangelism is one on one.
00:22:04
Speaker
When we realize it's a process, I don't have to have all the answers or do the end all everything in this meeting. Rather, you know, we get talking and then they start raising something. And, you know, I've been in conversations where someone turns out they have a high background there. Well, I know a guy who's an expert on that. Hey, why don't the three of us have coffee together? And so that's how the team often works. It's not like you're always all there together, but you, you know,
00:22:31
Speaker
team up, you pull people in as needed and so forth. The other little caveat I want to put is it can be natural, it can fit you, it can be something that doesn't feel like you're an imposter, all the things we've been talking about.
00:22:45
Speaker
But you still have to be willing to take risks. It always feels risky to open your mouth, to start the conversation, to answer a question, to challenge an idea. It always feels risky and the enemy's always going to be whispering in the ear of every believer, not now, don't be a jerk. This is not a good time. And so we do have to overcome that. If we're going to be used by God, we got to be willing to take risks for the sake of the gospel.
00:23:12
Speaker
There's a great, that's great advice to end with. So Mark, we've been talking about contagious faith. So how do people find it? What's the best way for people to find out about the book and the video resources?
Conclusion and Resources
00:23:24
Speaker
A regular book folks can read, but it's also a six week video training course. And there's a website, which is just contagiousfaithbook.com.
00:23:33
Speaker
So it's just the name of the book, Contagious Faith plus the word book.com. And there's not only information on it. It shows some of the endorsements people that have gotten behind it. But there's also a little questionnaire in there that you can take quickly. It's kind of a small version of what's in the actual course.
00:23:52
Speaker
to quickly kind of assess which of these is probably my style. So I'd urge people to go to contagiousfaithbook.com and do that little questionnaire and check it out. And I hope it'll help liberate a whole bunch of our folks that are listening now, and not only them, but then they will become liberators of others so that we really, this does get contagious. An epidemic, as we've learned the hard way, spreads person to person, but if we each do our part, it can spread quickly. We need an epidemic.
00:24:22
Speaker
Christian faith spreading around the world. Love it. Well, likewise, we'll put a link to the book as well as the Lee's Trouble Center in the show notes. Mark, it's been an absolute privilege. Thank you so much for making the time and being a guest with us today on Peptor. Thank you, Andy, and thanks for all that you do to serve so many. Bless you. And for all of you listening at home or in the car or at the gym, wherever you're catching this episode, join us in two weeks time for another episode and another guest and another edition of Peptor. Bye for now.