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With Aaron Edwards
61 Plays4 years ago
In our Christian churches today we often extol the virtues of "friendship evangelism". But does the low-key, latte-sipping, long-term approach really do justice to the gospel? Aaron Edwards joins Andy and Kristi to help us navigate between awkwardness, courage, sincerity, fear, and initiative in our relationships with others.
Aaron Edwards is the MA Programme Lead and lectures in Mission, Theology and Preaching at Cliff College. He has specific interests in the theological work of Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, the Reformers, and the Great Awakeners. Additionally, having studied English Literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and has been an editorial and administrative assistant for the acclaimed Irish poet, Micheal O’Siadhail. He has an enthusiasm for literary, philosophical, and popular culture, and is keen to find ways of maintaining rigorous faithfulness to the Gospel in the midst of the present moment. He has been a guest on various religious radio programmes and alongside his academic work he writes regularly for a number of church/mission-focused publications.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction & Support
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and thanks for downloading this episode of pep talk. If you're enjoying the podcast why not get a free copy of my book The Atheist Who Didn't Exist or Christy Mayer's book More Truth by becoming a regular supporter of the show. Just visit our website www.solas-cpc.org and donate as little as £3 a month and we'll send you a book as a thank you. Thank you so much and for now on with the show.
Meet Andy, Christie, and Guest Aaron
00:00:34
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to Pep Talk, the Persuasive Evangelism Podcast. I'm Andy Baddister, the Director of the Solar Center for Public Christianity, coming to you from a sunny, a scorchingly sunny Dundee in Scotland, 23 degrees today. And I'm joined by always my fun-filled co-host, Christie Mayer, from the other end of the country. Christie, how is it in London today? Are you folks melting down there?
00:00:58
Speaker
Pretty much, I mean, it's 32 degrees here today, Andy, so. Oh, get out of town. I don't want to boast or anything, but. Yeah, yeah, we can't cope with that. We melt into Scotland. We turn into puddles of iron brew, if that happens.
00:01:12
Speaker
Well, we've got an exciting guest on the podcast today. We are joined all the way from presumably sunny Darvishar by Aaron Edwards. Aaron, welcome to the show. Hello. So Aaron bears a title almost as long as a very long title. You are, let me get this right, you are the lecturer in theology preaching and mission and also run the MA in mission at Cliff College there in the heart of Darvishar. Did I get that right? Did I miss anything?
00:01:41
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, I won't be sending any lawsuits your way for mispronouncing my title, my long title. That's correct.
Aaron's Past Visit to Cliff College
00:01:48
Speaker
I came and taught for a week at Cliff College and it was one of the last things I did before lockdown. I remember all the Covid signs sprouting like mushrooms all over college and things shutting down. You know, first the cakes went and then the dining hall went and then the teaching went and then the end of the world came. So I have fond memories of Cliff College as the place where the world ended.
00:02:10
Speaker
That's right. Of course, that was just for you, Andy. We just tried to shut everything down because you were going for too many cakes. I think that was the issue. Do share with listeners that fun story. There's a strange connection about the place where you live and historical plague. I mean, when you were there, you told me. It's a brilliant story.
Historical Plague Story: Im Village
00:02:28
Speaker
There's a little village called Im, which I think most people, I'd never heard of it till we moved to the village next door called Stony Middleton. And Im has been in the headlines since lockdown because it was during the
00:02:38
Speaker
great plague of the seventeenth century. It was self-quarantine, it was famous for self-quarantining itself and the people in our village in the Middleton were key to kind of keeping them alive to some extent because there's this stone halfway between the two villages at the top of a big hill where there's still to this day there was some
00:02:58
Speaker
drilled holes in this stone where people used to leave, from Eam, used to leave vinegar-soaked coins to pay for the food that was left on that stone by the stony Middletonites back in the day. I don't know if the vinegar actually helped save off the effects of the plague. In fact, I'm pretty sure vinegar doesn't do that, but they thought it did. It was enough for the stony Middleton people to kind of complete the deal, so yeah. So we now live in that village, so we should be experts in this kind of thing.
00:03:27
Speaker
Absolutely. And I believe when pubs reopen in the UK, it will be kind of vinegar soaked credit cards will be the legal tender.
00:03:35
Speaker
But on to more serious matters.
Is Friendship Evangelism Superficial?
00:03:37
Speaker
Before we press the record button on this podcast, you and I and Christy were kind of sort of bantering away as we like to. And you sort of threw from left field into the conversation the idea that when it comes to evangelism, there's a term we hear a lot around today, friendship evangelism. Lots of people think friendship evangelism is a good thing. And you said, I do paraphrase slightly to be naughty, but you said words to the effect of
00:04:01
Speaker
I think friendship evangelism is a bit rubbish. I paraphrase slightly just to get an edge to the show, but what is your sort of concern with friendship evangelism and that whole approach to sharing the gospel? Maybe you didn't go quite as far as saying it was rubbish, but you definitely had some questions, Aaron. Yeah, absolutely. If I had a vinegar-soaked coin for every time I heard how great friendship evangelism is, I'd be a very
00:04:28
Speaker
Well, vinegar, which soaked man. So I think it's just that I hear this as the default response of most Western Christians today, especially evangelical Christians, the ones who are supposed to really care about front footed, outward, outgoing evangelism. And I think it's become the default because it's easier. It's something that you can do without actually having to
00:04:54
Speaker
think about it very much and you can literally live an entirely normal to some extent worldly existence and think you're doing evangelism because you've got this more long-term game. So I often hear people say well we're not like those crazy street preachers who kind of speak of hellfire and damnation or these or these or like a Billy Graham evangelist who speaks to tens of thousands we don't do that kind of thing anymore. What we do is we're friends with like two or three people over the course of about 20 years they might come to an alpha course and that's kind of like
00:05:22
Speaker
you know, that's our long game. And I think that's actually the game. That's actually how I was faced with evangelism.
Genuine Friendships and Faith Sharing
00:05:29
Speaker
There's got to be something fundamentally wrong because evangelists in the history of the Western world didn't just do that. So of course, there's good things about friendship evangelism, but I think it
00:05:40
Speaker
It's been absolutely done, it's been overused as a kind of default response that stops people actually thinking about the radical emphases that are needed in how to evangelise and just the lifestyle of evangelism for any Christian in their life, let alone those called to be, you know, Ephesians 4 evangelists as someone like a Billy Graham or a Wesley or a Whitfield would have been. So you're saying that it kind of leads to this kind of spiritual laziness when it comes to talking about Jesus within those friendships?
00:06:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because I think, you know, it's a sense of which, as I said, you can just be friends with someone. And they know I'm a Christian. And I occasionally say something that, you know, happened at the weekend when I was at church or something, you know, I might have heard something or whatever, I might drop it into a conversation. But it's so subtle.
00:06:29
Speaker
I just don't think it counts as evangelism in most cases, let alone, of course, the genuine issues people have ethically with the whole of the other notion of friendship branches, and which is sort of being friends with someone where the friendship is kind of fake because you're secretly trying to convert them. I just prefer actually being friends with people. And in my friendship, they know that I'm a Christian and that being a Christian means
00:06:54
Speaker
Jesus is the most important thing in my life and should be in theirs too. Otherwise, why would I be a Christian if I didn't want them to be one as well? It's not the kind of thing like a hobby. I'm in this sport, you're into that sport. No, this is something where I believe that Jesus is Lord. So of course, I want to need you to believe this. It would be wonderful if you did. And so I sort of changed tack.
00:07:16
Speaker
I remember at the time being a student, wanting to be this cool Christian, who everyone knew I was a proper, sold out Christian, but I could be very cool and savvy and not really ever seem like I was properly trying to convert them anyway, or I'd be horrified if they knew that I was going to try and convert them.
00:07:36
Speaker
And I kind of realized actually that's quite disingenuous. It's far better and far more, they appreciate it, most of my non-Christian friends, the fact that I've just realized how being outgoing about it is far more genuine really to what I actually believe.
Why Choose Friendship Evangelism?
00:07:51
Speaker
So Aaron, what do you think it is that drives our tendency to lean towards things like friendship evangelism? Because I, like you say, if I had a vinegar-soaked coin for every time I've heard that phrase, it's all over the place. And I wonder what's driving it. So I mean, you suppose you could be positive and say maybe we think it's a wonderfully engaging way of responding to people. I also worry maybe of some of its fear. And so we're more on the back foot than the front foot. What do you think is going on?
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right, that thought about fear for sure. But people don't say it's because of fear, they say it's because they're much more missionally sensitive, culturally sensitive, because no one wants to be evangelised. So if you think about how bizarre evangelism actually is, when people think about it, you're asking someone to accept the gospel, to make a fundamental existential
00:08:47
Speaker
deep personal level change that affects everything for all eternity. So I think people it's quite a big ask when you think about it and so I think people like to kind of lower the expectations of that ask and kind of just hope that this person can drift into an awareness of how important the gospel is and you know it sort of just
00:09:05
Speaker
because it comes from sometimes a good place you know this tendency to think okay I'll tone it down I don't want to seem like someone who's you know blasting at them because maybe then they'll be put off by the gospel so that's kind of the fear the fear that I'll be put off I'll put them off by the gospel that'd be the kind of
00:09:21
Speaker
you know, a quite laudable motivation, but it's also a less laudable motivation, or maybe a deplorable one, which is, you know, self-protection. I will face persecution, I will face a kind of social ostracizing by evangelism, by doing this, by seeming like the crazy person who talks a lot about Jesus. And I just think that, again, that just you cannot map that
00:09:44
Speaker
neatly into the history of Christianity and how it's spread and the kind of sacrifices that people are willing to make in order just to speak the gospel in various contexts both both beyond the west but also within the western world. People have paid a great great cost for us to now do our very comfortable you know latte sipping version of evangelism which doesn't look all that much like evangelism basically. You know I can almost kind of hear people saying well the alternative
00:10:13
Speaker
to this kind of flavour of friendship evangelism. It just sounds quite overbearing, you know, like in every conversation, should I be thinking, okay, my friend has just talked to me about clothes, okay, I'm now going to start talking about how only with Christianity can we have a sustainable worldview when it comes to environmental issues and, you know, rights, poverty, those kind of things.
00:10:36
Speaker
How would you respond to that impetus that's in most of us? I don't want to be the overbearing Christian that with every single conversation I'm just using it to crowbar it to Christ, which then in the long term turns them off from Jesus and it's much harder to build any kind of traction
Critique of Formulaic Evangelism
00:10:54
Speaker
when it comes to speaking of him.
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, funnily, in your example, I thought you're going to say, you know, in the kind of cheesy, evangelistic links, you could have said, you know, you could be clothed with the righteousness of God. I know, right. It went through my head and scores. Right.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I totally I'm really glad you said that, actually, because obviously, that's often a way that the kind of thing I'm saying could easily be misinterpreted. I'm just as, you know, annoyed by the very sort of formulaic approaches to evangelism, which also undersell how good the gospel is when people kind of try to shoehorn it in. You know, I've done so much campus related evangelism in my time and face certain approaches which
00:11:41
Speaker
are kind of really embarrassing partly because they're just they're almost cut off from real life. So yeah the friendship around the room is we want to be immersed in real life like Jesus was. We want to go to parties. We want to be actually friends. We want to like these sports that people like, whatever people like. Of course we do. Those are the great good things to be involved in culture.
00:12:00
Speaker
And so yeah, there can be an approach that sort of says all that stuff doesn't really matter. Just pretend that you like it in order to get your little, you know, clothes with Christ kind of thing in. And I think, you know, that can be a real problem. There were seminars that used to be run for student ministries. One conference I went to, which was called, one seminar talk was called, How to Turn Every Conversation Around to the Gospel. And I kind of thought, gosh, that sounds very stressful, doesn't it?
00:12:29
Speaker
similar to as you're saying you know you're chatting with someone and everything turns back to this obviously if you're talking to someone like that the person is clearly going to then think well that person doesn't really want to talk to me they don't really
00:12:40
Speaker
care about me as a human being. They care about me as a kind of notch on their evangelistic sort of chart or something. And that's kind of a very depressing thought to come across like. So yeah, if a Christian is thinking in those terms, and then I would certainly want to say something to them as well. Because also, and the reason I say that misrepresents the gospel is because there ought to be a sense in which you're obviously tailoring the way you proclaim the gospel to different people. As Paul says in Colossians, you know, walking wisdom toward the outside and making the best use of the time,
00:13:10
Speaker
let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, that you may know how to answer each person. So there is a sense in which Paul would clearly speak very differently in different contexts he was in. And there's a sense of seasoned conversation as well. You're thinking intentionally, but you also actually, you can't plan it all in advance in that formulaic way. That would be kind of dreadful.
00:13:35
Speaker
I wonder is there also, though, it's interesting, isn't there, as you were talking there, Aaron, I think there's a fine line to walk, isn't there? Because on the one hand, as you say, you don't want to be the person who gets the reputation for, you know, twisting every opportunity in sort of bizarre and strange ways towards the gospel and just so people avoid you. But on the other hand, I think there is this sort of tendency we have to be so afraid of embarrassment, particularly in British culture, that, you know, that verse of the scriptures that says, you know, about the idea about being prepared to be a fool for Christ.
00:14:04
Speaker
And it's finally the space to walk that light, isn't it, between not being sort of stupid, but equally being willing to risk the reputational hit. And I wonder sometimes, I would say, I say this to myself, I catch myself sometimes walking away thinking, gosh, I wonder if I just bottled that because I wanted the quiet life.
00:14:24
Speaker
Yeah I totally agree and then you know with respect to the caveat I just said before the bigger issue I would still say is definitely that fear of looking a bit crazy and to some extent those of a previous generation may remember yeah more Christians around who perhaps seemed more acerbic and kind of aggressive in their response in their evangelistic kind of
00:14:46
Speaker
way of speaking that would have would put anyone off speaking in that way and so therefore they kind of just you know pendulum swing classically to the other side. I just don't you know you say you go back to the scripture and you just see so many examples of where we're supposed to look. We're supposed to get in trouble you know Peter don't be surprised when the persecution comes against you for what you say. A good deal of the New Testament is written by people who spend more than a little time
00:15:12
Speaker
in prison, that should give you some kind of clue as to the kind of trouble you might get in.
Embracing Vulnerability in Evangelism
00:15:18
Speaker
And I don't mean necessarily you're breaking the law, I just mean that people aren't necessarily going to like what you say and you are going to look rather silly at times. And so, yeah, the foolishness is also central to the Gospel. It's the beginning of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians, that it won't look
00:15:34
Speaker
you know, impressive to the world the ways in that way. There's something fundamental about the cross shaped life and the message of the cross that will rub up against the way people think they should live their lives. Yeah, that fear of looking silly is another thing which I think is just, yeah, it shouldn't have a place in a Christian life because that's something we've been, the gospel actually frees you from, not to live a life that's, you know, completely withdrawn and comfortable and just getting on with the normal,
00:16:03
Speaker
your normal career in life, go to your church, programs and meetings, do your small group, do your little thing and then just keep huddled away.
00:16:09
Speaker
It's an outgoing faith. It's fundamentally outgoing. That's what the gospel is. It's good news. So it's not like I have this good news that I don't need to share. We all need to share this good news. So how you do that is obviously there's a variety of ways you can do that. There's better or worse ways of doing it. But we all have to have that sort of sacred duty, I guess, to be having that on the forefront of our lips in a way. So we're not restraining it. There's something I often think of with
00:16:37
Speaker
reading Psalm 40, which in its immediate context isn't...
00:16:41
Speaker
necessarily thought of for evangelism, but I think there's lots of applications for it. In that David is saying, I have not restrained my lips. You know, I've been brought, my feet have been placed on this rock out of the miry bog, and I'm not restraining my lips. I want to tell people of this great salvation. So it should be a kind of overflow of our life, of how good the gospel is, and seeing it
Public Prayer and Active Faith
00:17:04
Speaker
in action. So it shouldn't necessarily be this terrifying, fearful thing where we say, well, I have to go into switch on my evangelism, like,
00:17:10
Speaker
robotic switch now. Now I turn into an evangelist. I think evangelism should be an overflow of who we are as Christians. Just as we come to a bit of a close, Aaron, what would you say that that sacred duty looks like in practice? What does it look like to put that foolishness on display in our lives in an intentional way with friends and family and strangers? Yeah, that's a really good question and I think I could give some examples. I mean,
00:17:39
Speaker
just from a few days ago I was chatting to one of my neighbours in the street and we talked about all sorts of stuff but then he starts opening up to me about some issues he's been having. I start telling him some testimonies because he knows that I'm a Christian because I just talk about it almost straight away when I meet someone. I want people to know that I'm
00:17:59
Speaker
a Christian who takes it seriously as soon as I meet them. And I don't mean that in a wooden way like we were discussing earlier, but you need to have it on the front burner straight away so that they know that you mean business. Because I think it's easy in our, you know, post Christendom society where we know that Christianity had an influence, people couldn't know about it, but they didn't necessarily know it. And so then saying I go to church can mean different things for different people. So wherever I can, I try to talk about early on when I meet anyone,
00:18:30
Speaker
about what my faith means to me, because it is the most important thing that they can know about me. So I don't think it's an odd thing for me to talk about it a lot. And therefore, when I start, you know, when you get that out of the way, in a way, it's not as strange for you to jump in with things and say, oh, this reminds me of a testimony, or this reminds me of something that happened to me once, or that someone told me, or this thing I heard in a preach or something.
00:18:51
Speaker
Anyway, in this conversation the other day, this guy starts asking me to pray for him because he had a problem with his right side, which he's had for many years. In fact, he can't go to sleep at night because of his post-traumatic stress syndrome when he was in the army. I just pray for him in the middle of the street and there's people watching and it's a bit weird, people watching from their windows, the Stony Middleton windows.
00:19:14
Speaker
It's like, I don't find that strange at all, but I know some Christians would, because that must be weird. Why is it weird? Why is it weird? Put your hands on someone and pray for them. He got healed, by the way. The next day he came to say, I saw him walking back from the chippy, and he was like, Jesus has done something in my life. Amazing.
00:19:33
Speaker
And so that's a whole thing. So be praying for him. But that's just an example of just a recent one of situations where quite regularly just you're trying to seize the moment and just go, well, is this appropriate? You're prayerful about it. You don't have to blast in every conversation you're in. But I just think being willing to blast in if you need to is the important thing.
00:19:52
Speaker
And I think I had a pastor who used to say, I used to go to a Google guy, I go to a charismatic church, as you can probably imagine. And we, there'd be this thing with people who dance in worship. I've never really one who loved dancing in worship. I'm sure Andy, you enjoy dancing in worship. Absolutely. Absolutely. He used to say, look, some of you don't like doing this, but you're not free to not dance until you're free to dance.
00:20:18
Speaker
Because otherwise you're kind of thinking that you're kind of inhibited and you're saying, actually, I'm doing good things, that's fine, it might not be a good thing to do, but would you be able to do it if it was a good thing to do? And that's the kind of way I think about evangelism.
00:20:33
Speaker
Are we saying, I could go and talk about Jesus really openly, but I could offer to pray for someone in the street or say something a bit cheeky to someone I'm talking to, but I'm just choosing not to. I just get the sense that most people aren't choosing not to, they're actually not willing to. And until you're willing to do something a bit embarrassing, then let's start curbing how you do that and be wise about how you do it. But I think until you're willing to do that, the thought about being wise about how you do it will probably be an excuse to not do it at all.
Episode Conclusion & Farewell
00:21:04
Speaker
That's a fantastic challenge to bring it to the end on, Aaron. That's been really helpful stuff in there. I hope for all of you listening, I hope that's been helpful and challenging and if it's been too challenging, just contact Aaron directly to complain.
00:21:19
Speaker
But no, I think a great wake-up call to all of us. So thank you for all you're doing down there, training the next generation at Cliff College. Thanks for all you've shared with us today and thanks for being a guest on the show. It's been great to have you, Aaron. Thank you, it's been a pleasure. And Christy and I will see all of you guys who listen to this and tune in again with a fresh guest in two weeks time. Thanks for listening to PepTalk.