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With Mary Jo Sharp
60 Plays5 years ago
How can we present the gospel through our lives and in our churches when, unlike Christ Himself, we are far from perfect? Navigating the tricky waters of hypocrisy or painful experiences is so important in bringing friends and family to Christ. This time on PEP Talk, Mary Jo Sharp reflects on her own journey from atheism to faith, and how she dealt with these kind of issues.
Mary Jo Sharp first encountered apologetics in her own spiritual search while seeking answers. She is now an Assistant Professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University and the founder and director of Confident Christianity Apologetics Ministry. She has been featured in Christianity Today’s cover story “The Unexpected Defenders” and is an international speaker on apologetics, focusing on love and logic to uncover truth. She lives with her husband and family in Portland, Oregon. She serves on faculty with Summit Ministries Student Conferences, and is a guest lecturer with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. She is the author of the top-selling Bible study, “Why Do You Believe That?” as well as Living in Truth with LifeWay Christian Resources. She recently released her book Why I Still Believe.
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Transcript
Introduction to Pep Talk and Hosts
00:00:09
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Vanister and I'm joined as ever by my wonderful co-host, Christy Mayer. How are you doing? You're doing very well. Thank you very much, Andy. Greetings from London.
00:00:22
Speaker
Greetings from London. And greetings from Scotland.
Mary Jo Sharp's Introduction and Book
00:00:25
Speaker
Well, we have an amazing privilege on this episode of PepTalk, because we are joined all the way from the US of A by Mary Jo Sharp. Mary, Jo, welcome to the show. Hey, guys, it's so good to be on. And greetings all the way from Portland, Oregon. Oh, thank you. Well, it's a real privilege. I've been looking forward to this a while, because Mary Jo, you and I have been each other for a while, haven't we? Oh, yeah.
00:00:52
Speaker
You haven't come across Mary Jo and her amazing husband Roger. You're the only person I know who knows more puns than I do.
Mary Jo Sharp's Background in Apologetics
00:01:00
Speaker
But you wear a number of hats. You are on staff at Houston Baptist University in the States where you teach apologetics, right? Yes.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yes, well, that's a good answer. Also run a ministry called Confident Christianity. People who followed Solas may recognise that name. And also you're the author of a fantastic new book, which is, I think, where I'd like to start our conversation on this episode. So your new book is called Why We Still
Challenges with Church Experience and Hypocrisy
00:01:28
Speaker
Believe. Is that why I still believe? Well, I still believe, yes.
00:01:31
Speaker
and what I love about Why Still Believe is it's a sort of so many things combined in that book but really I guess it begins with the story of how you came to Christ from an atheist background which is great but then sort of a few things went wrong at that point. What kind of happened shortly after you became a Christian?
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for asking me that. Shortly after I became a Christian, I mean, just immediately from the very first experience I have as a new believer in the church, I started to notice that the things that drew me to Christianity, the things I was excited about, like the truth and goodness and beauty of God,
00:02:08
Speaker
We're not very well reflected in his people and I I means from the very first day that I walk into the church I'm already experiencing judgmentalism hypocrisy all sorts of stuff going on So there what happens is that over time, you know, you don't just immediately respond to those kind of things like hey this is wrong over time you start to think wow, this is
00:02:30
Speaker
This isn't good. What I'm seeing in a church is not what I was reading about in the New Testament, like how we're supposed to do unto others as we want others to do unto us, and how we're supposed to be confessing our sins to one another. I could just start downloading all these things on you. But I was basically going, where are the people that I expected to find when I was reading the New Testament? And I was very disappointed in that and what that led to. Not just disappointed, but there were a lot of situations in which I got very hurt in the church.
00:03:00
Speaker
And so what that led to was me having doubt about whether or not anybody I was going to church with actually believed in God. And then when that started running around in my mind, the next thought was, well, why do I say I believe in God? Why do I think that I have a relationship with Jesus? Why do I say that God exists or that Jesus rose from the dead? And I realized I didn't really have good answers to that.
Navigating Church Hypocrisy through Apologetics
00:03:23
Speaker
And so that started me on a search for answers, which brought me into the field of apologetics.
00:03:28
Speaker
And I didn't even know that was a field and never meant to get into it. That's amazing, Jay. I mean, having got into the field of apologetics, what is it that helped you to navigate that just really painful and tricky terrain of seeing that kind of hypocrisy in the local church, the place that's meant to be a beacon of God's goodness? How did you work through that? I mean, I'm guessing you're still in church today.
00:03:55
Speaker
I am. My husband's actually in ministry. He's a pastor. So that's a really big question because there's many parts to it. So we'll just kind of hit a few things in short form. One of the things that
00:04:10
Speaker
dealing with my doubts helped to push me into a deeper faith where I started studying the bible at a deeper deeper level and started studying some of these philosophical issues and one of the ones that really helped me was the problem of evil the more that I look at the fallen status of mankind the more that I understand the depth of his depravity and and how
00:04:34
Speaker
People are not, even the best people are not going to act perfect. They're not going to, you know, they're going to fail you. You're going to have hurtful experiences with them. And that should be expected in the kind of world in which we live. And so that helped me like having an understanding of what is the problem of evil and what is God doing about it? You know, why is Jesus going to the cross and rising from the dead? And how is that working with the problem
Engaging with Non-Believers
00:05:00
Speaker
of evil? What does that do?
00:05:02
Speaker
Finding those kind of answers helped me to handle some of the hurt and the grief that I was experiencing in the church because I came to the realization that this is the kind of stuff that humans do.
00:05:13
Speaker
You know, one of the reasons I find your story so fascinating, I mean, firstly, I think any story of someone who's come to faith from an atheist background is hugely encouraging because sometimes I think, you know, Christians sort of get, you know, sort of hear lots of stories of people who've gone the other way and to realize that actually there are plenty of people who come from, you know, from atheism and scepticism into Christianity.
00:05:32
Speaker
But, you know, to stay on this issue of hypocrisy, so many people, I think, have run into friends or family members or colleagues, you know, and as they've tried to have conversations about Jesus and the gospel, you know, the issue that you ran into as a new Christian gets thrown back at them. They've had an experience, their friend, their colleagues had an experience with Christians, you know, behaving in a way that's hypocritical or helpful.
00:05:54
Speaker
I've had those kind of conversations where people say that don't talk to me about Christianity because of and then some horrendous, you know, story gets funny. How do you, from your experience and what you've learned from actually going through this yourself, when you meet people who that is the stumbling block that keeps them from Jesus, how do you engage them and try and get them to see what you saw?
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really great question. So the first thing that I want to do is that I don't want to just push past the painfulness of whatever it was they experienced in the church because that's a valid experience. They have some kind of hurt in the background there.
00:06:33
Speaker
So I want to make sure that I'm listening to them and give them an opportunity to express their disappointment with the church. Like I have expressed my disappointment with things that have happened in the church. And I'll find wherever I can agree with them.
00:06:50
Speaker
But then I want to move them on to discussing from just having agreement about, yes, those things shouldn't have happened, to understanding what we mean when we say those things shouldn't have happened. What are we trying to say? We're trying to say that there's a way things should be. And so I want to help them see that, that they actually do have a commitment to something better than this. They have a commitment to some kind of point of reference for goodness.
00:07:18
Speaker
And in making the argument of hypocrisy in the church, they're saying that there's a moral standard that we should live up to that we're not. And so then I want to talk to them a little bit about what is that moral standard and where do we find a moral standard that we can use as our reference point for making these kind of judgments.
Building Genuine Conversations through Listening
00:07:37
Speaker
So I want to make sure to do that with them if they're allowing. I'm not just going to throw this on them, but this is like, so the conversation is going along. We've been talking and I want to get to that point. But I also want to make sure I get to the point of what does it look like in a world without God?
00:07:54
Speaker
So these things that we feel like should or ought, these injustices that we see, are they still there in a world void of God? In other words, can you ground them? Not just are they there, but can you find a reason for thinking that there's such things as injustice or evil or those sorts of things in a world void of God? So it's sort of the path that I follow is very much being attentive to them personally and validating their experience and then pushing them a little deeper to work through this issue.
00:08:24
Speaker
That's so good. I think one of the things, not that I've been stalking you Mary Jo, but I believe in your previous book. Why do you believe that? And one of the things that you tease out is the importance of listening to others well as you go through these different, as you go through these kind of, not steps, but the process of engaging others with the Gospel.
00:08:47
Speaker
How do we listen well? Because I think often we feel like we either have loads to say or perhaps we resort to listening because we don't actually know what to say, so we'll just keep listening. How can we be active listeners as we go through identifying those different kind of steps and putting forward the gospel, thinking about how we ground moral values and other things like that?
00:09:10
Speaker
Yeah, there's several ways that we can do it, but I think if we boil down to like one way to say, what does it mean to listen well? I would say listening well entails trying to others understand the other person's point of view the way that they understand their point of view.
00:09:27
Speaker
Because when we do that, it's like that walk in a mile in somebody else's shoes, you're really trying to get a sense of what it is they think. Because too often, we get ourselves into the, like, we place people into categories, oh, you're Muslim, oh, you're atheist, oh, you're Christian, oh, you know, whatever. And then we think we know,
00:09:46
Speaker
what they believe and who they are when really we don't. We can't jump into the mind of an individual to find out what exactly they're thinking. And I've never met a single person who expresses their beliefs in the exact same way as anybody else. So the listening part
00:10:02
Speaker
with trying to understand their point of view the way they do, it respects them. It shows that you respect them greatly. Like you really do want to minister to them. You really are valuing what they have to say. And it also, because you're doing that,
00:10:17
Speaker
It helps you not make assumptions about their views.
Church Improvements: Addressing Key Issues
00:10:20
Speaker
It helps you not build strawmen about their views, where you're actually reducing their view to something else so that you can knock it down easier, which that's creating untruth. And then it helps you find points of communication with them so that if you're worried about, well, what would I say to a Muslim or to an atheist by listening to them, you find the points of communication where you can talk about something that you know about.
00:10:47
Speaker
I think that's really helpful. One of the things that I think sometimes holds us back as I was listening to you saying that Mary Jo, I think sometimes I just wonder where the Christians are afraid of listening because almost by listening we worry that we're validating. So we sit and we allow our Muslim friend to share what they believe, we allow our atheist friend to
00:11:06
Speaker
you know have a bit of a grumble about religion and maybe just part of us on the inside is thinking oh I need to I need to step in here and tell them why they're wrong rather than learn that you know what we can allow other people to describe what they believe and doesn't validate it just treats them as human being and then we can respond when they've expressed themselves.
00:11:23
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, it's an erroneous view that you're validating it by listening to it because just think of all the things then you would be validating just because you heard them and just because you listened to it. So yeah, it's really important to drive home to Christians that a lot of people think that we don't respect them, that we just want to barrel on through and just tell them what the truth is before we even care about them.
00:11:48
Speaker
So that that's sort of a perception that people have of us and we need to be intentional about tearing that perception down
00:11:56
Speaker
Now, one other question I wanted to throw your way. We sort of brainstormed beforehand the three of us on things we might talk about, but something that just sort of occurred to me as we come into the last few minutes of the show that we didn't talk about beforehand. Obviously, you're involved in higher education. You're that Houston Baptist. And so you're dealing with a lot of young minds and trying to equip them to understand what they believe and be able to give reasons.
00:12:21
Speaker
Are there areas, Mary Jo, where as you do that on the kind of academic side, where you find yourself thinking, gee, there are some things I think the church needs to raise the game on. There are things that, you know, I'm continually seeing young people, young Christians haven't thought about, that actually they need to think about. So if there are, you know, perhaps church leaders or youth leaders listening to this podcast, you know, what would you sort of say to them, hey, you know what, the question that your young people are going to run into, because I see this all the time, is this, and this is something you might want to do to better resource them for the kind of world we live in. Is that going to
00:12:50
Speaker
question
From Atheism to Christianity: Inspiration from Beauty
00:12:51
Speaker
makes sense. Yeah, I just thought like I was thinking of a ton of things in here like what's the one thing? So I'm going to list a few things here and I'll try to keep it real short. One of the big things that churches are not talking about and it is a perennial like it is constantly around us is the problem of evil.
00:13:11
Speaker
And I don't think the churches are handling that question very well. They're not teaching on what it is. There's a ton of historical material of writings in church history on it. In fact, even recently with a very public deconversion story, a church person said, we're not even talking about these issues like the pain and suffering of mankind. And I'm like, we've literally been talking about those since the beginning of Christianity.
00:13:36
Speaker
We need to educate our congregations and therefore our young minds about the problem of evil. I would also say sexuality, obviously, we're not doing enough work in the area of sexuality and identity. And now the church is doing reactive work to what's going on in the West instead of having been proactive. So that's another one. But then I would wrap it up by saying,
00:14:02
Speaker
I don't think the church does a very good job of what life is for, of what it means to be human. So we give young minds this sort of image of Christianity, and I know people have said this a million times, but we give them this image of we are the religion of no. We don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. And we don't teach them what relationship with Jesus is for.
00:14:27
Speaker
We don't teach him what about the beauty of God. We don't teach him about, you know, when you, you know, these are the destructive behaviors that keep you from these good things that God intended for you. And here's what he wants you to have. Here's the life that he wants you to leave. And so I don't think we focus enough on just that the beauty of life of a flourishing human life. So they don't know what to live for.
00:14:55
Speaker
Wow, Mary Jo, I'd love to ask you, I think we've got time for just one more question. I'd love to ask you about how we actually see the flourishing of life in that we've heard a little bit about the experiences that you had being part of a church community once you'd said that you believed. But what is it that actually got you into the church in the first place? So am I right in thinking that to begin with that you thought religion is just for the weak-minded?
00:15:21
Speaker
What was it that started to disrupt the foundations of your former position that actually got you in the church that made you see that yes, this is about Jesus is about human flourishing. How did that happen for you? What got you to Jesus?
00:15:36
Speaker
Oh, there are a lot of things that got me there. One of the things that I realized later in my life after having been a Christian for a while was that because I grew up in a particularly beautiful part of the United States in the Pacific Northwest, I really feel like I was calling me through beauty and not just through natural beauty, but also as a musician growing up. So I could hear the call of like the transcendent in
00:16:05
Speaker
Music in sitting in the middle of a band and hearing this wash of beauty all around me as we all work together to create this amazing music and I remember thinking is this all for nothing like we do this and then we just die and that's it and it goes nowhere and it does nothing other than maybe some subjective experiences here and now relative to where I'm at and it just
00:16:31
Speaker
Wow, it really started to cause me to question, is this all there is? And so I think the beauty of God, which we don't, in evangelical circles, we don't really talk on that as much. You know, we're really going to talk about the truth of the word and truth, and we're really good at talking about God's goodness, but we don't really focus on the beauty
Closing Remarks and Farewell
00:16:51
Speaker
of God. And that was one of the areas that really drew me to Him was just the amount of beauty that I saw all around me and experienced and how
00:17:01
Speaker
That that aids human flourishing that's part of human flourishing That's um, that's a great place to to wrap it up. And I think what if I'm fascinating about that that answer? Mary Jo's I think that's often an area we miss actually as Christians is not talking about beauty and someone who loves that myself, you know hiking and climbing and standing on a
00:17:21
Speaker
the top of sort of summits, looking at the landscape, you know, have some fascinating conversations with people over the years, pressing into it exactly that. So really great to come across somebody else for whom that was a big part of their journey as well. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much. I've loved it. I hope we can do this again, guys.
00:17:39
Speaker
Oh, there's so many more things to talk about. If you've enjoyed listening to this and enjoyed what you've heard of Mary Jo, do check out her new book. There'll be more about it on the So Less website on the page on this podcast. But otherwise, Christina and I will be back with another guest in two weeks time. See you soon. Thanks for listening to Cut Talk.