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With Hannah Steele
348 Plays9 months ago
Steve Osmond fills in as host this week on PEP Talk and gets the chance to speak with an expert on mission and evangelism in postmodern culture. Hannah Steele is an academic and author whose passion is to see churches and groups of Christians grow together to become more missional and evangelistic.
The Revd Dr Hannah Steele is Director of St Mellitus College, London and Tutor and Lecturer in Missiology. As well as Living His Story, she is author of New World, New Church? (SCM Press, 2017). Alongside her academic work, Hannah has spent time engaged in mission and evangelism among students in central London as a staff worker with UCCF. She is married with three sons and loves watching football, baking and traveling.
Pre-order her next book here: Living His Story Together, due out 20 June 2024.
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Introduction
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, hi there and welcome to the pep talk podcast, the persuasive evangelism podcast. As you may hear already, I'm not Andy Bannister and I'm not Christy Mayer. I'm in fact, Steve Osman standing in for the two of them who sadly couldn't be with us here today.
Guest Introduction: Reverend Dr. Hannah Steele
00:00:27
Speaker
But I'm very excited to be with you and very excited for the guests that we have on the show today, Reverend Dr. Hannah Steele. Hannah, how are you? Thank you so much for joining us today.
00:00:40
Speaker
I'm great, thank you and thanks for inviting me onto the podcast, it's lovely to be with you all. Yeah, so you said that you are calling in from London and that's where you're based, am I correct? That's right, so I live in South East London in a glorious place called Peckham, it's a very vibrant part of London, I've been here for 25 years now so it very much feels like home.
Books and Interests
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, I've got a few questions for you based on some of your real writing. You've written two books. The first is Living His Story, revealing the extraordinary love of God in ordinary ways, which came out just in the time of the pandemic in 2021. And as you were telling me, you have written a follow-up, Living His Story Together, being a community of missionary disciples, which is coming out very soon, you said.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yes, it's due to come out in June. So it's a sort of follow up to the first one I wrote on evangelism. Oh, that is fantastic. I'm very excited to get our hands on that and just see through what that's all about. But I see in your bio here that some of your interests are football, baking and travelling. So I thought I would dare ask you, which football team do you support?
00:01:59
Speaker
Well, so though I live in Peckham, I am originally from the Midlands in Birmingham, so Aston Villa is my football team and it's a great time to be a Villa fan right now. You're getting a lot of respect from people for being a Villa fan at the moment, it's quite nice.
00:02:18
Speaker
Very good. Yeah, being from South Africa, I luckily at the moment sort of just stand back and say, well, you know, I don't, I don't support any team in specific, but maybe I'll join you with Villa for a little while just as soon as they're doing so well.
Football and Baking
00:02:31
Speaker
And baking. If you had to pick one thing or stop your head, what is it your favorite thing to bake?
00:02:38
Speaker
I think I would go for chocolate brownies just because it's the recipe I really could do with my eyes closed. And it always goes down well, however well baked it is. You meant that I will get behind that fully. And then you say here traveling, that is one of your favorite pastimes. So best place you've ever visited.
00:03:01
Speaker
We spent four months as a family in Uganda and I fell in love with the people and the place of Uganda. It is a stunning country. It is so beautiful, so much natural beauty. And the people are just remarkable. So it has a very special place in my heart. Amazing. When was that? 2015.
00:03:25
Speaker
2015. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, I haven't been up as far as Uganda yet, but hopefully one day I will be heading back that way. So as I've read your bio, you have been involved with quite a lot.
Faith Journey and University Experiences
00:03:43
Speaker
And I think what I really like and for the interest of us with this, the Peptalk podcast is really the mission, the apologetics, the evangelism, because that's really all what we're about here at Peptalk.
00:03:55
Speaker
And so maybe your first question, how did you get into that? What was your, I suppose, journey of faith that led you to want to study and then end up teaching in these areas, as you do? So I was brought up in a Christian family. My dad was a vicar, so kind of had that lovely sort of faith environment at home. And I think it was when I went to university to study theology, because I had always enjoyed, you know, exploring my faith.
00:04:24
Speaker
I came into contact with, for the first time, with people who really just had very different perspective on life to me, many of them are atheists, agnostics, and yet they were hungry and open to kind of hear what I thought and why I believed what I did. And it was such a rich time for me at university and I had the privilege of
00:04:47
Speaker
meeting Michael Green who was a real evangelist back in the 90s and he was such an inspiration to me, led a large mission that I was involved in as a university student and I think seeing his ministry really impacted me as well as seeing some friends come to faith and just having those conversations that made me think about my faith in a rigorous academic way that I perhaps hadn't done previously.
00:05:13
Speaker
Okay, that's fantastic. Just this past week, I was out at St Andrews doing the events week talks on a range of topics. And I just love there's something about that phase of life, the university time, where there really does seem to be such an openness, as much as people, you know, may have been even like antagonistic towards faith and belief in God, it seems like
00:05:36
Speaker
At the base is this openness to at least hear other ideas and engage so it's really formative i think for so many people so it's really cool to hear that you've had those discussions as part of your journey as well.
00:05:50
Speaker
And I think for me, a lot of it was people having a sort of a perception of Christianity that wasn't particularly helpful or true. And I think now for students today, I mean, I see this now with my children at that age, the conversations they have with their friends. It's not so much that people have preconceptions about what Christianity is about. They really just don't know. And there's almost like a novelty to meeting a person of faith.
00:06:17
Speaker
And there's such opportunity there. Yeah, it's interesting you say that I've been having a few conversations lately around, you know, as I'm relatively new to the UK coming from South Africa, just trying to understand the context better. And so there's these discussions around, you know, you have many
00:06:38
Speaker
families, many communities that are a couple of generations down the line who really have just no Christian context as well. They very rarely met someone of faith, never picked up a Bible for themselves, never set foot in church. And it seems strangely enough that actually that's opened up some opportunities to actually share the Bible without all of that baggage coming along. Is that something that you'd say you've seen in some way?
00:07:06
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And I think that is the post-Christian or post-Christendom culture that we live in that is increasingly that way that the Christian story has sort of slipped from our corporate memory and
00:07:22
Speaker
actually there just presents this opportunity to speak about the Christian gospel in new and fresh ways but it means we can't presume that people know what we mean like we use a word like sin or even talking about God people don't have a framework for understanding what that is and so that we have to be really clear with the way we describe and define what what we mean by those things yeah
00:07:52
Speaker
Absolutely.
Sharing Personal Experiences of Faith
00:07:53
Speaker
I like that. I was doing just a little read up on your first book and someone wrote the book seeks to provide a fresh perspective on evangelism, pursuing Walter Brighamons description of evangelism as an invitation and summons to switch stories and therefore change lives. And to me that I kind of I remember reading that.
00:08:18
Speaker
And so what you just said, this idea of switching stories, in what way do you think we can bring the truth of the Christian story to culture, be it in the university setting or friends, colleagues, family, whoever it might be, especially from that perspective of a better story? What do you think is the best way to actually do that?
00:08:43
Speaker
I really sort of got hooked on that idea a few years ago hence where the book sort of takes its inspiration from that Walter Brueggemann idea and Brueggemann's an Old Testament scholar so he talks about the sort of the drama of the gospel as being you know this big story at the heart of the universe and you see this sort of cycle of kind of
00:09:05
Speaker
creation, full redemption, glory, sort of in mini cycles throughout the Old Testament. And so I think, you know, obviously, that is the story of the gospel. And we can bring that story into our world today in a number of different ways by connecting it to some of the smaller stories in our culture, whether that's through films, through through books,
00:09:32
Speaker
finding those connection points for the gospel that sort of, yeah, demonstrate or point to that sort of larger story. But we can do it in our own lives just through sharing our story and our experience. That is one of the great things about a post-Christian culture is that everybody's experience is in theory equally valid and, you know, we can listen to one another's stories. And so there's
00:09:58
Speaker
I think the starting point for many of us can be speaking of our own experience of God. And I think sometimes when we think about sharing our story, we think, oh, well, I haven't got the dramatic testimony of like near-death experience and this miracle. I mean, some people do have those stories and they're wonderful and we should creatively share them, but not every Christian has that story. But we each daily have a story of God's presence in our lives.
00:10:27
Speaker
little answers to prayer, a feeling of security and peace in a moment of anxiety or fear, and we can speak of that. And in doing so, I think we begin that work of connecting God's story that we are part of with the story of the person that we are talking to. So I think there's a number of different ways we can use that story element to speak into our culture.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic and really, really helpful. Especially, as again, I mentioned, I'm thinking about, you know, the context here in the UK. Now, I come from a background of studying in the sciences and when I became a Christian, sort of midway through
00:11:10
Speaker
my degree and started sharing my faith in some way. People started asking the question, how can you be a scientist and believe in God? And so there's these very like rationalistic questions, the science in God or reliability of the Bible, all these kinds of things. It seems though, and I think as you're saying, people are, they've moved away from that a little bit. They're thinking more about these bigger questions of their existence and the purpose of life and meaning and you know, what are we here for?
00:11:40
Speaker
And so I think, as you point out, that is a way that we can bring a story and to show how Christianity gives sort of this better map of meaning to our lives, which we can locate ourselves in. So maybe with that in mind, what do you think currently are some of the biggest barriers to people's coming to hear the gospel or coming to put their faith in Christ?
Overcoming Barriers in Sharing Faith
00:12:06
Speaker
Do you mean from the perspective of the barriers for us as we share our faith or for those that we encounter?
00:12:15
Speaker
Yeah, both. I know that, you know, there's a lot of fear. So for years and years, I didn't share my faith because, you know, what if I say the wrong thing or get it wrong or look silly. So there's definitely that aspect. But I think as people are going out and sharing their faith, what do you think you think some of the big questions that people have or some of the stumbling blocks that they have to face?
00:12:38
Speaker
So maybe I'll just speak first of all to the barriers perhaps that we have, because I think we can, as you say, be very fearful. There was some Abana research, a survey done recently that sort of talked about millennial Christians, so sort of young adult age Christians, and how they all felt, basically the summary of the survey was that they felt they should be sharing their faith, but they felt really uncomfortable doing so.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I think there is a real question around the ethics of evangelism. And is it valid? Can you speak of your faith? And obviously there are lots of contexts in workplace where you can't speak of your faith in a public way.
00:13:20
Speaker
So I do think we need to do a bit of thinking around the ethics of evangelism and again this is why I found this Walter Brueggemann idea really helpful because he talks about evangelism as an invitation to enter into God's story and the thing about an invitation is it's just freely offered and it's not a coercive thing, there's no manipulation, there's no
00:13:42
Speaker
you know, not even sort of too much persuasion. It's just an invitation that is offered out to people. And I think that can be a helpful way to think about we are just simply offering. And it might be that we're just offering, you know, a conversation starter, we're just offering our own perspective, that may be a sort of a helpful way to get a conversation
00:14:05
Speaker
started and get us a little bit beyond the fear of, oh gosh, I've got to try and convince someone to believe something against their will. We're just offering an invitation to a different way of looking at life, almost saying to our friends, just come with me for a second and imagine this could be true. How might that change the way you view life? It's that sort of posture, I think. But then in terms of the barriers that people face,
00:14:32
Speaker
I mean they will be varied in terms of the person and that's why listening is so important. You know we always think about evangelism is about talking but evangelism first and foremost is about listening. What's God already doing in this person's life? Where can I see signs of God at work already in this conversation and in this person's life?
00:14:55
Speaker
and then beginning with that. So asking questions, you know, have you had any experience of faith or religion? Tell me about your understanding of the meaning and the purpose of life opens up the conversation to a sort of more, a deeper kind of place. And obviously there will be large issues, the barriers around individualism, around the nature of belief itself, around
00:15:22
Speaker
You know, the history of the church, those are questions that come up time and time again. But it's in an individual approach, I think. Yeah, what you've shared there, I think it's so good to just remove that pressure that there is. You know, hey, you're entering into a conversation with someone and you can share that experience you've had and just ask good questions and then, you know, let the conversation
00:15:43
Speaker
go where it will, I guess. And so that for me is definitely on the personal side of evangelism. But then your book that's coming out in June is really sort of shifting gears slightly, it seems, to more the community aspect of things, the subtitle of the book there, being a community of missionary disciples. So I want to ask you a question on that.
00:16:09
Speaker
If I were, say, a pastor or a church leader who seems to be in a church where this isn't really part of the culture, the culture of evangelism and reaching out to people, what do you think are maybe one or two things you would say to that leader for them to really start shifting that culture toward being this culture of missionary disciples?
Advice for Church Leaders
00:16:39
Speaker
So there's a number of things I would say. I mean, the obvious one, and I'm sure they are already doing this, of course, is to pray. You know, prayer changes the atmosphere. Prayer changes and shifts our wills to align them with the will of God. So, you know, prayer is, I hope, a given in this in this conversation. I think identifying the evangelists is a great thing to do in any church. And I think
00:17:06
Speaker
you know, even in a church that might not be very sort of missionally minded together, you know, there might be one or two, perhaps sometimes on the fringes of church life, because they don't actually always find Sundays that engaging or that sort of, you know, the place where they most want to be, but they might be out in the community doing other things. And I think if you can identify a couple of, you know, evangelists, people that do have that ability to
00:17:33
Speaker
speak winsomely about Christianity and draw them together, you can maybe start something with a small little group, even just gathering to pray to encourage one another to
00:17:45
Speaker
imagine creatively what you could do. So I think that can be one way to sort of get some energy going because then they can be a sort of example to others. And then I think it's looking at what are you doing in your church at the moment and how could you just turn the sort of not one dial up. So instead of going, okay,
00:18:10
Speaker
you know, we have this parent and toddler ministry, but no one ever speaks about Jesus. Let's next week do a full gospel presentation and an altar call. That might not work. But, you know, how could you just dial it up one little bit, one degree temperature on sort of everything you're doing in the church that, you know, connects with people outside the church. And that might be gathering to pray before it. It might be going into that parent and toddler group saying,
00:18:37
Speaker
God, give me an opportunity to speak to someone of you. It might be introducing a little Christian activity once in a while. There's lots of different ways you can do it, but to think of it as upping the temperature just one little bit across a number of activities, rather than coming with a huge new big strategy that might for some churches be a bit overwhelming. Sure.
00:19:03
Speaker
That's fantastic. I think that's really, really helpful. Just a few small little hooks that we can hang some things on. I have so many more questions that I'd love to ask you, but I see we've already run out of time. So just a huge thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us today at PEP Talk and share a little bit about your background and the ministry that you're doing. I'm really looking forward to your book coming out and I'd love to
00:19:29
Speaker
tattoo again once it does come up and once I read it. And yeah, we would love to have you back again sometime. But thank you so much for your time today. We really do appreciate it. Thank you so much. It has been lovely to be with you. Cool. Well, thank you very much. And I will hopefully chat to you again sometime soon. OK, thanks so much. Take care.