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The Relational Gospel

by James Barringer  
12/03/2009 / Christian Apologetics


If God wants people to be saved, why don't things like door-to-door witnessing work?

Back when I was in college, the pastor of my church (a small plant averaging around sixty people a week) told us that he felt moved to engage in door-to-door witnessing. The college student schedule gave me ample time to carry out his vision, and a friend and I found ourselves trudging through neighborhoods, thudding on doors for Jesus. To say that we didn't have much success would be putting it mildly. We considered it a productive day if one person was willing to talk to us. We visited over four hundred houses during a span of a few months, and while we did see one man and his family come to Christ, I think we have to acknowledge that a 0.25% success rate is pretty dismal for a gospel that is supposedly "the power of God unto salvation."

There are a lot of terms today for the idea I'm talking about, terms like relational evangelism and servant evangelism, but they all boil down to one crucial concept, namely the fact that the gospel was meant to be shared in the context of a relationship. The phenomenon that's commonly called "social justice" today, which in previous centuries was merely known as "loving your neighbor" until some people got it in their heads that you could love your neighbor without actually feeding him or clothing him or helping him in any way, is a powerful Biblically-prescribed method to create that relationship. Like I found when I was banging on doors, people simply don't listen to me if I don't have a relationship with them. I'm not in any way maligning or limiting the power of the Holy Spirit when I say this. It's just that God has decided the most effective presentation of the gospel happens in a relationship.

Many of my more fundamentalist friends, the ones who are angry a lot of the time and insult me when I disagree with them, think that the purpose of Jesus' miracles was to show off his power, basically to establish his credibility as the son of God. The miracles let people know that he was for real and gave them a reason to listen to him. While this is true, up to a point, let's look at the exact substance of the miracles. The most spectacular of Jesus' miracles (apart from coming back from the dead) was when he fed multiple thousands of people. Yet why did he choose to feed them? If he was merely out to prove his own power, he could have torn the sky apart so that it read "JESUS WAS HERE LOL WHAT." That's what I would have done, anyway. He could have done anything in the universe to demonstrate that he was legit and that his faith was worth following, and what he chose to do was something that met the needs of the people in front of him. They were hungry. He fed them.

I think the story of water-into-wine in John 2 is an even better example. In that situation, he didn't even want to prove his power. He scolded Mary when she volunteered him to do a miracle, saying that it wasn't his time yet. But, even though he didn't want to, he still turned water into wine, solely so that a person's wedding wouldn't be ruined. The way Jesus lived, you can see that he didn't just place value on himself and his message. He also placed value on the people who heard the message, which gave them a reason to listen and made the message that much more powerful because it was personal.

The fact is that the message of Jesus changes people's lives. But there is almost no way to make that known to people unless we're actually in their lives, showing what we mean when we say the word "Jesus." Authors and screenwriters have a slogan: "show, don't tell." If your character is nice, don't say that he's nice. Show him saving an old woman's cat from a burning building. Why? Because people can disbelieve what you tell them, but they can't disbelieve what they see. The whole scientific method is built around this idea of empirical truth, the reality of observed things. So, if I want to explain to a person that Jesus changes lives, the most effective way I can possibly do that is to be in that person's life, showing them, not telling them, what it means for my life to be changed. They can't argue with what they see.

Some of my friends, the angry ones I mentioned earlier, want me to provide chapter and verse when I say things like that. They like telling strangers about Jesus in the park so they can feel smug and self-righteous when those people ignore them. But telling people about Jesus is not the great commission. Making people into disciples is the great commission. And I think it makes sense that God, who himself is a three-way interconnected relationship, would design his message in such a way that it is best communicated in the context of a relationship.

When you think about it, you can ignore any truth that is communicated to you without the context of a relationship. Cigarettes contain large warnings about their health hazards, but many people still smoke. Public service announcements on TV urge teens not to use drugs, but many teens still do. I would be surprised if there was a single person reading this who didn't ignore the speed limit the last time they drove. But if your friend told you you were driving too fast, you would slow down. Have you ever seen the show "Intervention" on A&E? Drug addicts certainly know what they're doing to themselves and their families, but it takes an intervention, by the people whose relationships mean something, before they will change their behavior. Truth is still true without the context of a relationship, but it is not always meaningful.

I wasn't quite sure how to end this article. I sat here staring at a blank screen for about thirty minutes, until I got to talking about politics with a non-Christian friend of mine named Nick. I was telling him about how I think politics brings out the worst in people, which makes me not like it. He said, "Before speaking to you at length, I felt the same way about religion." This friend also recently asked me to pray for him while he was searching for a car to buy. What would have happened if I had body-slammed him with Jesus during our first conversation? I don't know the answer, but I do know that I wouldn't have gotten the chance to have this relationship, to show him what Jesus really means, and he would have gone the rest of his life thinking things about Jesus that had no connection to who Jesus really was or what he was all about.

I have found that the biggest reason a lot of people ignore or argue with the gospel in the first place is because they had a bad experience with church people sometime in the past. So how do you disprove their prejudice; how do you show them that not all of us are like that? Only by getting to know them. Without a relationship, they won't even be willing to talk about faith. They'll just be the people in the park who ignore my angry friends. With a relationship, like my friend Nick told me, there can be dialogue. Remember, the great commission is not to tell people about Jesus. It's to make disciples of people. And that happens in relationship.

When you get right down to it, the two most important commandments - the ones that Jesus says sum up everything else that's written in the Bible - are to love God, which can only happen in relationship with him, and to love our neighbors, which again can only happen in relationship with them. That's why I say that the gospel is relational. I write this as a person who has spent most of his life in the Bible Belt, so forgive me if all this is common knowledge to those of you elsewhere in the country or the world. And I'm also not diminishing the importance of propositional truth and actually leading people to repent and believe in Christ's death and resurrection. The point of relationship is to make disciples, not merely to have relationship. But I do think that if each one of us went out of our way to befriend, to really befriend, one non-Christian in the coming year, the world would probably have a lot more Christians in it come next year. Relationships are powerful; God has designed them to be that way, because he is a relationship. And the gospel is truth that is best communicated in a relationship. God obviously believes in relationships, because he exists as the embodiment of perfect relationship.

I don't think there's ever a bad time to tell people about Jesus. I've seen him use door-to-door witnessing, and I've seen him use those people preaching in the park. He is God and he does whatever he wants to. But I don't think it's out of line to say that he meant for us to function in the context of relationships, and that he wants us to use the relationships we have in order to reconcile people to him. It kind of gives life a new excitement, even a bit of urgency, when we remember that we have the opportunity, every day, to use every single relationship, action, and word for the purpose of living the gospel toward people. No day is ordinary; every day is us preaching the gospel to people simply by being in relationship with them. That's the kind of exciting life most of us wanted when we signed up for this whole Jesus thing in the first place - and now we get to pass it on.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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