Building Interest In Our Gospel Step By Step In a Non-Defensive Way

Dear Friends of M&T,
 
Below is a write up of a recent pre-evangelistic encounter that I hope will shed some light on how to engage others spiritually without making them defensive. It also suggests some ways to build future pre-evangelistic bridges based on current interaction with others. My prayer is that it might stimulate your thinking in the area or pre-evangelism.
 
Blessings,
 
Dr. Dave Geisler
 
 A few days ago I was working out in the exercise room at our apartment complex and a young Chinese guy (in his late 20’s) came in and started working out on the treadmill right next to the one I was on. Let’s just call him Raymond (that is not his real name). After about 10 minutes, Raymond was huffing and puffing and instinctively I looked over at him and said to him “If you think it is tough now, wait till you are my age.” That seemed to pique his interest to engage me in a conversation. I explained to him that up until I turned thirty, it wasn’t so difficult for me to “stay in shape” but when I got into my mid 30s it started getting more difficult and then when I turned 40, it was as though I hit a brick wall! That led to other conversations such as where he worked, what he did for a living, and etc. I told him that both my wife (who was a Singaporean) and I were teachers, she at NTU and me at East Asia School of Theology.
 
I realized that at this point I could have tried to engage him in a spiritual discussion since I mentioned that I was teaching at a seminary. However I realized this seemed a little too soon and abrupt and could make him defensive right away. He told me that he just started working out and since I am now in the exercise room almost every day, I knew I would bump into him again. As a result, I decided to wait for another opportunity to lay a plank in building my spiritual bridge. A few minutes later such an opportunity arose when I laid the ground work by telling him that my wife and I had moved to Singapore three years ago and shared with him some of the things I really liked about Singapore. This provided the platform for me to say “As a parent it is especially nice to know that when my daughter becomes a teenager I can feel confident she would be safe walking down almost any street in Singapore.” I told him that I could not say the same thing in my country, the U.S. (this was designed to set up what I was going to say next to engage him in spiritual dialog).
 
I said, “I don’t know if you know much about the religious history of the U.S. but  about 30 - 40 years ago the youth started rejecting belief in God. Now the problem is that once you have given up believing in God, you lose any foundation for believing in any kind of morality and each person does what he or she thinks is right.” I further said that “This has led to more and more moral decay in the U.S. society”. Then I asked him “Have you ever heard of a Christian writer named C.S. Lewis?” He replied that he did. I said that C.S. Lewis was an atheist who finally realized that without the existence of God there was no basis for saying that something was either right or wrong. I explained further that one day C.S. Lewis realized however that his argument against God was actually an argument for God! I told him that initially C.S. Lewis had difficulty believing in the Christian God when there was so much injustice in the world until one day he realized the flaw in his argument. He asked himself “How could I know that something was unjust unless I had some kind of standard of justice to measure the injustice by.” Furthermore he concluded, “How could I know that something was ultimately unjust unless I had an ultimate standard of justice in which I was measuring the injustice by?” So in reality C.S. Lewis discovered that his argument against God was actually an argument for God! Certainly this seemed to pique his interest. About a minute later he confessed to me that he has a friend who gave him a book that answers some of the questions people have about the Christian faith. (It was interesting that he would volunteer this info. and seem to suggest to me that he was potential open for further spiritual interactions). So from all of this I knew then he had a Christian friend in his past who tried to help him better understand the Christian faith. At this point we were both at the end of our workout routine and I could see that I had given him much to chew on for a while until our next encounter so I did not seek to engage him in further spiritual dialog. When you are engaging someone spiritually and you sense you are only going to get so far in one conversation, sometimes it is better for you to pull the plug on the spiritual part of the conversation first. That way the other person doesn’t feel “pressurized” to buy what you are selling and it helps to keep the door open for further discussion.
 
Next time I see “Raymond” I will try to pick up from where I left off and say to him something like, “Oh I remember last time we talked you mentioned that a friend gave you a Christian book for you to read. I am curious, was there any particular reason that he gave you that book?” Was there any questions or issues you were trying to resolve in your own mind? By asking these two questions I am trying to discern what his major barriers to the gospel might be. This is an example of a follow-up question I would ask next. Hopefully I’ve laid some ground work that might make it easier for him to want to continue the spiritual dialog in our next conversation (1 Cor. 3:6).

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