Walking Boldly - Treading Lightly // The Freedom to Share Jesus with Others, Part 9

We all hate people ramming their opinions, their beliefs down our throats, don't we?  So, how can we share our faith in Jesus with others, without giving them that same experience? Good question.

To quote a comedian who used to make me really laugh a few years back. "You know what I hate? You know what I really, really hate?" I hate it when people shove their beliefs and their doctrines down my throat. I hated it way back before I was a Christian and to tell you the truth, I still hate it today. Even more so right here and now.

To me it's somehow offensive when people try and bludgeon me to death with their beliefs. When they lecture me instead of pulling alongside me. When they somehow imply that they're better than me because of what they believe.

And so many people have spent so many years watching Christians telling people about their faith in that kind of a way, that they think that's the only way it can be done. And I don't want to be like that so I'm not going to tell people about Jesus. I'm just going to shut my mouth 'cause I don't want to offend anyone by whacking them over the head and shoving my beliefs down their throat.

In society today, let's face it, for a lot of people the Church is on the nose. My hunch is a lot of it has to do with the doctrinism and the dogmatic approach of telling people about their faith. The Church is anti this and anti that and anti this.

And all that "anti" implies judgement and criticism rather than love and grace. Now don't get me wrong, you'll never hear me standing up for, say for abortion. It's not so much though what we say, I think it's how we say it.

Before I went into ministry I was in the Information Technology industry. One of the things I did was to travel a lot to conferences and do a lot of public speaking right around the world. But I began to notice, when I was quite a young man, that some speakers seemed somehow to have a superior tone yet others were at my level.

I felt like they were like me and the mentor of mine, a man that mentored me for over 20 years, a guy called Graham, explained to me what that was all about. In part someone who gets ups and speaks at the podium, who has a superior mentality. You know, "I'm the expert. I'm the one that knows all about this subject. Now you listen to me and write it down and do as I tell you."

Well that's kind of offensive these days. It may have worked back in the 1950's and 1960's but it doesn't work today. People like that make me cringe because they demonstrated an outdated notion of relationships. They demonstrate a notion of a relationship that goes back to the 1950's and 1960's which says that they are the experts and the institution stands above people and they tell us what to do and we do it.

Now that was okay back then but 99% of the time it is not going to work for people today. So in part it's a superior attitude.

Then there are other people who kind of pull alongside. Who share their experiences. Who invite me to think about what they're saying with questions. Who share not just their successes but their weaknesses and their failures and their challenges and the insights that come out of that and the stuff they still don't understand.

They talk more in terms of "us" and "we" instead of "you" and "me". You know what? I love listening to those people. I have so much to learn from people who speak in those terms because it demonstrates an attitude that says, "Hey, I'm not an expert. I don't know everything but there's a few things that I've got insights about."

Why don't we share those? Why don't we discuss them? Why don't we have a dialogue? Why don't we pull alongside one another and be better off for the experience? And to me that second type of communicator is someone who treads lightly.

Yes they reflect an attitude which is contemporary in terms of relationships which is where we all, by and large, are today but they also find language that's about "us" and "we". That's about questions. That's about engagement rather than, 'I've got this now you should do that. And I believe this therefore you should believe that and if you don't, you're wrong'.

You know, those sorts of people tend to have really reactive language like, "I don't like" and "I'm absolute" and they try to steam roll you with their beliefs. And I'm not just talking about Christians. You can go to the abortion lobby and you'll find exactly the same sort of person there.

There are people right across the social and political and religious spectrum who want to bludgeon me to death with their beliefs and my answer, like most other people, is, "Hmm, no thanks. I'm really not interested."

This concept of using our attitudes and our languages to tread lightly, to me, is a beautiful concept. To me it's relational. To me it's like I love dealing with people like t