The third group is Christian leaders. The issues here are usually much the same as the second group, and the solutions will work much the same. The distinctive extra element leaders bring to the table is the particular demands that come from exercising some kind of leadership role. On the one hand, they usually (if they’re any good) have high expectations of themselves. So the ambiguities and compromises of life can often vitiate their sense of the vitality of the Christian life more than for ‘run of the mill’ believers. The right expectation that they will be an exemplar of the life of faith puts pressure on them that sometimes ends up being directed to the reality of God himself. Their falling short in life and godliness can make the whole faith seem less real. This in turn can leave them vulnerable to arguments that the faith is merely a human construct, with no inner objectivity or power.

On the other hand, they tend to be the person that people look to for solutions to their own crisis of faith. Part of their life is given over to encountering just how fragile faith can be, the myriad of reasons why someone might not believe or even take back a faith once proffered. Over time, this constant dealing with the problems of faith can have an effect on them. Doctors who deal regularly with sick people should probably be prepared to catch some diseases.

In dealing with such concerns, they often have to push deeper into the arguments of the opposition than those to whom they minister. Being a teacher often requires people to read every Dan Brown novel or New Atheist publication that is currently making waves. If a particular heresy or attack is having some influence, then many Christian leaders will make sure they have some firsthand knowledge of it. Thus leaders are often exposed to far more attacks on the faith than the average believer. While the success rate of such polemics can be low, frequent exposure will still lead to a surprising number of people affected. In the words of Gandalf the Grey, “It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill”. Filling your mind with something usually has an effect on you. So there’s an ‘occupational hazard’ that comes with this role.

This can sometimes be exasperated by a weight of expectation. There is a certain appropriate anticipation, by others and themselves, that Christian leaders will be able to refute arguments against faith in Christ. It’s part of the job description, but it’s not always possible. A very intelligent person can make a good argument out of a bad idea, and a good rhetorician can take a bad argument and make it more compelling than a better argument. Sometimes you find yourself facing someone who can run intellectual and rhetorical rings around you. Most of us are used to that, and we don’t automatically assume that losing an argument means we are wrong (indeed, some of us could afford to recognize that sometimes losing an argument can mean that we are wrong). But Christian leaders are expected to be ‘experts’ about the knowledge of God, and this can lead to a wrong view that one will always be able to win the argument.

In this situation, it helps to remind people that they aren’t all that smart, and it’s no surprise that they get bested, or go up against an argument they can’t prove wrong. There are a lot of very intelligent people that have existed in history, and they disagree strongly with each other about a wide range of things. They can’t all be right, and yet you might not be able to win an argument with any of them. One of the most important survival skills for any teacher is to realize that very intelligent people can be profoundly wrong, and so develop an instinct for when a hard-to-answer argument might be a sign of some truth, and when it is just more evidence that You Are Not the Smartest Person Ever. Intelligence and rhetorical ability are no guarantors of truth. Working out when a winning argument is an indication of truthfulness is a harder task than simply saying, “I can’t answer that, so it must be right”.

There are three final things that are good to keep in mind, whichever ‘group’ of Christian you are dealing with. First, the kind of people who are attracted to the arguments of New Atheism will invariably be people who have an aptitude for science and some kind of respect for scientists and the capacities of the scientific method. People who don’t care, or who are orientated to other aspects of life, like art, are rarely going to be swayed much by New Atheism (although they may be attracted to forms of atheism grounded in other approaches—more on that next time). Thinking highly about science is hardly a bad thing: science is a good gift from God. But it is something to keep in mind. One of the things that might be useful to check and address when you think someone might be susceptible to New Atheist arguments is the level of the person’s respect for science and scientists—do they think science can answer almost any question, for example? Do they see it as having any limits, and if so, what?

Second, New Atheism runs two main kinds of arguments. One is primarily intellectual—there is no reason to believe in God; belief in God is inconsistent with an empirical view of knowledge. The other is more existential—religion is a night-light for people who are scared of the dark; religion is the cause of most of the world’s evil. The first addresses primarily whether the Christian faith is true, the second addresses whether it is a force for good or harm, or just utterly irrelevant for living life (i.e. the idea that atheists can be (and are) just as moral as believers). When someone is being swayed by their arguments, usually only one of those two prongs is doing most of the heavy lifting, the other is simply support. Identifying which one is which can often help uncover the area of concern for that person. Focus the energy on the prong that’s doing the heavy lifting.

Third, it makes a big difference whether the person is primarily being swayed by New Atheism’s arguments and so is (more or less reluctantly) finding themselves in a position where they’d like to believe but find that they can’t with intellectual honesty, or whether they don’t want to be a Christian (either because it involves something they don’t want, or because it involves not having something they do want) and so find themselves drawn to New Atheism’s arguments to validate that. Those are two very different paths to unbelief, and it makes a huge difference in how you address the issue. In a sense, the person being swayed by the arguments is the kind of person who might end up being a New Atheist ‘true believer’, the other is the kind who will likely end up as ‘Mr or Miss Average Aussie’. And so, some attention to the issues to do with those two groups is worth keeping in mind as well.

When it is all said and done, I think New Atheism is a fairly limited challenge, and responding to it is moderately straightforward, not least because a large number of written resources doing so have been produced over the years. You don’t need to have the answers, you just need half-decent abilities in reading and comprehension and then to pick up something in your Christian bookstore on the topic. However, that doesn’t mean that New Atheism is nothing at all; because of the respect that science and scientists are held in, when and if you choose to deal with New Atheism it needs to be dealt with seriously, and shouldn’t simply be waved away with empty rhetorical tricks.

Next time, we’ll conclude by batting around the kind of atheism that I think might form the basis of a more serious threat to faith, once New Atheism fades into the background once again.

by Andy, age 5

The other day, my husband Steve told our four children to grab a piece of paper and a pen. Then he rolled out those old, familiar words: “God is the loving ruler of the world…”.

We’re teaching the gospel outline Two Ways to Live to our kids. Steve told them they’ll get five dollars for every panel they get word-perfect. Actually, he wanted to give them one dollar, which says something about what a dollar was worth back when he was a child!

We figure that kids have great memories, so why not make the most of this by stuffing their heads with good things? And what better to fill their heads with than a simple gospel outline?

So far, our eight-, eleven- and thirteen-year-olds are word-perfect on the first panel. We’re yet to see if the five-year-old can get his head around it. Although now I think about it, jelly-beans might be a better bribe reward for him than a five dollar note.

Oh, and we’re getting the Two Ways to Live app on our daughter’s iPod.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

In the first century, a fight broke out between rabbis at the Jewish Council of Jamnia. The issue? Should Ecclesiastes be removed from the generally accepted books of the Old Testament.

Few modern Christians would have the audacity to pose such a question. Yet from its bleak pessimism (e.g. 3:19) to its seeming encouragement of unbridled pleasure seeking (e.g. 9:7-10), or the fact that little is made of God’s dealings with his people until that point, the thoughts contained within its few pages can be troubling to say the least.

How then should a Christian read Ecclesiastes? The key to its message lies in the first few verses. ‘Vanity’ is repeated five times in the opening line (in much the same way that “king of kings” means the greatest king). The ESV footnote shows the Hebrew word translated ‘vanity’ in the ESV is hebel, and can variously mean vapour (Prov 21:6), vanity (Prov 31:30), temporality (Ps 144:4), and even be a derisive term for the lack of substance of the idols of the nations (Ps 31:6). But here the Preacher uses the metaphor of vapour to constantly point to the fleetingness of human life under the sun. This gives the book a stark realism about many common sources of worth (2:1-23), but it can also be a comfort, especially when confronted with great evils (8:10-13).

This clarifies the main thrust of the book. Ecclesiastes is no longer an extended study in the utter futility of life without God (although at points that might be an implication). Rather, the Preacher seeks to give wisdom on how to live well in a world where the only constant is that everything changes. The question in 1:3 is a real one: can a person gain anything if everything on this earth is fleeting?

On initial reflection, we’d be tempted to answer with a resounding “no”. After all, if nothing in this life lasts, what gain could possibly be had?

And yet, throughout the rest of the speech, the Preacher gives a more complex answer than this by taking the listeners on a journey. At points, he demolishes the human pretense that our accomplishments will make a lasting difference in the world. After all, everything is utterly fleeting. Other times, he affirms the goodness of wise living and the evil of folly since every situation we find ourselves in will not last forever (3:1-11) and the future cannot be predicted (10:12-14).

Ultimately he comes to the conclusion that wise living in a fleeting world consists of fearing God and accepting the life we find ourselves in as his gift. Rather than despising what he has given us by grasping for more, we should wisely enjoy the things of this life while we have them.

However, we can say more than the Preacher. With the coming of Jesus, our view of the world shifts from the utter fleetingness of life under the sun. In Christ, we find a new lasting life. There are the slightest of hints of this when the Preacher reflects on God’s work (3:14-15), but it comes to fulfilment particularly in the resurrection of Christ. Jesus has ushered in a new era where death will no longer have any sting, and where we now participate in the lasting “work of the Lord” which will continue into the full revelation of the kingdom (1 Cor 15:54-58). Therefore, we have a wisdom beyond that of the Preacher by which we can dedicate our lives to lasting things, rather than trying to make the best of the passing ones.

Yet we still need to hear the truth that everything under the sun is utterly fleeting. Until Jesus does return, we find ourselves still having a foot in the world where nothing stays constant and death touches all.

To those outside the kingdom, Ecclesiastes brings the challenge of whether gaining the whole world is really worth it, not just because the soul is more important, but because since the world is fleeting, it cannot be gained (cf. Mark 8:36). For those within the kingdom, the fleeting things of this world continue to be given to us as the gracious gifts of our unchanging Father. Paul reflects on this fact: we brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing from it, and therefore the way to gain while we wait for true life comes through godliness with contentment, since God “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim 6:17, cf. 1 Tim 6:6-19).

“Vanity of vanities; utterly fleeting” is not the cry of those without God. May this thought from the Preacher push us to live the lives we do have as the gift of God while we long for and work towards the day when Christ will completely bring in his eternal kingdom.

Which Christians are particularly vulnerable to New Atheism’s polemics? The first group is teenagers and young adults growing up in some kind of Christian framework. This group will generally be relatively ignorant of the content of the Christian faith and how it can answer challenges such as that presented by New Atheism, as they haven’t had time to mature and sink their roots down deep. They are in the process of transitioning into the man or woman they are going to be and so are usually, whether they realize it or not, coming to conclusions about where they stand in relation to the God they have grown up with. They are in the process of deciding whether or not, and if so to what degree, their life will be a pursuit of the kingdom of God.

Many are looking for something to believe in, something bigger than them, that can divide the world into straightforward black-and-white categories (though not all, because some are looking for a reason to justify living a self-centred life). Here New Atheism and good Christian youth ministries are fairly evenly matched. New Atheism is nothing if not an ideology that offers people the chance to be part of something bigger than themselves, and offers a fairly simple ‘us and them’ way of interpreting the world. But most Christians involved in ministry to people in this age group have grasped this feature of the youth demographic and pitch the gospel and its implications accordingly. New Atheism’s style of polemics is tailor-made for this group, but its advantage is blunted wherever Christian youth ministries are prepared to forgo imposing on youth a concern for nuance and subtlety, which is more a hallmark of older adults.

I’d suggest that the quality that makes this group vulnerable is also where the solution lies. For this group, what they primarily need is more knowledge, either explicitly in response to New Atheism arguments, or implicitly before the problem begins as an inoculation. Teaching, especially with an eye to the ‘relationship of science and religion’ question (e.g. whether science has all the answers, but also whether religion is fundamentally a source of evil in the world) can fairly quickly bring people in this group up to speed. And for most people in this group it is a relatively straightforward matter to show why New Atheism’s arguments are not overly compelling.

The second group are adults who have been Christians for some time, and who have lived on the basis that the gospel is true. Now they find themselves reconsidering that commitment and the conviction behind it. This gives their dilemma a different flavour from those in the first group.

Whereas teens and young adults are weighing up what to do with their heritage, whether to embrace it and how much if so, older adults are re-evaluating their lives to this point. Younger adults will be generally making their decision ‘aspirationally’—weighing up what sort of future life they want and, where there is reflection on the present, they will likely be looking mostly to the adult Christians around them to decide whether they want to be that kind of person when they ‘grow up’. Older adults have lived that life: now they are querying if what they got is what was advertised, or as compelling or convincing as it was before. Unlike the first group, they need not so much a reason to believe (and hence basic teaching) as a reason not to disbelieve—not to step back from (or drift away from) their current convictions and commitments. In general, I think people in this group need more troubleshooting to identify where the problem exists for them, the area that has begun to cause a significant question mark to appear over the truth and goodness of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Often this group needs a different style of communication to that of the first group when addressing these issues. This group has lived the kind of life that you have when you live by faith in the crucified Lord. They have experienced the ambiguities, the paradoxes, the things hard to explain. In differing ways, these have raised a question over the validity of the way of life lived under the cross. So a simple reassertion of black-and-white is often highly counter-productive. However, the more liberal approach of trying to reconstruct a Christian faith with fewer doctrines and more grey areas is also a dead end. What this group often needs is an attempt to acknowledge these ambiguous aspects of life, but that expounds the faith in such a way that it comprehends them, even if tensions remain. The battle lies not just in teaching the fundamentals in the abstract but in relating them to the world they live in, how these truths shed light on their experiences and continue to ring true despite the tensions. This group knows the answers but hasn’t internalized them, or has struck a snag in working their implications out in daily life. Some attention to the details of how the rubber hits the road will usually provide the most help for this group.

(I wrote yesterday of the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin which also occurs this Sunday, which not even many Aussies know much about.)

The Judsons became pioneers in Buddhist Burma, a nation of tyrants and no freedom of religion, of war with Siam (i.e. Thailand), of cholera, malaria, and dysentery. Six years passed before they saw their first convert. In that time, their first two children died. A few years later, Judson was imprisoned and tortured. Caring for him over those 17 months broke Ann’s health. Eleven months after his release, she died, soon followed by their third and last child.

Explaining why she went to Burma, Ann wrote to a friend,

I feel willing, and expect, if nothing in Providence prevents, to spend my days in this world in heathen lands… I have about come to the determination to give up all my comforts and enjoyments here, sacrifice my affection to relatives and friends, and go where God, in his Providence, shall see fit to place me.

A comfortable life for their kids was not the Judsons’ great ambition.

Instead it was to see many Burmese converted to Christ and saved for all eternity from sin and judgement.

And by the time Adoniram died, there were 8,000 believers gathered in 63 churches; the Bible was translated and a Burmese dictionary complete. Today there are hundreds of Christian churches in Burma, often struggling, but tracing their origin to the Judsons’ work (many of them Baptist, since the Judsons were baptistic).

I imagine there are also Burmese congregations, often comprising refugees from that land, in a number of Western nations around the world. Certainly there’s a wonderful newish ministry at the reformed and evangelical Wollongong Baptist Church – our good friends just down the road from us at St Michael’s. It has services both in Burmese and Karen languages!

I am remembering to pray for their ministry this week. A number of their kids are in our SRE (Scripture) classes in our local public schools and they are lovely. Some of the Burmese refugees have some sad stories though.

Of course, numbers were not the real marker of the success of Adoniram and Ann Judson. Their success 200 years ago was seen in suffering, patiently enduring hardship and opposition for Christ’s sake.

Note: Readers in the know will realise that I have drawn heavily on John Piper’s biographical sketch of Adoniram Judson entitled “How Few There Are Who Die So Hard!”. Simply inspiring.

And to those few readers who have never checked out Piper’s back catalogue of biographical sketches of Christian leaders, check them out right now! (Audio is great to listen to for personal challenge and edification, though you usually need over an hour per talk. The full text is great to return to for the detail to use as excellent sermon illustrations.)

Lastly, a friendly thank you to Joy Horn over at Evangelicals Now for her excellent annual round up of anniversaries of relevance and interest to the evangelical world (at least those of us who care a bit about history!)

Because Australians are not always very good at history and The Briefing originates here, I think they are worth noting. They may be of interest to others too.

The first is the bombing of Darwin, during World War II. It began 9:58am, 19 February, 70 years ago, in 1942. For the first time, the effects of a war which had raged mainly on the other side of the world – albeit at the cost of thousands of Australian soldiers’ lives – were felt on home soil. Arguably it was the most dreadful emergency of our history.

It was widely feared then that the Japanese planned to invade Australia, though it seems more likely to historians now that Darwin was attacked for its wider strategic defence value (as a port and airfield staging post for the war in South East Asia).

Today, most Australians know next to nothing of these events, perhaps because Darwin’s population then was much tinier. Details were also kept from the great bulk of Australians down south, presumably for morale’s sake.

Perhaps it’s also because most Australians aren’t very interested in history (certainly not as much as my superficial impression of North Americans). But I have been surprised to discover that [sources: frontlineaustralia.com.au (pdf); National Archives]…

The third group New Atheism has an effect on is Christian believers. It seems to have some success in persuading some people to abandon their faith. My impression is that the numbers involved are fairly small, and New Atheism’s effect is usually only one of a constellation of factors; there’s usually a number of other things going on in that person’s life. Nonetheless, given New Atheism’s weaknesses and flaws it’s a bit surprising it has any effect at all.

The success it does have is primarily, I would suggest, because New Atheism is almost entirely targeted at Christian theism. While it is called ‘atheism’, which suggests a belief in the non-existence of God, or even gods, in its rhetoric and arguments it tends to focus almost exclusively on attacking the credibility of the Christian faith. New Atheism appears to exist pretty well purely in order to convince Christian theists to stop being theists. It is rare to hear a New Atheist attack the credibility of the Koran, or riff on the stupidity of reincarnation, or assault horoscopes, or take apart the life and teaching of Mohammed or Buddha. No, the target in the sights is usually the Bible, the Christian knowledge of God, and Jesus Christ. That is true even in what is arguably the heartland of New Atheism, the United Kingdom, where a case could be made that Islam demonstrates more vitality than Christianity at present. Even (or perhaps especially) here, New Atheism has eyes only for Christian theism in its evangelism for atheism.

I’d suggest a couple of reasons for this.

First, most New Atheist ‘true believers’ seem to have had some kind of Christian background that they decisively rejected. When you’re dealing with a New Atheist, you’re more often than not dealing with some kind of ex-believer. They weren’t necessarily a convinced, committed, practicing Christian, but often they were raised in a family that identified itself as Christian in some sense and/or that exposed them to Christian teaching as they grew up. They then didn’t just drift away from that heritage, like most who leave the Christian faith; instead they defined themselves by their rejection of it in favour of another world view, another explanation for reality. And like many people who experience this kind of conversion experience, they are far more provoked by the people who hold to the beliefs that they used to hold to than by people who hold other views that, while still in contradiction to their atheism and empiricism, aren’t the views that they decisively rejected.

Second, Christianity has a much stronger sway in the west than rival gospels. In differing ways in differing countries, Christianity has a greater impact upon public decision-making, a higher public profile, more people who identify themselves as belonging to it in some sense, than any alternative. While Christians are often attuned to how much of that is a mirage, and are conscious of the various developments that suggest that such a situation might be changing, nonetheless, if you want to take on the religious Goliath in most western countries, taking on Christianity is a no-brainer. That’s a kind of reverse-compliment for us. If the day ever comes when a ‘New-New Atheism’ arises that invests heavily in anti-Islam or Buddhist or Shinto or New Age polemics, that will be a clear sign that Christianity really has moved to the margins. The fact that the atheists speak as though the choice is basically between God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ or no god at all is hardly all bad.

Third, Christianity has a history with the west that just isn’t there with other faiths. The modern liberal democratic state came into existence through the deconstruction of Christendom and the dismantling of Christianity’s role as the more-or-less ‘default’ position for people to believe in. Ever since, the defenders of liberal democracy have had their guns aimed primarily at the Christian faith to ward off any return to something more like Christendom.

There were two great arguments against the potency of faith that lost their credibility at the start of this century: that all religions are basically the same, and that religion doesn’t influence people’s behaviour—people do what they do for other reasons and religion is only a justification. One only has to look at the movies and TV shows of the latter half of the twentieth century to see that, unless religion was the focus of a story, it almost never featured in a significant way. Whether it was subversive M.A.S.H. or feel-good Brady Bunch, religion only featured as a motivation for specifically religious behaviour, never for how people might go about every daily life. Thus it was easy to argue that people could be just as good without religion as with it—stories were told about people living without religion in the frame all the time.

These two arguments came tumbling down with the towers on 9/11. It was pretty clear that all religions weren’t the same—atheists, Christians, Hindus, and Shintoists weren’t hijacking planes and flying them into skyscrapers. Even the vast majority of Muslims weren’t doing it or supporting it. Clearly this was something particular to one religion, and to one subset of followers within it. Religious difference mattered; not all religions were the same. It was also clear that religion profoundly shapes people’s behaviour. It strained credibility to believe that the people who undertook that suicide mission were simply using religion to justify actions that they were taking for other reasons.

The days of saying “religion is just for people on a power trip and people who want to play at it privately in their spare time; it has no effect on life in the real world” were gone. Nonetheless, despite the fact that it was a subset within Islam that had demonstrated the terrifying power of religious belief to prompt people to evil, New Atheism never really turned its guns on it. Despite the fact that since then most religiously-inspired violence that has made it into western media reports has had an Islamic dimension, New Atheism still focuses most of its ‘religion is the cause of almost all the evil in the world’ argument on Christianity. Western intellectuals have a long tradition of attacking Christianity, as seeing it as the big threat to their ideal world, because Christianity had such a key role in society in the past. Even though that role has diminished, the instincts and tradition remains. Therefore, when (because of militant Islam) atheists switched from the argument that religion is powerless to the argument that religion is powerful and dangerous, Christianity remained in the sights.

When one also takes into account that the overwhelming majority of New Atheists are white, middle-class males who usually speak English only and who are hardly well-known for their exposure to non-western cultures, this makes even more sense. The eyes of New Atheism are, as a whole, not on the majority of the human race: they are fixed firmly on debates being carried on within western society alone. New Atheism is an anti-faith by and for English-speaking westerners.

All of these things are, in my view, worth keeping in mind when engaging with New Atheism, if you want to try and grasp its tone, rhetorical manoeuvres, and stance towards Christianity. A bit like the question of whether someone is a freedom fighter, rebel, or terrorist, New Atheism can be labelled either positively or negatively. To its adherents it is a robust intellectual movement made up of people who saw the light, which fights for the integrity of science against its biggest single threat. In the other light, it is a movement of converts, filled with a convert’s passion against what he or she used to stand for, getting most of its energy from its attack on Christianity and hence parasitic upon it. Wherever on that spectrum you care to place New Atheism, the same basic issues that give it its distinctive features are being identified.

Keeping some of that in mind is worth doing when and if you decide to take on some of New Atheism’s arguments (especially its argument that religion is the cause of much/all of the world’s evils). Understanding that it isn’t simply their rationality that leads New Atheists to attack Christianity (as they seem to think), nor is it simply their unbelief (because there are lots of other ways someone can be an unbeliever), can help you to both address the actual arguments as well as unpick some of the dynamics going on under the surface.

But the nature of New Atheism’s relationship to Christianity is only one side of the issue. The other thing to consider when responding to New Atheism’s attempts to de-Christian believers is the kind of Christian that New Atheism has an effect upon. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to highlight three main groups of Christians, and the issues that might be worth keeping in mind when engaging with New Atheism’s influence on these groups.

Available now on the App Store ($0.99/£0.69/

Last year I attended the Oxygen conference in Sydney for ministry workers. During one of John Piper’s talks, he got to a point where he realized he had been talking about ‘the gospel’ as foundational to the Christian life without ever telling us what he thought that gospel was. So he told us he was about to outline ‘John Piper’s gospel’, which had six points to it.

Muffled chuckles echoed around the large auditorium. Dr Piper looked a little startled; he hadn’t intended to make a joke. Perhaps he thought it might have been some American-Australian translation issue. In fact, I think Matthias Media was the culprit. I estimate about a third to half of the attendees were at that moment wondering if his next words were going to be, “The first point of the Christian message is that God is in charge of the world”.

(They weren’t. But his outline was still good.)

By far and away the most popular Matthias Media resource is the Two Ways to Live tract. If you’ve never come across it before, this little gospel outline explains the good news of Jesus within the context of the unfolding story of the Bible. The tract introduces a non-Christian reader (or hearer) to all the background information they need in order to grasp the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

You may well have used this outline for sharing the gospel with others. I certainly have. The six boxes have for many years formed a really helpful framework in my head for talking about Jesus with others. Even though I rarely draw the six boxes or talk through the entire gospel outline from beginning to end, its structure is an incredibly useful tool for making sense of a conversation: What are the underlying questions of my conversation partner? What presuppositions do we not share? How can I get from the topic of the moment to Jesus, using the logic of the gospel outline as a guide? This simple, memorable outline has stuck with me in a way that few other things have.

So at Matthias Media we want to build on what we already have, and give you another option for sharing the gospel. It’s not a different tract as such—just a different delivery method. These days, there are an astonishing number of iPhones, iPods and iPads around. If you’re not convinced, catch a peak-hour train or bus in your closest major city and you’ll see what I mean: eyes glued to smartphones, and white earbuds everywhere. Apple has done a remarkable job of convincing us how much we ‘need’ to have one of these iOS devices—last financial year Apple sold well over 100 million new units. (100 million is really a very large number.)

So we’ve made Two Ways to Live into an app for the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. It’s the same clear, challenging outline of the Christian gospel that we’ve been producing for years, but in this case you can whip your phone out and step through the presentation with a friend, filling in the explanation yourself, or you can give it to someone else for them to explore. There’s extra text that explains each of the points in more detail, and an audio version voiced by Kel Richards. It’s even available in a few different languages, selectable from within the app itself (currently English, Japanese, French, Spanish, and (simplified) Chinese; we’ll add more as we’re able).

Like any other iOS app, you can ‘gift’ it—that is, you can give it away as an electronic evangelistic tract to someone else (either via email or by printing out a gift card). We’ve made it especially easy to do this by including a link within the app itself (or click here to give it away right now). And at the point of working out the consequences of the choice at the end of the presentation, there’s also a link to a free download of The Essential Jesus from within the app to iBooks or another e-reader.

We’d like to port it to Android devices (or Windows Phone or other mobile platforms if there’s demand), but we’re still working out if it’s going to be viable to do so. If you have experience in doing this sort of thing and you’re able to help us work that through, please get in touch.

This app is available exclusively on the App Store as of now. It requires iOS 4.0, and will run on iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad. We’ll follow up soon with an enhanced iPad version, including some Q&A videos and testimonies about how the gospel has changed people’s lives.

You’ve probably been asked that question yourself at some point. It’s what we ask engaged couples, children starting school, soon-to-be parents, and soon-to-be-empty-nested parents. And it’s just as probable that you answered “Yes, very excited”, no matter how you really felt about it. It’s the expected response, the “good” to the shop assistant’s “how are you?”.

Well, I was excited about three years ago, when we began making plans. Now I feel ill-equipped and scared, bemused that God thinks it’s a good idea to send someone as inflexible and introverted as myself to the mission field. Leaving the comforts of a first world life, the joy of friends, and the sensibleness of Sydney’s climate does not excite me (-40ºC, Mongolia? Really? Whose great idea was it to settle here?). I’m terrified!

So what now? Should I call a halt to proceedings? Does feeling nervous mean it’s all wrong?

Helpfully, I have found many examples in the Bible of people who were called to do things out of their comfort zone and who were wary about it. Esther wasn’t itching to approach the king. Gideon was somewhat reluctant. And, of course, Jesus himself was both obedient and sorrowful at Gethsemane. But what did he do that night?

He fell on his face and prayed… “Not as I will, but as you will.”… Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed… “Your will be done.” (Matt 26:39, 44)

If you’re concerned about following a command in the Bible, or taking a step in life that would seem to be for God’s glory, or anything at all, then the very first thing you should do is to talk to the one you are seeking to serve. It seems obvious written down, but I know that I can easily continue to let my fears roll around in my brain for hours before it occurs to me to speak to God about them. Somehow it can seem more productive to dwell on the feeling and what might get rid of it—as if I can solve it better than the creator of the world and the one who knows exactly what’s best for me. Whatever I’m feeling, it’s preferable by far that God’s will is done over mine.

Okay, so I’ve prayed. Am I excited yet? Well, a little bit. Praying did remind me of all the great reasons why God would want us to go. Am I still terrified? Well, a lot. But I don’t think it’s a sign to stay home. If I waited to want in the flesh what the Spirit wants before I obeyed, I’d still be waiting when Christ returns. No, instead we are slaves to righteousness, happy or sad.

It’s clearly not sinful to feel nervous or scared while obeying God; it’s probably not even unusual! We are not told to be mindlessly thrilled. What we are to do is love God and keep his commandments. But how can I do this when I’m feeling unsure, when I know the right thing to do, but waver?

John has the key ingredient to Christian obedience in this life:

For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. (1 John 5:4)

flickr: activefree

I’m no saleswoman. I don’t have the thick skin, the showmanship, or the gift of the gab. But apparently, that’s not what I need to help people get to know Jesus. The best salespeople, I’m told, show genuine concern and sympathy, and believe in what they’re talking about.¹ That sounds a bit more like me. I can love; I can believe; I can pray. But I also have to open my mouth and speak.

That, I’m not so good at. Clever ideas for gospel conversations run off me like water off a waxed car. I’ll never be one of those gifted individuals who can turn a chat about graffiti into a conversation about Jesus. Instead, my tongue ties itself in knots, and only later do I have that lights-on moment when I realize, yes, that’s what I could have said. I’m queen of the sweaty palms, the awkward silence, and the fumbling answer.

I’m beginning to realize that it doesn’t have to be so hard. Speaking about the gospel isn’t some obscure skill I have to master. I don’t have to become like someone else to do it. In fact, it’s not even something I “do”, an added extra to my faith. It’s just me being who I am, chatting about the things that really matter to me. So what I want to do here isn’t to talk about gospel outlines or apologetics, useful as they are.² Instead, I want to share ten things that have made gospel speech more natural and joyous for me. 

• Close the gap
  When I’m with Christians, I’m relaxed and open: I share what God has been teaching me and talk about my struggles. When I’m with others, I’m cautious and reserved: I weigh what I say and look for rejection in their eyes. It’s exhausting. I’m tired of being two people! It’s time to close the gap. It’s time to talk the same way whoever I’m with. There’s something deeply attractive about people who talk about their faith with enthusiasm and warmth. What have I got to lose? 
• Don’t assume people will respond in a certain way
  For so long, I’ve assumed that people will respond badly if I talk about Jesus. They’ll be bored. They’ll be offended. They’ll be embarrassed. Inevitably, this makes me nervous, and invites the very reaction I’m trying to avoid: I’m embarrassed, so they are too. To my surprise, I’ve found that people are often interested in what I believe. One woman even wanted to read the Bible with me! It took years to work up the courage to ask her; now I’m kicking myself for not asking sooner.
• Speak the way you speak
  I’m not sure where my mental image of “evangelism” comes from. I know one thing, though: it doesn’t look like me. It’s masculine and argumentative, maybe because much that’s written about evangelism is by men. It’s extroverted and eloquent, like my gifted female friends. Lionel Windsor says, “Different people will speak the gospel in different ways.” Phew! I’m introverted, relational and reflective, so these things will characterize my gospel speech, and that’s just fine.
• Talk about your life with God (and do it from the start)
  “I’ve been praying for you”; “We went to church on the weekend”; “I’ve been thinking about…”: there are lots of little ways to talk about God without explaining the whole gospel. Some people show further interest; some don’t. I’m learning to put it out there and see where it goes. It’s important to do this right from the start: this avoids that embarrassing “Oh, gosh, I never let them know I was a Christian” moment.
• Listen more than you talk
  “Do twice as much listening as talking”: so says my friend Ben Pfahlert. I’ve got a long way to go on this! Too often, I shut off a conversation by talking about what I think instead of asking others what they think. Next time someone tells me they’ve got a Catholic-Charismatic background (something that happened to me recently) I hope I’ve got the good sense to ask them to tell me more about what that was like, what stopped them being part of it, and where they’re at now.
• Get ready to answer the questions you know are coming 
  We all know what the questions are likely to be: “How are you?”; “What do you do?”; “What are your plans?”. Why not get ready to include God in the topics you know are coming? It’s a little corny, but sometimes I rehearse – out loud – what I want to say. “My father-in-law died, but I know he’s gone to be with Jesus” rolls more easily off the tongue when I’ve practised, or at least thought about, what to say.
• Live differently – and be ready to explain why
  Here’s a fine moment from the life of me. I was chatting to a friend when she said, “I can’t believe how some parents over-protect their daughters, not letting them go out with guys and stuff.” Through my mind ran the words, “Well, actually, that’s pretty close to how we plan to raise ours”, but I laughed sheepishly and didn’t say anything. Later, I realised that living in a way that’s shockingly different can be a good thing, because it gives me a chance to explain why we live the way we do.
• Relax
  One of my friend’s friends told her that when she talks about her faith she sounds anxious and unnatural. That’s a little close for comfort! Telling yourself to relax can be a bit like trying not to think of a purple hippo (try it now), but it helps me all the same. I remind myself that this isn’t the Roman arena: it’s just a chance to chat about something I care about. I take a deep breath, smile, and make eye-contact. It can also help to admit, “I’m a little nervous telling you this. Would you mind if I talked about it?”.
• Get lots of practice - and make lots of mistakes
  I think the main reason I find gospel speech hard is that I don’t get much practice. It took time to learn to lead a Bible study: why do I expect this to be any different? The more I talk about my faith, the easier it gets. I make heaps of mistakes; but instead of berating myself, I try to learn, apologise (if needed), and do better next time. In the meantime, I remind myself that God is sovereign: he’s the one who chose me to be part of these people’s lives. 
• Bring it all back to Jesus
  In the end, it’s Jesus I want people to meet. It’s the gospel – the good news of his life, death and resurrection – that will bring people to him. So that’s where I want my conversations to end up. If I can bring every question back to Jesus; if I can talk about the hope I have in him; if I can read a gospel with a friend: well, that’s half the battle. The rest happens as God’s Spirit works in people’s hearts.

This probably all sounds very upbeat. The truth is, I find talking about my faith difficult. I battle fear, laziness and inertia. It’s easier not to bother. But to my never-ending surprise, when I start chatting about Jesus, I discover an openness in people’s hearts (because God is at work in them), and a joy in my own heart (because God is at work in and through me), beyond anything I expected. And if I can learn to talk about my faith, anyone can!