EVANGELISM AS LISTENING, ACTING, SPEAKING, AND SENSEMAKING Dwight Zscheile

IMPORTANCE OF CREDIBILITY  Credibility is the foundation of faithful witness  What makes a witness credible?

DEEP LISTENING  Evangelism begins with sustained listening  Posture of attentiveness  Hearing stories, hopes, struggles  Asking open-ended questions  Resisting temptation to offer quick answers  “Listening into free speech”

ATTENDING TO EMOTIONS  Emotions reveal what is important  Active listening: “What I hear you saying is…”  Be aware of your own emotions  Tolerating resistance, confusion, struggle, failure without “rescuing” or “fixing”

CRUCIFORM EVANGELISM  What does it mean to evangelize in the way that God comes to us in Christ crucified and risen?  “Let the same mind be in you …”  Creating space  Non-coercion

ACTING  What you do matters as much as what you say (personally and communally)  Embodying and sharing grace  Small gestures  Counter-cultural acts  How can our practices and behaviors reflect our allegiance to God in contrast to idols of the world?

BY WHAT AUTHORITY?  “The Christian mission is thus to act out in the whole life of the whole world the confession that Jesus is Lord of all. … I make this confession only because I have been laid hold of by Another and commissioned to do so.” –Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, p. 17

AFFIRMING GOD AT WORK  “The Christian confession of Jesus as Lord does not involve any attempt to deny the reality of the work of God in the lives and thoughts and prayers of men and women outside the Christian church. On the contrary, it ought to involve an eager expectation of, a looking for, and a rejoicing in the evidence of that work.” –Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, p 175

CHRISTIANITY AND THE RELIGIONS  “The church, therefore, as it is in via, does not face the world as the exclusive possessor of salvation, nor as the fullness of what others have in part, the answer to the questions they ask, or the open revelation of what they are anonymously. The church faces the world, rather, as arrabon of that salvation—as sign, firstfruit, token, witness of that salvation which God purposes for the whole world.” –Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, p 180

POWER OF WORLDVIEW  Everyone inhabits a “social imaginary” (Charles Taylor)  Assumed, taken-for-granted ways of viewing world, life  What is normal, expected  Shared among culture or social group  Vital to recognize, seek to understand, unpack

SPEAKING  Finding common language  Fully committed, fully compassionate

TRANSLATION  God’s way of communicating with us in Christ  Incarnation is translation (Andrew Walls)  Vernacular principle  Addressing people in their native language, culture  What might this look like in practice?

SENSEMAKING  All of life is interpreted  Evangelism involves coming to make sense of world in new ways  Participatory, communal process  Gospels: seeing differently  Example: Journey to Emmaus

DISCUSSION