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Oh dear.
Sixty MILLION people got this message on Unilad this week:
"On Friday, April 23, John Sherwood was ‘preaching the gospel’ outside Uxbridge Station.
However, police arrived after the 71-year-old was accused of homophobic language, soon arresting him under the Public Order Act, which cites ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour’.
In footage uploaded to Twitter, officers can be seen pulling him off the stepladder after he refuses to come down and using force to restrain him. He was later released without charge."
Now whatever you make of that, 60 million Unilad followers have now heard about that incident, but what they've heard is not the message of Christ.
What they've heard is that Christianity is about:
- out of touch elderly white men who
- take it upon themselves to insult minorities
- in public places, and
- insist upon their right to be doing so
- and are then seen on camera to be resisting arrest.
That's almost certainly not the communicator's intention, but that IS what our society sees and hears.
In an age when 'the messages' is a synonym for the adverts, and the 'push' of information makes many reasonable people's minds gag at the overload ... we've really got to be aware of how our messages are expressed and received.
Now, against such a background as that ...
I've got a confession to make
But please don't rush to judge me before you have heard me out ... because the truth about me is simply this:
... my name is Simon and I'm a frustrated street preacher.
Honestly, I LOVE it.
It's a blast!
For years (where there were suitable places to do it without blocking the pavement or causing an obstruction or public nuisance) I used to go with friends and a sketchboard, possibly some musicians and some actors and we'd have a PARTY around the purpose of presenting the winsomeness of Jesus to passers-by.
Oxford, London, Paris ... wherever we went, I've got tell you that we had such great fun!
We attracted crowds (not captive audiences), had some friendly banter (not trading insults), showed how good news the Christian message is (not ranting or raving) ...
We listened to the lonely, bought food for homeless people, had some really good laughs and also had some really serious talks with people facing issues in their lives where the Christan message had really struck a chord with them.
Lives were changed for the good by our encounters.
But it was all about the Good News Christian MESSAGE .. like it says in our Verse for the Day.
Trying to 'christianise' a secular society, preaching morality aside from spiritual conversion and motivation, or being 'bolshy' and getting up people's noses was honestly NOT what we were about.
We were doing what it says in the Bible about getting the message out ... we must ... but I guess we were convinced that these three things:
- the medium
- the message and
- our lives
should be consistent, if Christ was to be heard from in what we did.
So if it was so much fun and I loved it so much, why aren't we doing it now?
Why aren't we doing it now?
Firstly, because you need the right location to be doing this ... like the ancient city market places where this happened in the time when the Apostle Paul strode the earth.
Places where you aren't blocking the way for people who don't want to be spoken with, nor battering the ears of the unwilling to listen (there's something in Scripture about not feeding pearls to pigs, you know?)
Secondly because street preaching in this manner was good training for passing the message of Jesus to small groups of people outdoors and indoors and everywhere ... and I now find I'm quite capable of being a complete open air meeting on my own as I walk around town or visit the supermarket ... it used to cause terrible embarassment to my teenage children - I couldn't get through the supermarket in under an hour!
But thirdly and sadly because the job's getting spoiled by well-meaning people who're missing the point of doing God's work in God's way by keeping that consistency between the medium and the message.
It's not for me to judge, but 'confrontationalism' is not the same thing as 'Christianity' ... and courting controversy in public places, I've got to say, has spoiled the job for us.
Which brings us to the Verse for the Day
What is the Verse for the Day today getting at?
"Consequently faith comes from what is heard,
and what is heard comes through
the preached word of Christ."
Romans 10:17
Romans 10:17
That 'message' is described with a particular Greek word which refers to a personally delivered and spoken message on behalf of God.
It's a MESSAGE not a method or a nice personality or a lifestyle that's at the heart of bringing people into the salvation of God.
But Christians need to be true to the MESSAGE of Christ for Christians to maintain any credibility and accordingly a HEARING for that message.
They need to keep the mood of the message of Christ too, so that it is the message of God's grace and not our own religiosity which is the thing that gets heard in the process.
The Point
There is no DOUBT that the Christian message has got hard stuff in it that has to be got across.
It's about the sins we all commit, but that not everyone we meet will want to acknowledge.
We can't eliminate that hard element in the message, but we can't be hurtful and vengeful about it either.
After all, believers are all 'outed' sinners too, and feel the pain of that to the core of our being.
And if we're going to communicate the Good News of God, then our manner needs to match up with that message.
So if we're going to talk about sin (and we must because it's at the centre of the problem the Gospel solves), then we'd better acknowledge the sorrow our own sin brings to our hearts ... in a way that someone hearing what we're saying can believe it.
The Takeaway
Firstly, if the message about Christ is what's taken us from
where we were to
where all Christians are going to be
... then we need to help others hear that hugely crucial message.
But secondly, if our 'method' is not consistent with that message, we're contradicting it in the act of delivery.
It's a GREAT thing to be doing the former. Let's DO that!
It's a frightful thing to be doing the latter. Pray God to deliver us from it.
In the days of change in which we live this is a challenge.
May He give us as much grace as we need today, to get this right.
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