Political Models for Spreading the Faith – or NOT

Political Models for Spreading the Faith – or NOT
Greh H. Parsons
Mission Frontiers, Vol. 30, No.3 May-June 2008

a paradigm shift ...

… when we express our faith, we must refer directly to the Scriptures, not to Christian doctrines or history. A friend of mine answers every spiritual question with “I don’t know, let’s look at the Scriptures,” or “I have the same view on that as Jesus has.” He really does know often, so I guess you could call that a lie. But the main advantage is that it points to the Source for our authority and not to our knowledge or knee-jerk authority and not to our knowledge or knee-jerk catch-phrases…

For example, when people ask how God can allow evil, we say, “It is part of His sovereign plan,” and, “We can’t understand it with our finite minds.” Those are both true. But perhaps we should try to share a passage such as where Jesus weeps over Lazarus?

What Jesus does there is, of course, not an answer at all. In fact, Jesus resolves the problem by raising him from the dead. But it demonstrates the compassion of Jesus in death. That is the kind of thing people are looking for.

I find it very freeing to not have to have answers for every question. But it means that we need to know our Bibles even better. A standard way of sharing our faith does not work for many people. For all of us, it is a process.

Try it out! Saturate yourself in the Scriptures and let the Bible speak – especially Jesus. See where it takes the discussion.