I spent the last 3 days at a conference in Dallas, TX focusing on evangelism. Theologians and pastors and administrators from 16 different colleges gathered together to think about how we might create a culture of evangelism on each of our campuses with an ultimate goal of deploying 50,000 students each year equipped to share the gospel around the world. In 10 years, the exponential effects could be that over 1 million were living out the great commission faithfully throughout the Earth. I was challenged and inspired, refocused and rejuvenated...until I walked back out into the real world.
Last night I felt compelled to tell a waitress at IHOP that God loved her. Instead, I just smiled and said “thank you.” A woman who shared a shuttle ride to the airport with me asked what I did for a living. "I am a professor and pastor," I told her, but I didn’t tell her why, or what drove my passion to teach college students, or even that I was a Christian at all. I spent the flight home to Atlanta with a civil engineer from Dallas. I know he graduated from Clemson, and that he was born in Charleston, SC. I wanted to ask him if he attended church in Dallas, but instead we sat inches from each other staring at our iPads in silence for almost 2 hours. In the real world, sharing your faith is difficult.
Added to my own discomfort of nudging my way into the spiritual life of strangers, I also observed on this trip just how determined our culture is to ensure that we increasingly pull away from community. The airport, the hotel, and the airplane were packed with people who created their own world of existence by way of earphones and glowing screens. We are a society who is more and more becoming blind and deaf. We have become islands by way of technology. It reminded me of he Police song which shares the laments of an island castaway who assumed the whole time that he is all alone only to discover as he awoke one morning unable to believe that he saw "a hundred-million bottles washed upon the shore." He continues, "seems I never noticed being alone, a hundred-million castaways looking or a home." This is not an excuse for my lack of obedience, it is an observation that while sharing the gospel may appear harder than ever these days, in some ways, it couldn't be easier. People are starved for human connection. Like the movie Crash implies, people with do almost anything for touch. As a people, we are dying to belong. This makes the initial stages of evangelism shockingly easy, and seemingly impossible. In our current culture it can be as difficult and intimidating for some to simply say "hi" as it is to ask them if they know who Jesus is. At the same time taking a moment to recognize the humanity of someone standing next to you, or actually addressing them by the name on their name-tag, can open possibilities for God to enter the moment in profound ways, in ways not possible in past generations, when chatting with strangers at airports was common policy.
I will say, that with 15 minutes left of our flight, I finally mustered the courage to turn to the man next to me and, almost with my eyes closed, stammered out, “Do you attend a church in Dallas?” He did. In fact, the man I was sitting next to was a devout Catholic named Michael who had grown up attending Catholic School and who had seen the Pope during a trip to Rome.
The moment passed quickly. The wheels on the plane descended, seatbelts unbuckled, and we all filed back out into the airport as quickly as we had entered. People put earphones over their ears once again and stared into glowing screens trying desperately to ensue they didn’t make contact with anyone around them. But for 15 minutes Michael and I connected as two humans made for relationships in a fallen world by a God who sacrificed everything to make us whole again.
O’ Lord, that your people would be brave enough to reach out to the blind and deaf with the Gospel of eternity. Give us courage, and help us to see the lost sheep of the world with the eyes of the Great Shepherd who left the 99 for the one.
