My church had great preaching and worship. This first approach should have been a slam dunk, but so far it hadn’t worked well for me. Occasionally someone would come with me to church, but usually just once and that would be the end of the conversation. The one-hour lecture and sing-along wasn’t compelling enough to them. Plus, people in northern California, where I lived at the time, were resistant to giving up their precious Sunday mornings, and many of them weren’t actively seeking God.
The second recommendation I’d been given was that I tell everyone about Jesus (“present the gospel”) during a one-time conversation and hope that they received the Good News with open arms, ideally saying a prayer to seal the deal. Then I could invite them to church and Sunday school classes so that someone else could keep teaching them more about Jesus.
Whether the initial gospel presentation came at church or from me, all the discipleship paths I knew basically relied on church programs to help people grow in their understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Love and relationships didn’t seem to be predominant factors in either of these approaches, yet I noticed that Jesus was relational with his followers. In fact, so much of what his disciples learned was “caught” rather than “taught.”
A Better How
In our increasingly secular Western culture, Christ followers have been stifled by a lack of direction on how to live out and share their faith in ways that are both biblical and magnetic. Yet Jesus showed us how. He modeled a more relational, conversational way of living and sharing the good news of the gospel.
John Crilly (from here on, we’ll simply call him by his shorthand nickname, Crilly) and I have written this book because we believe that many Christians desire to share the good news about Jesus with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers but in a way that is natural rather than intrusive. We have seen, both from our own personal experiences and from the experiences of Christians who have begun to engage with people the way that Jesus did, how conversations about God can unfold naturally and powerfully.
At the time we wrote this book, Crilly and I were both part of Q Place, an organization that empowers ordinary Christians to engage in meaningful conversations about God with people who believe differently. The Q stands for questions, and a Q Place is a small group of two to twelve people in which the majority are not Christians. These people get together on a regular basis to discuss questions about life, God, and the Bible. The mission of Q Place is to mobilize Christians to facilitate group discussions with spiritual seekers so that those seekers can find God as he is revealed in the Bible.
Before joining the staff at Q Place, both Crilly and I led several small groups in which the majority of the participants were not Christians. As facilitators rather than teachers, we created safe havens where spiritually curious people could wrestle with their big questions about God, consider what the Bible says about those questions, and figure out what they believed. These groups relied heavily on an inductive learning approach, built on the premise that people learn best when they discover truth for themselves through questions, discussion, and study, rather than through lectures by experts presenting information.
After twenty-three years in the business world, Crilly led our field operations at Q Place from 2011 to 2015. He brought leadership and project management expertise to the organization, as well as his experience as a writer and a certified professional life coach. Crilly’s life had been transformed by Jesus Christ shortly after he completed engineering school at the University of Illinois. With a new heart and a passion for helping others discover God, Crilly directed his enthusiasm and energy into seeker small groups and sports ministry. He helped equip others in the seeker-small-group movement by training adults, church leaders, and university students.
As for me, I worked in the high-tech industry for most of my adult life before ending up in leadership at a large church. I also went back to school and earned a seminary degree, and by 2006 I was ready to go into full-time ministry. At the same time, I had been getting an unofficial seminary degree in my own living room. In 2002, in the midst of my midlife crisis, the thought had occurred to me that, if Jesus had invited a handful of ordinary people to explore God together during his earthly ministry, it might be worth trying to do the same thing in my own community of Portola Valley, California. What the heck! Given that all of my other evangelistic ventures had seemed to bomb most of the time, I figured I had nothing to lose.
Applying my entrepreneurial skills to this faith challenge, I invited two other Christian friends to start a small group with me that was primarily a place for people to figure out what they believed about God. We called it the “Tough Questions Group.” I was amazed at the depth of relationships, stories, honesty, doubts, and faith that quickly emerged. This was the answer to my midlife crisis! Suddenly, many people were meeting Jesus for the first time and choosing to follow him through their involvement in this group. What a privilege for me to be there when they made that decision.
This transformational experience started to creep naturally into my relationships with other friends and family members; more and more I found myself talking about God without a debate or argument. For example, my dad and I had decided long beforehand that we couldn’t talk about God because it always ended badly. We had increasingly polar views about social issues, politics, and religion, and of course we both thought we were right. But I learned some important new skills in my Tough Questions Group that I hadn’t had before. As I co-facilitated our group over time, I improved at genuinely praying for people who believed differently, listening to them tell stories about their faith journeys, and asking them questions to help me understand how they had arrived at their current beliefs.
As I put these skills into practice, God gradually gave me a heartfelt curiosity about my dad’s faith journey. Rather than judging him and what he believed, I truly wanted to understand those beliefs. When he sensed that my curiosity was genuine, he started opening up both about what he really believed regarding God and all of the questions he had about the Bible. It turned out that no one had ever given him a safe place to air his own doubts and questions. Yet when he was seventy-nine years old, this became our favorite topic to discuss, rather than one to be avoided at all costs. That was the year he decided one day at my kitchen table to follow Jesus wholeheartedly and begin studying the Bible with me. What had changed?
Asking versus Telling
When I examined the core difference between my approach with my dad and the Tough Questions Group and my approach in earlier attempts to share my faith, I realized that I had made a subtle but significant shift from a telling approach to an asking approach.
In a telling approach, I do most of the talking, and I give you information that I believe is important and true. You are the passive listener receiving this information and deciding whether to believe it. You’ll evaluate this information internally, based on what you already believe to be true, your openness to new information that contradicts what you believe, and my personal credibility with you. It’s hierarchical: I, the teller, have most of the power over you; and you, the listener, have very little if any voice.
The telling approach is efficient. Because not much response is expected, the teller could be talking to one person or a thousand. Many people like the telling approach because it gives them a sense of control. Telling also tends to be transactional: I tell you something, and you decide whether to listen, believe it, reject it, or obey it. Putting two “tellers” with different views in the room causes conflict; they both want to talk, and each of them thinks he or she is right. Few of these conversations end well or continue productively. Two people with different beliefs who both want to tell the other what to believe is at best a recipe for getting stuck and at worst a relational crisis.
In an asking approach, on the other hand, I am curious about you, and my primary goal is to understand you, not just to give information. Our developing relationship is more valuable to me than any single moment of conve
rsation. My respect for you and desire to know you takes precedence over my verbal content.
The asking approach can be messy. The initiator of the conversation is not in control of how it goes because he or she assumes that the other person also has something significant to share. There is give and take. It’s a dialogue, not a monologue. Two essential ingredients are listening and asking good, open-ended questions that are not easily answered with one or two words. These practices require the other person to think in order to respond.
We see the asking approach in the first recorded conversation between God and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had disobeyed God’s command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God was walking through the Garden and wanted to talk with them. Since God is all-knowing, he obviously knew what had happened. And yet instead of telling Adam and Eve what they did, he asked a sequence of four questions: (1) Where are you? (2) Who told you that you were naked? (3) Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? (4) What is this you have done? (See Genesis 3:8-13.)
This has always puzzled me. If I had been God, I would have blasted Adam and Eve with the facts: “You could eat from any tree in the entire garden and yet you chose to eat from the one tree I said was off-limits! You shouldn’t have listened to anyone who was contradicting me, and besides that, snakes are not supposed to talk.” (Good thing I’m not God!)
Why did God ask questions? I think he wanted Adam and Eve to consider what they had done. To own their actions. To notice that they were now feeling ashamed in their nakedness. To see that they had chosen to disobey him. Perhaps he also wanted to approach them in a respectful way, to start a dialogue and continue the relationship. Whatever the reasons, I am overwhelmed at this loving response from God in spite of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. This response is repeated throughout the Old Testament, as God continued to ask questions of his people.
Walk the Way of Jesus
Reading the New Testament, we see that Jesus also majored in asking much more than in telling. He asked questions, responded with questions, and filled his teaching with questions and parables that required people to puzzle through what he was saying. You can easily imagine people, long after Jesus’ teaching was over, continuing to discuss what he had said as they tried to get to the heart of his message.
Mark 8 provides one example of Jesus’ tendency to ask questions. In just one chapter, Jesus asks sixteen questions, including the all-important one: “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29). We see the same scene in Matthew 16:15-16. When Jesus asks his disciples to voice their belief in their own words, Peter responds: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” We can imagine the thrill it must have been for Peter to hear Jesus’ affirmation: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). Because Peter had reached this conclusion on his own, his realization was much richer than if Jesus had directly told the disciples, “I am the Messiah.”
Let’s look beyond the questions to the bigger picture of what Jesus did to advance the Kingdom of God around him. Jesus made disciples by selecting a few people into whom he poured his life—just twelve ordinary men. The plan was that they would “be with him” for the majority of his earthly ministry (Mark 3:14). Jesus wanted to give his followers as clear a picture of God as he could. He wanted them to walk alongside him to ensure the lasting nature of his mission. I think Jesus knew that disciples could not be impersonally mass-produced but would be the product of intimate and personal investment. Could this be true of disciples today as well?
Evangelism or Discipleship?
Most Christians and non-Christians can agree on one thing: They don’t like the “e” word—evangelism. Although evangelism comes from the Greek word euangelion, which means “good news,” the term has been hijacked by an approach that has not always delivered good news to its intended recipients, and it now elicits negative emotions from many.
It seems that the church at large has separated evangelism from discipleship so that there are two main buckets: everything before someone has a conversion experience with Jesus, which we call “evangelism,” and everything after that conversion experience, which we call “discipleship.”
Author Alan Hirsch has long been a prophetic voice to the church in the twenty-first century. If you haven’t read any of his books on evangelism and discipleship, I’d encourage you to explore his writings, starting with his best-known work, The Forgotten Ways. Hirsch talks a lot about “reframing evangelism” within the context of discipleship in his recently released digital download, Disciplism.
Hirsch explains that treating evangelism and discipleship as part of the same continuum makes space for long-term, loving, authentic relationships with people in our lives. It gives credibility to our message and meaning to our relationships. It forces us to think of evangelism as a process, not as a transaction where someone prays a prayer and then graduates to the next class called “discipleship.”
Reimagining evangelism through the lens of discipleship requires that we let go of seeing salvation as something we can deliver on demand, or when a person says a certain formulaic prayer. Rather, we need to reconceive discipleship as a process that includes pre-conversion discipleship and post-conversion discipleship. A person’s salvation really is God’s business, isn’t it? Our part in it is to simply devote meaningful time and commitment to making disciples of whoever wants to share the journey with us—as we go. We don’t need to rush to share the standard formulas in an unnatural, non-relational, forceful way. Surely, if we love our Lord Jesus and love the people we are investing in, we will get to share the Good News of His saving impact on our lives in a less forced manner. And surely we believe that it is the Holy Spirit who awakens interest in those that He is calling into God’s kingdom?[1]
Maybe another “e” word is a better place to start with the people whom God is drawing to himself: engagement. What if simple times of engagement and respectful dialogue are what’s needed to build relationships? What if they can serve as a bridge that is able to bear the weight of truth as people choose to explore Jesus? Perhaps we are becoming too preoccupied with what we label pre-evangelism, evangelism, and discipleship in the church today. If discipleship is helping those around us engage with God by engaging with them, that all starts the minute we choose to love them with his love—not just after their moment of salvation. Let’s have conversations about God flow naturally from our interest in others and see whom God leads toward more intentional discipling and ongoing discussions about Jesus. We’ve made it harder than it needs to be.
Making New Disciples: Love Like Jesus
Author Francis Chan helps us understand what counts as good news: “God’s definition of what matters is pretty straightforward. He measures our lives by how we love.”[2] Our mandate from Jesus in Matthew 22:36-39 is clear: Love God, love people. Could it be that simple? We may have complicated evangelism by separating this Great Commandment from the Great Commission. Loving God and loving others is the foundation of the Great Commission.
To make disciples of people outside of our church doors, we start by loving them, building authentic friendships based on ordinary life circumstances and proximity (our neighborhoods, local coffee shops, workplaces, fitness classes, basketball courts, golf courses, or preschool play groups). These are the early stages of discipleship. The people we have identified may not all become followers of Jesus, but when we actively love them, we are in a better position to discern whom God might be drawing to himself.
One of our best snapshots of Jesus’ love and compassion is found in Matthew 9:36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (NLT). If we are honest with ourselves, do we have compassion on the people we see every day? It starts with that deep, unsettled, heartfelt sympathy for people whose lives are full of problems and who are living wi
thout hope, meaning, or a clear direction for their future.
Jesus is called “a friend of sinners.” Through his life we see that making new disciples starts with love and compassion for those we want to point toward him. Greg Ogden, a well-known author on the topics of discipleship and leadership, reminds us that “the Bible teaches us not only the message of our faith but also the method by which that faith is to be passed on to future generations. We are called to do God’s work in God’s way. The manner in which the Lord works is incarnational: life rubs up against life. We pass on Christlikeness through intimate modeling.”[3]
The apostle John reminds us, “Whoever claims to live in [God] must live as Jesus did” (1 John 2:6). Are we ready to walk the way of Jesus? What does that look like in day-to-day, 24/7 life?
In the remainder of this book, Crilly and I will present nine relational practices of Jesus that we see in the Gospels. These practices provide tangible skills (the “how”) for those who want to walk in the way of Jesus—to develop relationships and use an asking approach to pursue vibrant, vital conversations about God. Walking in the way of Jesus is a tremendous privilege and an exciting adventure that we hope you will take seriously. It will enable you to make disciples in a way that is natural and life giving. It will change your life and the lives of people around you.
The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations Page 2