Telling the Story, Part 1: Things Have Changed

Evangelist Billy Graham

They started trickling in before noon, then the first of 400 buses arrived.  By 6:33 every seat in Yankee Stadium was taken and new arrivals had to stand on the field.  They filled all but the infield, which was cordoned off by a four-foot snow fence.

That warm midsummer day witnessed the biggest crowd in stadium history   More than 100,000 people crammed in while over 10,000 were turned away.  At 8:00 the lights were turned on and they were bathed in soft light.

Five minutes later Billy Graham strode to the podium.  His dynamic, heartfelt presentation pierced listener’s hearts as he emphatically preached, “Christ is the only answer to our problems and dilemmas.”   Then he called for attendees to make a decision for Him.  In typical Graham crusades the audience was invited to the platform, but this night was different:  with no room to move, those who accepted Christ were asked to rise if they were sitting and  raise their hands if they were already standing.

Gradually people seated in the stands rose and hands went up all over the outfield.  Thousands of people came to Christian faith in this one place, at this one time.  The New York Crusade drew 2.3 million people to multiple services in the stadium, Madison Square Garden and Times Square.

Dr. Graham in his prime might still fill Yankee Stadium today, but it likely wouldn’t be the purely spiritual event it was in 1957.  It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the posters, hear the epithets and feel the anger protesters would unleash.  Rampant antagonism makes evangelizing harder than it should be.

To deal with this we need a variety of tools to choose from, starting with traditional methods.  One goes like this:

1.      Using Romans 3:10 and 3:23 show the person he’s a sinner and get him to admit it.

2.      Using 5:12 and 6:23 show him the price of sin is spiritual and physical death.

3.      Using 5:8 show him that Jesus paid the price for his sins.

4.      Using 10:9 show that by receiving Jesus as his savior he’ll enter heaven when he dies.

5.      Pray with him and ask God to save him.

6.      Get him to pray for the forgiveness of his sins and salvation for his soul, and  then state he has received Jesus as his Savior.

7.      Ask where he would go if he died at this moment.

8.      If he answers “heaven” you’ve done your job.

This has been and is successfully used.  But people often don’t think the Bible is credible, so to them it has no authority.  Even worse, nowadays people conjure their own moral standards.  Modern self-centered, custom designed, elastic rules are easy to live up (or down) to, so people don’t see themselves as sinners at all.

For this tough audience we need an approach that addresses their reasons for skepticism, is usable by most Christians, and doesn’t compromise our beliefs.  More on this in the next Christian Standpoint post.

To view an excerpt from one of Billy Graham’s Madison Square Garden services please click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOxCFJ7bX5o

Photo credit:  Time Photos

We Have Met the Enemy...

A Message for Christians

A newspaper columnist recently wrote a piece about the need for young people to return to religious groups.  She bemoaned the fact that 103 parishioners from her church had died during the previous year and nowhere near that number of new people had joined.  In fact, her church was already a consolidation of three churches, two of which had closed.  She asked for advice from churches that weren’t experiencing these problems.
 

The writer felt the causes were the disappearance of religion from family life and a smaller number of people choosing church life as a career. But these aren’t causes; they’re symptoms.  The root cause is the marginalization of Christianity by a steady drip of attacks that’s produced at least one generation of Americans who’ve fallen into secularism and have limited, if any, knowledge of Christian faith.

Why – and how – would parents introduce their children to something they know little about aside from the fact that Christianity is disrespected and attacked?   And why would potential clergy choose careers in a dying industry?  These symptoms can only be addressed by reaching parents and children who are truly lost when it comes to faith.

I contacted the columnist because she asked for help and I could offer it.  In our brief conversation she told me her church already had a program for outreach and I should contact other pastors in the area.  She had publicly complained but wouldn’t even listen to a new idea. She’s probably just a typical Christian and, if so, it’s no wonder secularists have successfully whittled away at our faith.  
  

Here’s the bad news: the U.S. has a Christian heritage but it no longer has a Christian culture.
 

The good news is that everyone – secularists included – has a God sized hole in their heart, even if they don’t recognize it.  They try to fill it with substance abuse, “wisdom” invented by secular gurus, New Age fads, perceived alien visitations and who knows what else. Millions of misguided people trying to pound square pegs into round holes. Christian faith is the missing round peg and it’s our job to help them find it.
 

Christianity has been cast as hateful, judgmental and bigoted by secularists whose own “beliefs” are incredibly shallow – and wrong.  We need to tackle this in order to share our faith,  and  it’s a disservice to both the unbeliever and to Jesus if we don’t.  Fortunately, ways to do this are easy to teach and simple to use.
 

In his classic comic strip Pogo, cartoonist Walt Kelly coined the phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us” to point out that individual people were personally responsible for a massive littering problem 40 years ago. We Christians are personally responsible for living, defending and sharing our faith, and if we merely convey a message of noncommittal uncertainty we ARE our own enemies.
 

There are practical, friendly ways to communicate with today’s unbeliever but we need to know how to do it. We’ll discuss some ideas in the next post.

Graphic credit:  We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us, Walt Kelly, Simon & Schuster, 1987.