Day 3: Relevant Christianity

Slovenia is nice. Really good ice cream here. For those who know Austria, it's a lot like Baden, only bigger.

I've been thinking a lot about evangelism here. It's hard -- evangelism, that is, not thinking. (Jetlag hasn't been THAT bad). One of the big challenges missionaries face here is building meaningful relationships with Slovenes. As with any non-believer, you have to earn their trust and prove to them that you care about them. Only then will you be able to confront them with the reality that sin exists. Most of them don't want to believe that. Lives are pretty good and comfortable (for many non-believers, especially Slovene and American ones), so it's best not to think about sin. But, of course, they are all wounded to one degree or another. And they all wound others just the same. But you have to have earned their trust before you can get them to open up about their own woundedness or admit to their own guilt in sinning against others.

And in order to earn that trust, you have to enter into relationship with them. And to build that relationship requires bridges -- way to meet them and get to know them -- some kind of common ground. (A few of those bridges here are English and baseball -- secular things). It also requires that the missionary be willing to live in their world, with all of its ugly parts too. I think those are two big challenges: finding common ground with a non-believer and being willing to stick through the ugly aspects of the secular world. I have to ask myself how I'm doing with that in the States. Honestly, not well. If I aspire to return to the field someday and enter into reaching the lost directly, I'm going to have to improve mightily in these areas.

It's a big challenge for those of us who seek the lost to enter into their world. It's messy there. In the U.S. it seems we're increasingly creating our own world which prevents us from having to engage with non-believers. We have our own movies, our own music, our own education system. None of those are bad things, but we have to make sure we don't isolate ourselves into complete irrelevancy. As a missionary entering a foreign culture, you more or less start at a point of irrelevancy and have to become relevant in order to reach the people. Let's strive towards life-changing relevancy.