Coming off of a great Easter gathering at Adullam, I woke to this encouraging note from a buddy Joe.

When we consider the power of the message of Christ, consider also the power of how we share this message.  People sniff out trite religious stories that have little reference to our human condition. This unchurched, barely-believing friend, was open to the Jesus story not just because of the story.  She was open because the messenger was believable.  Because a divine message was housed in a human.  This isn’t a pat on my own back, or evidence that any human is more important than the story.  But it does show that it matters to Jesus how we bare witness of Him.  In other words, how we tell the story!  I believe the posture of how we engage the lost world was modeled by Jesus and as we are encouraged in 1 John, ‘to walk as Jesus walked,’ we have an opportunity to be tell His story well or at least better than we have been.esR

During this sermon, I did apologize for how Christians have not lived the story or made it sound easy to believe. I was honest about my own continual failure and even about my occasional doubts.  I gave real examples of how Jesus has made small incremental changes in my life, over many years, but I didn’t make it sound like I had reached some pinnacle that others can get to in a weeks time.  The story our collective community told was that there’s no insiders or outsiders and that God’s story is for everyone.  They could see it and feel it in how we related 30 minutes before the service together as well as how we stayed another 30 minutes after the ‘religious time’ was over.

These simply changes in posture don’t remove all the barriers to someone finding faith, but they sure do make it easier for the story to be heard. And that’s a good starting point.
 
Hugh