Richard Prow ~ rpcrosswords@gmail.com

 In last week’s article I asked you to imagine yourself being born in a different country and being raised in a faith other than Christianity.  I then wanted all of us to think about how we might respond if after 20 or more years someone told us that everything we had based our lives upon was completely false.  I wanted us to be in those two hypothetical situations in order to set us up for a third scenario.  Namely, how would you go about sharing the Christian faith to that person you imagined to be?

Before discussing the correct way to share our faith, which given my editor’s column space restraints may be next week, let’s first share how not to share. 

We should never deride those of other faiths, denouncing their beliefs as ludicrous speculations or pure fantastical myths.  Dreaming of 72 black-eyed virgins awaiting you in heaven or considering your pet cow your long since dead uncle may seem the thoughts of a mad man in the eyes of a Christian, but what does a Muslim or a Hindu think of Christians who speak of “streets of gold” and retell the story of a man being raised from the dead after 3 days in the grave?  A careful study of the 17th chapter of the book of Acts shows Paul exuding a clear respect for other’s faiths while at the same time making a case for his own.

Never look at sharing your faith as a contest.  We have not been called to win arguments but rather to win souls.  Our faith cannot be proven in a science lab or with an eschatological chart, for our faith is unseen (Hebrews 11:1).  Simply declaring that our God is the “God of the Bible” is inadequate to those of other faiths because they too possess their own holy scriptures.  Even those of no faith at all remain unscathed when we quote scripture because the Bible says that “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

The Apostle Peter did not instruct us to schedule debates, set up experiments, or settle our theological differences on the field of battle  (he mistakenly tried that last one in the Garden of Gethsemane).  His simple and straightforward evangelistic approach was  “give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).  We’ll break that down next week.