The Necessary Things

Evangelism Discussion on BlogTalkRadio Recap

My staff team hosted an impromptu online radio talk show this morning on BlogTalkRadio. It started out as a way to test the platform for the upcoming Blogference, but it turned into an enjoyable and inspiring conversation.

Some highlights:

• Four of us spent just 20 minutes promoting the show via Facebook, text, and email. We saw at least 45 people listen into the show. It was amazing to be using social media to host and promote the show! Extremely powerful demonstration of social media.
• Global Platform: Our show was airing alongside professional and other amateur shows that spanned many different categories. Anyone could listen in and there were definitely non-believers who trusted the site.
• Wide-Range of Listeners: We had students from our movement listening in, other CCC staff, and one of our staff member's father who is also a pastor. I loved that the dialogue was not contained or restricted to a specific group of people.

If you would like to listen in, click here.

I'm hosting an extended conversation on evangelism next Monday at 2pm.

Hearing But Not Listening to the Gospel--Propaganda Part 2

from the movie White Men Can't Jump...

[ Purple Haze Playing ]

Hey...what is this?

Jimi Hendrix.

 
I know.
Why are you playing Jimi?

 
Because I like
to listen to him.

 
That's the problem.
Y'all listen.

 
What am I supposed to do.
eat it?

 
No. You're supposed
to hear it.

 
I said I like to
listen to him.

 
There's a difference between
hearing and listening.

 
White people can't
hear Jimi. You listen.

The content of the Gospel can never be compromised or boiled down to interrogatives, however the approach and bridge building must change from confrontational/intellectual to a conversational/heart manner. Otherwise, we risk speaking to that part of a person's soul that is listening but cannot hear.

Two of the comments from the first post tapped into this idea:

We'll need to be intentional, or take initiative, anytime we seek to share the gospel. Because there is a level of 'offensiveness' (that we can't get around) in The Cross, we will have to take initiative to put it out there even when we fear that it will offend people we don't want to offend. However, my conviction is that we must be overly intentional to make everything else about our interaction inoffensive, leaving the content of the gospel to either offend or transform.--Dave Goffeney

We encourage people to seek God, but are hesitant to show how to find Him, lest we be labeled “narrow-minded” and thus offend their post-modern sensibilities. There are too many interrogatives and not enough indicatives in our presentation of Christianity. Our feigned uncertainty is spiritual dishonesty, and ambiguity is just a failure to communicate clearly.--Mike Gregg

I'm so encouraged by the conversation that Propaganda-less Evangelism sparked. This discussion and wrestling with how to most effectively and powerfully communicate the Gospel to a post-modern audience is obviously happening in our heads and with other believers.

I've noticed that too often students seek to go after the philosophical arguments before establishing enough rapport and relational connection to share the Gospel effectively. I have observed that a key part of an evangelistic conversation is helping the non-believer see us as personal and human. It is far too easy for them to write us off as hypocrites who just want to convert them, and starting with philosophic arguments or combative methods only harden the soil.

As Dave keenly noted, for non-believers to feel the full weight of the Gospel, we must extract as much inoffensive-ness as possible from our interaction, leaving no room for them to justify their lack of faith or apathy towards Jesus.

Here's the best line from White Men Can't Jump:

What are you talking about?
His drummer was white.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Let's keep the conversation rolling... 

Just the Facts...Not So Much Anymore

Here are two realities that I and my staff team have frequently experienced when sharing the Gospel on campus:

• The worldview and data of most non-believers has become dramatically distant from the worldview and data of the Gospel.

• Information in general has become so abundant through the web to the degree that sharing new information with people does not generates less excitement/curiosity than ever before.

The conversations that I would describe as successful result when I'm able to listen well enough to ask questions and share how the Gospel connects with their heart, passions, and talents. Many staff sense that meaning has become the new destination, not information.

Concluding a conversation without connecting how the information of the Gospel might be relevant and meaningful to the listener usually produces an awkward ending. The listener is often unimpressed with the information of the Gospel, and we are frustrated at the listener for not valuing the information.

Some new tools have surfaced to connect with this demand for meaning--Soularium uses pictures to bridge a conversation about what is meaningful or not to the listener, which then gives a platform one to share how the Gospel more specifically to the listener. There are also some new short movies that can be downloaded on an iPod and used similarly.

I don't know if there will ever be a general evangelistic tool that's as effective as the Four Spiritual Laws. I do see tremendous potential in developing many tools that allow believers to tailor and contextualize the Gospel to the listener's heart, passions and talents.

Hit-Driven Evangelism...

I'm almost finished with The Long Tail and have loved thinking about the connections between the book's principles and observations and my own ministry philosophy and movement building principles.

Anderson, the author, defines our hit-driven media in the following way.

• A desperate search for one-size-fits-all products
• Trying to predict demand
• Pulling 'misses' off the market
• Limited choice

When I think about evangelism, in particular the tools we use for it, I'm realizing that we very much have a hit driven approach to developing evangelistic tools. Once again, our top-down model requires an evangelistic tool to fit all of these aforementioned categories, because they are thinking in light of the country.

If instead we could begin to develop niche-driven evangelistic tools from the ground up that would require less investment, contain more customization, easy to discard and have a short self-life, we may begin to see more evangelistic effectiveness. Also, our resources might be stewarded more in line with the real needs of college students, not perceived ones. 

I love the process of developing Soularium, one of CCC's newest evangelistic tools. They actually beta-tested it on a few college campuses of different ethnic and geographic places, modified it, and then released it. I thought this was a huge step forward because it solicited field input that actually affected the product! So many of our tools are handed to us, without any input on our part. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. 

I would love to see more regional and even cultural niche-evangelism tools developed. What if we partnered with IV to develop 200 new evangelistic tools, each geared toward a specific cultural or ethnic niche group? I wonder if we would see an increase in not only our external evangelistic effectiveness, but also our internal--meaning would multiple and context-specific tools actually inspire students to share their faith more?

Making the Gospel More/Less Popcorn

Great marketing insight from Seth Godin...

"The thing about popcorn is that it is a low investment, low risk snack. You can eat it if you're not hungry. You can successfully have a tiny portion. You are virtually certain that it will taste very much like your last popcorn snack.

There are products that are as easy to sample as popcorn. And making your product more popcorn-like is a great idea.

At the same time, it's interesting to note that very few people make a lot of money from popcorn. For a product this ubiquitous, it's surprisingly unsuccessful. Coke and Nike and Marlboro are a lot more powerful than Jiffy Pop.

So, the second lesson is that you want to make the sampling popcorn-like, but the commitment to be far bigger than it is for popcorn. Easy trial and consistent quality can lead to low commitment, not a great combination.

How do we make this more like popcorn? How do we make it less like popcorn?"

I couldn't help but think about how to relate this to the Gospel. The first month of school we seek to give students who have never heard about Jesus a popcorn-type experience of him. The desire is that they would taste who he is yet experience him in a way that's contextualized to their expectations. One of the insights I took away from our time of staff planning was that often times we serve 'meaning' to students who are not hungry for it. We then get frustrated when students do not come to a meeting or show more interest, even though we're offering them something that they don't perceive to be valuable.

The Gospel has to have a popcorn element to it when shared with people unfamiliar to its message. Otherwise, we risk serving something that's not desired or over-stuffing someone with meaning. Christians who have been Christians for a while (like me) can place unrealistic expectations on non-Christians, expecting them to desire the same level of depth and meaning as we do. That reflects arrogance on my part for thinking that others should want what I want in the way I want it.

So adapting Seth's question, I wonder: How do we make the Gospel more like popcorn? How do we make it less like popcorn?

Gospel Narrative Part 2--Why Not More Tools?

"If media companies are ultimately "pipes" companies - ones that primarily focus on distribution - what is their incentive to serve the consumer? I think that in the tech world, when we've seen this happen with Microsoft when it achieved superior distribution leverage relative to all its competitors. It creates perverse incentives to to try to squeeze whatever you can out of consumers, rather than innovating new products to serve them. And I'd argue that a lot of what we see in the entertainment industry - endless sequels, manufactured pop bands, child-actor-to-paparazzi-bait actresses - are all indicators that this is already happening.

Why take content risk when you can just out-distribute and out-promote whatever you want?

Is the Mummy 3 the entertainment equivalent of Windows Vista? (I guess I shouldn't be too harsh, after all the movie hasn't released and I haven't seen it yet - maybe it will be good!)"

This is from a recent post by Andrew Chen, a Bay-Area entrepreneur. The quotes before and after the red serve as context for the heart of the issue that resonated with me: Developing new content is a risk if you have tremendous resources invested in old content.

After seeing Choung's 4 Circles presentation on YouTube, and reading the article from Christianity Today, I have been left to ponder why in the 57 years of Campus Crusade has only 1 evangelistic tool received the lion's share of resource allocation? I believe the answer lies within Chen's post--there is a risk and fear of distributing new evangelistic content, especially when the old has worked so well for so long, and that most financial donors that enable us to develop resources are rooted in a One Tool/One Presentation mentality.

I truly believe the next 50 years of evangelism, at least in the U.S., will see a shift from One Tool/One Presentation mentality to Many Tools/Many Presentations mentality. Hopefully the resource allocation will follow that shift. Hopefully instead of investing money in 'The Next 4 Laws,' Campus Crusade and other evangelistic ministries and churches will invest resources in developing tools for different ethnicities, religions, regions, cities, AS WELL AS different medias--photo, video, and print.

A fellow staff member Kevin Lamb mentioned he wanted to explore evangelistic resources that use short-videos that could either be downloaded and presented via an iPod, Zune, etc, or presented via YouTube on an iPhone, Blackberry, etc. An idea like this would never come out of a One Tool/One Presentation mindset.

To get there we as evangelistic leaders need to abandon the expectation that we will come up with THE next best evangelistic tool, and embrace the reality that we can come up with A great evangelism tool that should be used as one of many tools in our evangelistic tool-box.