"You don’t have to do doctrinal re-engineering to get the spirit and tone you want"

"Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness"

How sharing the gospel is not like MLM

Tonight I had a great conversation with J and a friend of J’s, who’s had some experience with MLM. Ironically, we talked a lot before the spiritual conversation about MLMs and ways that people make the sell, persuade, and the kind of rhetoric and language that gets used. The comparison was made, between how we use apologetics and evangelism like an MLM - after all, we are getting people to believe, and we are trying to ‘persuade’ them. 

But it’s not quite the same.

An MLM is detestable simply because any means necessary to the cause of the sell is employed, but the structure simply cannot deliver the wealth and promise that it sets out to. It offers something that is simply, false and hence, reprehensible. It is inherently deceptive, and the main motivation is self-interest, greed, material, and thus people become means to an end, tools for the plunder, resources to abuse.

On the other hand, sharing the gospel is entirely different. The promise held out, the offer on display, the good news declared WILL deliver what it sets out to do. It is effective and good, trustworthy and secure. It is true in every sense and reliable in its offer. It is the mystery held for the ages but now revealed, and now offered freely to all who will believe. It is inherently truthful, and the main motivation is a passion for God’s glory, the love for lost men and women who need Christ, and the means is self-sacrifice and service. People are an end to themselves, or at least, in the service of God’s glory through their delight and joy, and we offer ourselves as living sacrifices for their evangelization.

Perhaps Paul said it best in 2 Cor 5:11-15: “Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” (emphasis mine)