Skip to main content

Conversion!

Today my friend B came to see me in the coffee shop.  B used to attend a group I ran which met for friendship, Bible study and discussion.  At that time he was a spiritual seeker with some history of church attendance and a lot of doubts and questions.  I hadn't seen B for a couple of months.  He turned up today with a box of halal Turkish delight (one of my favourite sweets - how did he know?), and explained that he had become a Muslim.  B is happy for me to share his story.

In Islam B had found the truth he had been looking for.  He had always struggled with Christian beliefs about the divinity of Christ, for example, which Muslims reject.  He had also found brotherhood with the men he met at the mosque which he was now getting up at 4.30am every morning to attend.  Now that's commitment. 

How is a Christian supposed to react when a friend with Christian leanings chooses another path?  As an evangelist I long for people to know Jesus Christ, the visible image of the invisible God.  At the same time I have absolute respect for their right to reject everything I believe.  While I was at college we visited a church in Birmingham which had a ministry with people of other faiths in the area, particularly Muslims and Sikhs.  One of the church leaders told the story of a Sikh colleague who had suddenly realised that he probably wanted her to become a Christian.  "Are you trying to evangelise me?", she asked.  "I would love to share my faith with you," he answered, "but you don't have to listen and I will still be your friend."  What a daringly honest answer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple fish and c
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have heard sin desc
4 comments
Read more

Turn or burn: OCD and evangelism

Recently I came to realise that my psychological makeup, specifically my OCD, had probably influenced my theology and indeed my vocation quite profoundly. I'm an evangelist, which is a word which means different things to different people, so I'll tell you what it means to me.  Being an evangelist means that my principal concern as a Christian minister is for people who don't follow Jesus, and that communicating the gospel or 'good news' to people who haven't heard it a thousand times already is the most important thing I do.  My faith has been nurtured in evangelical churches, and it's probably fair to say that evangelicals place a greater emphasis on evangelism than other Christian traditions.  That's partly because we emphasise conversion and making a personal decision to follow Christ.  In Baptist churches we practise believer's baptism, which means that we only baptise people who have made that personal decision for themselves (which is why
Post a Comment
Read more