Soul Awakening - Ministry Exchange (MX)

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Soul Awakening Geoff Gordon, November 2004

In InterVarsity we have spent a number of years now trying to perfect the
art of reaching seekers. Evangelism has been a front burner issue in New
England for almost a decade. Yet despite the countless hours given to
planning and hosting seeker events, leading gigs, and equipping students in
personal evangelism, the number of conversions in our region has actually
fallen in recent years. Perhaps there are some fellowships that could be
more intentional about their outreach, but on the whole, our low numbers
are not due to a lack of evangelistic effort. More than one staff person
has reported that regardless of the new and improved method that gets
rolled out on any given year – the number of conversions more or less stays
the same. Put another way, the fruit that’s dangling off the branch is
going to fall into the Kingdom by whatever evangelistic strategy we use at
the time. What we need is not so much another method for reaching seekers,
but an evangelistic strategy that creates seekers. Many of the students on
our campuses – probably most – are not consciously seeking spiritual truth
or experiences. They aren’t asking the questions that go with the answers
we’d like to give them. They don’t need a clever and relevant way to hear
about Jesus (not yet), they first need to wake up to the fact that they
have a soul.

Rick Richardson in his book, Evangelism Outside the Box, writes,
“People need to be awakened to their need for God. to become anxious for
their souls. to get more in touch with their spiritual needs and hungers
and longings.” In his opinion, effective soul awakening efforts are the
“greatest missing link in evangelism today.” He deals extensively with the
topic in chapters 7-9 of the book. Especially helpful is his use of Paul’s
sermon at the Areopagus in Acts 17 as a model for soul awakening. Paul
first comes into their territory and affirms the Athenians for the things
in their culture worth affirming. He also uses their language and quotes
their poets in presenting his message. And finally he connects their
spiritual interest with a need that he understands and can help them meet.
Richardson concludes ??? Another model for soul awakening comes from George G. Hunter’s book,
The Celtic Way of Evangelism. He uses the ministry of St. Patrick to the
“barbarians” of Ireland as a template for reaching the “new barbarians” of
the postmodern era. In contrast to the Roman way of evangelism, which
required a conversion to Roman culture as well as to Christianity, Patrick
reached the Celtic people by indigenizing the Gospel to their culture.
Instead of challenging their culture, he identified with it and affirmed
it, building upon the good that was already there: “their religious
aspirations, their sense of divinity’s closeness, their belief in
afterlife, their love of creation.” In fact, Hunter compares Patrick’s
approach to Jesus’ in coming not to destroy “the law” but to fulfill their
religious traditions. The Celtic culture itself was full of symbols and
stories that became convenient “vessels” for Patrick to use to convey
spiritual understanding and experience. A final model for soul awakening comes from Carl Ellis’s material on
Discipleship as an Agricultural Process. Ellis says, “There is a reason we
have not been able reach different cultures. We send 100 people out to
reap a harvest but there has been no planting or soil prep.” In his model,
after the important step of soil prep, which Ellis says is the practical
application of God’s word to the felt needs and core issues of the people
(aka loving them), comes cultural seeding. Cultural seeding is another way
of describing soul awakening. As Ellis describes it, there are veiled
truths in any culture and in nature that point people in the direction of
God but stop short of revealing the full story. He calls this the
“obscured schoolmaster.” Through reinterpretation, the use of the arts,
and thoughtful dialogue, we can help people to “connect the dots between
these veiled truths and biblical truth.” Each of these three models share some common principles. None of these
things are radically new and most of us probably operate this way
intuitively, but it may be helpful to highlight them. First, it is important to know, and more importantly, to appreciate
the culture you are trying to reach. Paul spent time in Athens observing
and becoming fluent in their ways. Patrick had lived in Ireland (as a
slave) for many years before returning as a missionary after his escape.
In order to awaken souls, we must be able to move beyond disdain and
judgment of culture to understanding and affirmation of it. It involves
going to where the people are instead of expecting them to come to us. It
involves participation in the activities of the culture, not just knowledge
about them. We need to be able to identify the good in a culture so that we
can use those things to point people first toward the spiritual realm and
then ultimately toward Jesus. Secondly, it is important to understand the core issues and felt needs
of the people you are trying to reach. This involves paying attention to
what people are talking about “around the water cooler,” and listening for
opportunities to engage. In cultures that are not specifically
Christian, these longings play out in ways that we can use for soul
awakening conversations. One example is found in all the sloganeering
associated with the Red Sox march to the World Series. Many of the things
people put on t-shirts and signs had direct associations to the spiritual
realm: “Believe,” “Reverse the Curse,” Miracles Do Happen,” “There is a
God,” “Now I Can Die in Peace.” These slogans resonated with thousands of
unchurched people because they line up with unconscious longings in their
slumbering souls. The desire to believe in things that seem impossible is
a good thing. The desire to reverse a curse is a good thing. People felt
those things specifically about the Red Sox, but they had the capacity to
feel those things because their souls long for it in a deeper way. What
would it look like to ask questions that began a conversation about the
nature of belief or curses? Questions that were asked not to lead the
conversation around to Jesus, but because you are genuinely interested in
what they think. There is potential for great pre-evangelistic
conversations when, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we engage people
with the issues they care about. With good questions and genuine interest – even things like baseball have the potential to awaken souls. Thirdly, it is important to identify with the people you are trying to
reach. The reality is that people whose souls are asleep are a lot closer
to us than they are far from God. Not only do we share the same core
issues: among them, issues of identity, belonging, personal fulfillment, we
also share the same felt needs: like issues related to loneliness, stress,
and conflict. We are able to engage in conversation identifying fully with
the needs and longings of our friends. We share the experience of what it
is to be human in this world and so we are able to talk about these things
from a place of equal footing. Another important way to identify is to
recognize – and to help our friends to recognize – that we share common
experiences with God. Whether or not they realize it, God is at work in
their lives. Paul in his speech to the Athenians says: He is not served by
human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men
life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of
men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times
set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so
that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though
he is not far from each one of us. `For in him we live and move and have
our being.’ There is not a living person who has not experienced some
measure of God’s grace and providence. At BU this fall, Mako Nagasawa gave
a great example of a soul awakening talk entitled, “The God You’ve Already
Experienced.” He talked about different ways that God speaks to us through
feelings, thoughts, and experiences – even when we don’t realize it’s Him.
At Boston College, which is 80% Catholic, we didn’t feel like God
Investigation Group accurately described what we wanted to see happen in
GIGs. Nominal Catholics don’t need to “investigate” God. They need, like
all of us, a deepening awareness of his work in their lives. So instead of
calling them GIGs, we called them Spiritual Discussion groups, “designed to
deepen our awareness of God.” Soul Awakening is about opening people’s
eyes to spiritual world in which they already participate. Ultimately our
goal is to serve people by getting them to ask the deeper questions related
to their souls. How we do that exactly will require ample experimentation,
prayer, and risk. But if soul awakening is the biggest “missing link” in
our evangelistic strategy, it will be well worth the effort.

In closing, here is an ancient Chinese poem quoted in The Celtic Way of
Evangelism:

Go to the people Live among them Learn from them Love them Start with what they know Build on what they have

Lingering questions:

. In our soul awakening conversations, instead of focusing on areas of felt
need, what would it look like to connect with them in areas of their
goodness? What would it look like to engage in conversations that appeal
to their potential for greatness instead of their emptiness or place of
need?

. Are Soul Awakening Events really possible? How do we create soul
awakening events that aren’t either a bait-and-switch, or actually seeker
events. If soul awakening is an essentially missional activity, is it
possible to create soul awakening events where we are expecting the people
to come to us. In New England, most people who would accept an invitation
to an event that they knew had some spiritual content, would already be
seekers. What are some ways we could bring soul awakening events to the
people? How about an art installation in some public space on campus.
Another idea is to bring soul awakening content into events that are
already happening within the culture. Instead of sponsoring a Soul
Awakening Coffee House, what if a group brought soul awakening poems and
songs to open mic nights already happening on campus? What are some other
ways we can engage with our culture and participate with a soul awakening
mindset? Obviously with this approach we lose some of our ability to
follow up with people, but we need to be willing to “seed” of the culture
liberally and trust that we’ll have the opportunity to follow up another
time. That’s what seeker events are for.

. What is the role of community in soul awakening?

. How can we toss out our tired evangelistic scripts and grow in our
conversational skills: asking good questions, listening, allowing the
conversation to go where it naturally will yet taking maximum soul
awakening advantage of the topics that come up?

. How can we use the visual arts, drama, storytelling, music, etc for soul
awakening?