June 21, 2009
Sunday night in Dearborn…
Almost everyone else on the team seems to have had their fill of the Arabic Festival, but Annie is hoping that she’ll run into a woman she and Neshe had a really good conversation with last week so they can confirm lunch plans for this week. I didn’t get in until late last night, so I have experienced nothing thus far. The rest of the team drops us off where we can walk, and Annie and I head off. I’m still wrapped up in the joy of being reunited with my team and wrapped up in culture shock (capris that barely cover the knee, sandals, and a shirt that exposes your collar bone are okay to wear when possibly ministering to Muslims?), and Annie is determined to get us there before everything shuts down and make sure she finds the woman she is looking for.
But everything has already shut down. We walk past booth after booth where people are packing up and leaving. It’s not yet 9PM, but apparently everyone has been given their marching orders.
We get to the booth where the woman was working, and she is already gone. No big surprise, since the festival has closed down, so we keep walking to see if any of the Christian booths still need help. We see someone Annie recognizes, and get by the police officer by telling him we’re going to help clean up – not a lie, because we intend to do that if need be.
The person we see is Jon, one of the many people Louis and Annie have come into contact with in the three summers they have been to Dearborn. They started shutting everything down before 8:30, and all of the major cleanup is finished, he says when we ask, but we can walk with him for a bit as he goes to meet up with his team. Can you pick the tracts up off the ground and throw them away as we go?
Yes, we can, and we do. I pick up tracts and walk slightly behind Jon and Annie as they walk and talk and collect, and listen. They talk about a lot of things that I mostly file in the back of my head to ask about later because they are things that happened while I was back in Phoenix, teaching in Vacation Bible School.
Eventually, we catch up with the group Jon is hooking up with – the apologetics team that came with Josh McDowell for the festival this year. They are getting ready to pack up and head out, too. They have a debrief at their hotel that is supposed to include Josh. We talk with the guy who is holding the giant pole sign for a while as Jon stows things in his car and starts getting ready to ferry the group to their lodgings.
I am not a great fan of apologetics as a form of evangelism. I believe that God can and does use it. However, many of the people I have seen attempt to use it somehow turn apologetics into polemics (or attacks). And I HATE polemics, because often times polemics make people who aren’t Christians far stronger in whatever they were lukewarm about before. So standing on this street corner with other Christians standing around attempting to disprove the Koran… this is not what I expected when Annie and I arrived at what was left of the festival this evening.
It is hard to tune it out when it is all around you, and while Annie is halfheartedly conversing with the sign holder, I stand and nod politely and try to listen to their conversation instead of the many others going on around me. The sign holder leaves, and Annie holds the sign for a few minutes, and we hang around until the apologetics team loads up and moves out before we head over to the park to meet the rest of our team at the park.
Later on, Annie tells the team about our time at the festival. She’s not a fan of apologetics teams, either. But she says that while she was holding the sign, she heard the guy behind her talking to a couple of Muslim men one minute attacking the Koran. Suddenly, his tone of voice changed, and he told the men “I just want you to know Jesus loves you.”
As she goes on to talk about how this has changed her perspective on some of the people who use apologetics as a form of evangelism, I sit back and think, because my perspective is changing, too. Not everyone who uses apologetics does so in love, but there are people who do. And all of these people who are Christians and engaging people this way are my brothers and sisters. How dare I associate their style of evangelism with who they are as a child of God and as a part of my family? I pray I will remember this in future encounters.
