My pastor is really good at recommending books to me. I mean, we're talking supernaturally keen.
Most recently I have been working my way through "The Celtic Way of Evangelism" and the simple profundity of the message within is staggeringly powerful.
So far, I've learned that the difference between "the Celtic way" and "the Roman way" is the order in which things are done (prepare for a gross oversimplification, but I'm hoping to get the gist of it across): the Roman way is to present the gospel, have the potential convert come to a decision, and then welcome them into community if the decision made is "for Christ." But in the Celtic way, the fellowship comes before anything. These crazy missionaries like St. Patrick and Boniface were going into territories occupied by "hordes of barbarians" and converting them by the tribe, consistently and convincingly. They weren't waving swords or making edicts or concocting schemes to try to get the locals to buy into the power of God; they were living among new people and "doing life."
Through that immersion, the immersion of the evangelist into the environment of the potential convert and not the other way around, the latter finds themselves asking question and having feelings of what it means to be like these people that have come so humbly to be a part of community. And that is where a change, a decision, is made – not after the initial presentation.
I've realized that I will probably be engaging in something relatively similar to evangelism the way the Celts did it, and it has everything to do with one of my biggest fears: language barriers.
I have always struggled with people that do not speak English well because I am afraid of engaging them on their level. When I was an RA, there was a student on my floor that didn't speak a lot of English. He grew up in a Spanish-speaking country, and even though I took three years of Spanish in high school and tested out of six hours in college, I never made the effort to meet him in his own language. I was so afraid of stepping on his cultural toes, using poor grammar or unknowingly committing some social faux pas that would forever label me in his mind as a bigoted, ethnocentric white guy with no grace or class.
Of course, by not talking to him I forever labeled myself as the RA that never talked to him. And I don't want to have that happen again when I am out in Romania or Tanzania or wherever. I'm guessing nine out of ten people I run into won't speak English, and I'm not really visiting any countries where my rudimentary Spanish will help.
Instead, I've just got to hope that my actions speak louder than any language, grammatically correct or not, could communicate. In fact, maybe having no spoken language at all to use will remove that fear from my mind – the fear that the things I say verbally won't be good enough. I'm going to be doing community with people, and that has to say what I can't: that Jesus Christ is the reason I live and breathe, and the reason that I came half way around the world to do whatever it is I'm going to do.
I hope we get to do some Celtic evangelism, and I hope that I pick up some phrases of the umpteen thousand languages, but even more, I hope people everywhere, adults and children and whoever, see Jesus in me not because I'm talking about Jesus, but because I'm acting Jesus.
