Talking about Jesus can be intimidating. And some things in our current culture work against it. But some other trends may be helping us tremendously. John Hopper shares about ways to make the most of these opportunities.

Resources:

• Search Ministries' website
• Questioning God?: Answers to Questions Worth Asking by John Hopper
• Giving Jesus Away by John Hopper
• Having a Conversation About the Conversation by Randy Newman

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter. This is a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute, and I'm your host, Randy Newman. And today my conversation partner is John Hopper with Search Ministries. John, welcome to Questions That Matter.

It’s great to be with you today, Randy.

I first learned about Search Ministries when I was a young campus minister at Towson State, and for the first year, I was pretty much alone on campus with Campus Crusade, and I learned very quickly that there were these three guys in town who, if I ever needed a speaker, they were going to be great. Larry Moody, Dave Kruger, Bob Shelley. They were with Search Ministries back when their ministry was headquartered there, and sure enough, these guys were just great at coming in and addressing apologetic questions and answering really, really tough questions that students had, and I've just connected well over many, many years with Search and really like them.

And I was thinking that I'll bet a whole lot of our listeners with the C.S. Lewis Institute don't know anything about Search. I'm really sorry about that. Let me introduce you to our listeners first, and then, John, I'm going to ask you to introduce Search to them.

Sure. Absolutely.

John has written two books. The first one… I really like them a lot, and I really like the title of the first one, because it's called Questioning God. And so as a guy who wrote a book, Questioning Evangelism, and I’m coming out with another book called Questioning Faith. Any book that has the word questioning has got to be a great book. What is this book about? But here's the bio or part of the bio of John on the back of the book: “John Hopper has discussed questions about God and life with Muslim clerics Uzbekistan, Buddhist monks in Canada, slum dwellers in Guatemala, and tennis professionals at Wimbledon.” Whoo! Baby, I'm intimidated! “Now he serves with Search Ministries. For quite a while, he was the director for the ministry in Houston. Search has expanded.” Anyway, I'm doing too much talking. John, tell our listeners what Search Ministries is and how you roll.

Yeah. Search Ministries is all about getting on people's turf and starting conversations and dialogues with those who don't know Christ, have questions about God, questions about life, the Bible, those kinds of things. So we're always trying to create gatherings and spaces where people can explore Christianity, sort of “kick the tires” of Christianity. And so we're doing that across the country in different cities. And we're not always the people out on the billboards, where you get noticed that way. We're in businesses, we're in country clubs, we're in homes starting these dialogues and having conversations. So while that book says I’ve had conversations with people in different parts of the world, most of the time it's right here in the good ol’ US of A, and again, in neighborhoods or clubs or businesses. And it's such a joy, Randy, as you know, to be able to be in conversation with people who are curious or even skeptical and to see how God can work in their lives.

Now, back when when I was in Baltimore, Search did this thing. I'm really sorry, I'm forgetting what you called it, a forum, a local forum, and people just gathered in someone's home. There would be a person there with Search Ministries, you’d have some food, and it was, “Does anybody have any questions at all about religion, God, faith?” and you would discuss that for one hour. Someone set a timer, and when that thing went off, it’s, “Thanks. We’re not going to talk about this anymore.” I imagine people stuck around and maybe ate some more food, but do you still do that kind of thing? Is that your main thing?

Yeah. It’s still a sort of a hallmark of Search. We call them open forums, and just as you said, we gather people in a comfortable, friendly environment, and then we set the table. We say, “Hey, thank you for coming tonight. You may have not even known exactly what you were coming to, but we're just going to have conversation tonight, about the bigger questions of life. And we talk about business, maybe our children, sports, those kinds of things, but often we don't talk about, like, ‘What’s the purpose of life?’ or, ‘What happens when we die?’ or, ‘Is there really a God?’ And so we'll talk about those things tonight or today, but we're going to let you choose what we talk about. So whatever you wanna talk about, we'll talk about that, and it will only go an hour, and so don't worry about this going on forever.” And then usually I'll add, if I'm leading an open forum, I'll say something like this: “As I've looked at some of these deeper questions of life, I've landed in the Christian camp. And so somewhere along the way, in the midst of this conversation, I'll share, if we're sort of talking about one particular question or topic, I'll give you a five minute Christian perspective on that question.” But I'll also say, “But you can just take it or leave it as one idea in the pod of ideas.” So that people don't think I'm setting it up for this big sermon, but I'm just going to share something for a few minutes. And then I usually say my five-minute piece about forty minutes into the hour, because I don't want to be the last word.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, good.

I’ll share something like that, and then I'll say, “So what do you all think of these thoughts that I just shared?” and then I'll get feedback. And that kind of situation, Randy, it just creates space for great dialogue and gets people thinking about things that they probably had questions about for a long time, and they never had space to talk about it. So it's really been valuable for me and for Search in general over the years.

Boy, you've touched on several things, and I want to follow up with a question: All right, so what kind of things are you seeing, and what kind of things are you observing that people bring to these gatherings? But before there, I want to underline: It does seem to me. I think people are hungering for these kinds of conversations, and they don't get a chance to do it, or if they do, they're afraid that, “Oh no. This is probably going to get ugly. It's probably going to be a shouting match.” Because so much of our world today is that. The public sphere is so unkind and nasty, and so, I mean if it's unkind and nasty that way about politics and everything else, oh, my goodness, about religion? I mean, break out the swords. And so I think to be able to say, “We want to talk about this. We want to talk about it respectfully. We want to allow back and forth dialogue,” and I do think people are hungering for talking about some of the deeper things. Are you seeing these kinds of trends?

Yeah. I think so as well. I mean, every once in a while, you get somebody that is a part of something like that, and they’re just almost offended by it, and they don't want to be a part of it anymore. But most people, they really enjoy it, and their response is, “I didn't even know something like this could be done,” or, “Are you doing more of these?” or, “I'd like to ask more questions.” Oftentimes, I meet people as a part of those forums, and I'll take them to lunch or breakfast at some later date, and they'll bring up things from that conversation. They want to talk more. They want to ask more questions. So I do think there is a hunger there that we're not tapping into.

Mm-hm. I was talking to a friend last night, and sort of out of nowhere, he just told me that, the night before or two nights before, he went to a concert of Sting. The rock musician Sting. And first of all, this friend of mine was pretty young, and I thought, “Young people are going to go hear Sting?” He goes, “Yeah. He’s 71.” But what he told me was…. I said, “So what was that like?” I like Sting’s music. There are a couple of songs. I really haven’t heard about anything recent, and apparently he's still writing a whole bunch of songs. And what he said was, “It was amazing how so many of his songs were very serious, and a whole lot of them were tremendously religious.” This friend said, “I'm just kind of wondering if he's a closet Christian or whatever.” At one point, introducing one of the songs, he even read a couple of verses from the Bible.

Wow!

“Here’s an episode from Second Samuel about David that pointed me towards this idea, and I wrote this song.” It’s like, “Oh, my goodness! But I think people are going to concerts or watching shows, streaming shows or whatever, that…. I mean, okay, yeah, a whole lot of them are inane and silly and just ridiculous. But a lot of them, I think, are trying to explore what is life about and where do you find, not just happiness, but something deeper. Where do you find meaning? Is life just one big absurd joke? And so I think you're connecting with some of that. What else are you seeing?

Yeah. Again, I do think there's that kind of interest at all levels and really for all ages, all places in life. People have those kinds of questions and that kind of interest. I mean, you bring up Sting, and probably the biggest podcast right how in terms of audience might be Joe Rogan, right? And we might look at some of what Joe Rogan has to say and be pushed back by it, but in many ways, those conversations that he’s having, it's aiming for this deeper life, right? This greater meaning. And how do we get there? And so I do think people are searching, and I think, in some ways, at our age, Randy, we can say that, well, the younger generation doesn't care about those things anymore. They've sort of left God, but it's a generation younger than us that’s listening to Joe Rogan. They’re looking for the answers.

By the way, I hate to say this to you, John, but at our age, we should talk about the younger generations, plural.

That’s right. There you go.

But we’re going to edit that out.

I wonder about… there's something about the genre, if I could say, of a podcast, in that it doesn't have to be a certain length of time. I mean, most podcasts stick with what their format is, so there are some that go for an hour and some for a half an hour, whatever. But it's not like the old television shows that had to be done in 30 minutes. And the people who produce them know, “Well, we really only have whatever it is, 21 minutes, with the commercials and stuff.” So you have to raise an issue, create some tension, and resolve it in 21 minutes. On a podcast, well, I don't know. Today’s podcast might go a little longer than yesterday's or whatever. And people have this expectation that this doesn't have to be so shallow. And I just think that may be conditioning people to, “No. Let’s talk about this a little bit more.” I love that.

I also think maybe people's work schedules, with working from home or working remote, you might have a little more flexibility. It used to be, okay, if you're going to meet someone for lunch, you had less than an hour, because they had to leave their office and meet you and then they had to be back, and you knew it. So it's like, “Well, if I’m going to talk about Jesus, I better get to this in the next ten minutes. And then I better wrap it up ten minutes after that, because they're getting up and leaving. So I just wonder if there's… Sure there are plenty of things that are working against us in proclaiming the gospel in our world. But I think there are some things that are really working in our favor, if I can word it that way? Or if that’s too crass.

Yeah. Well, one thing that I would say is working in our favor, which—it's sort of a negative, but it works to our advantage—is I think there's just a growing loneliness actually. So, again, people might be connected with others in new and broader ways because of social media and things, but in terms of actual friendships, people that care about you, know about you, that you have good conversations with, I feel like that's fewer. And the research I've looked at, that's the case, that people have fewer and fewer what they would call good friends. So it gives us an opportunity really to be a good friend to someone, because people are looking for that. And so, if you can be a good friend, then that's certainly going to create lots of opportunities to be able to share about Christ.

Yeah, I think it's a lot stronger than that. Some people have used the word epidemic, the lack of friendship and the lack of real conversation, causing tremendous depression and despair and suicide and drugs. I mean, there are a bunch of statistics that are truly alarming. So you're right. And there's a resource and a fuel we have, of, “God has befriended me. Because of God's grace, because He saved me. He calls me His child. He calls me His friend. I have been adopted. I have the greatest friendship, reconciliation, connection.” And so out of that is like, “Okay, I could befriend this person. I probably don't have the strength within me, but God can give me that strength, that compassion.” People are starving for it. And here's a great…. We are commanded to go love our neighbor. I think listening and having good conversations may be one of the best ways to do it.

That's right. And one place that I see that, Randy, just this desire for that deeper conversation, is sometimes I'll go to a lunch or a breakfast with someone for the first time. Maybe I met them sort of casually at some gathering. Sometimes I've even been set up sort of almost like a blind date. So somebody has said, “Hey, I think you should meet this person,” so I meet with them. And I just sit down and begin to ask some questions about their life, their family, their work, whatever the case might be, just trying to get to know them. And as I listen well to their answers and even follow up with questions, like, “Oh, that must be difficult,” or, “How did you get to that point?” And I’m showing my interest that way. It's stunning to me how often, in about 40 minutes, 45 minutes, the person I'm sitting with will say, “You know, I'm never really shared this with anyone before but….” And I'm thinking to myself, “Why are they telling me this? I’ve known them for 45 minutes.” And they feel like they can share this, or they want to share this, right? So it shows me the hunger for relationship, that people are really looking for people that will listen to them and that will be concerned and interested and curious about them. So that creates opportunities for us, for sure, to share about Jesus.

We here at the C.S. Lewis Institute are very excited about a new monthly publication we are launching and have launched already and have sent out a few issues. In the legacy of C.S. Lewis, this new publication which we're calling Challenging Questions tackles subjects and issues regarding the Christian faith, with a hopefully winsome and thoughtful approach to provide believers with good reasons for their faith and to provide seekers and skeptics with some food for thought. This new publication will be distributed monthly. We hope that you'll share copies of it with friends of yours, neighbors, colleagues, and we would love to receive your feedback on it. Go to our website, look for Challenging Questions. There’s also a place where you can send us feedback and comments about it. Maybe you could offer some possible topics you'd like to see us address. So we really hope that this resource helps you as you reach out to people who are posing challenging questions to you.

You know, I think people who have listened to me on this podcast will have heard me say this before, probably far too many times. But I did this research project where I interviewed college students who had just become Christians within the last two years. And I made sure that I told them we're going to meet for an hour, 45 minutes to an hour. So I wanted them to block out that much time. And after a while, I just started seeing things come out around the 35- or 40-minute mark. It was almost like I could look at my watch and cue the music. Here comes the, “Oh! I just realized something!” or, “Oh, I just remembered something,” or, “You just said something, and that reminded me of….” And it takes that long in a conversation for certain things to come to the surface. By the way, there's a lot of recent books being written about conversation. I just took another one out of the library the other day. I'm forgetting the title, but all sorts of people are saying—and these are not Christians. These are social psychologists or even technology researchers, and they're saying that we've got to recover conversation, because it is one of the antidotes to that loneliness and alienation that is an epidemic. So I think we all should try to develop the skill of becoming a much better listener, conversationalist. Okay. End of commercial on that one.

Yeah, no. I think you're right. And the word that I find myself using a lot, and actually it's showing up in different things that people are writing, is this need for us to be curious. If we're willing to be curious with people, that really lends to great conversation. So just try to find out things about people and how they think about things and how they make a decision and why they like things the way they like them, and you just begin to uncover, and boy, it doesn't take very much time to really get to know somebody and for them to enjoy that somebody wants to listen to them. So just having that mindset of curiosity.

Nice!

I found one thing that's kind of… so my daughter's really, I think, learned the art of curiosity, and she's become really good at asking people questions and drawing them out. She doesn't love at home anymore, and she'll come home, and she’ll just say, “Hey, Dad, when you were growing up, was it like this?” and, “Dad, do you like that?” and, “How was it when you wrote that book?” And she just starts asking me all these questions. And I just start talking, and I start sharing with her. And it's interesting because oftentimes no one asks me those questions. So I find myself like, “Oh, this is interesting. I kind of like this.” I'm sharing things about my life and my heart. And, “Oh, this is what I do with other people, and they’re sensing the same thing and feeling heard and cared about and that someone's interested in me.” And so it's kind of fun being on that side of it with my daughter.

Nice! Nice! Okay. All right. So this is painful for me to admit, and maybe I'm the only one, but I think maybe some of our listeners might also fit in here. Sometimes, for me, the switch to the curiosity has got to be, “Okay, I don't have to be the center of this conversation. This doesn't have to be all about me. In fact, it doesn't have to be about me.” And sometimes I have to repent inside my head, praying to God, that… “I like it when people are focused on me. And sometimes I like it a little too much, and so, Lord, would you set me free.” So that's all I want to say about that, and people can contact and say they’ll be praying for me. Let's talk a little bit about your book Questioning God. It goes after-

Okay.

This is written, I think, mostly for nonbelievers. I mean it's written for believers to learn how to answer common questions, but it's written to be given to nonbelievers, and you go after all the standard questions people should or are asking. Why should I believe that God exists? Don't Christians use their faith as just an emotional crutch? Why should I trust the Bible? If God is real, why is there so much evil and suffering? So it's sort of like all of the standard questions people are asking. What was the angle you wanted to bring to this, that you thought well maybe other… I mean there are several books like this. What was the angle you are hoping to bring? Or maybe angle’s not the right word. Maybe flavor.

Well, many apologetics books—which I've drawn from for many years, and they’re excellent. They really are addressing Christians, like, “Here, Christian. Here’s information so that you can have it to answer people's questions. But there's not a lot of apologetic books that are actually addressed to a non-Christian. And sometimes, if they are addressed to a non-Christian or a skeptic, they're a little like in your face, “I'm going to prove this.” And I wanted to bring really a conversational style to Questioning God, and that's really one of the big responses that I've gotten to the book. “It's almost like you're talking to us,” which is great. So there's that conversational style. In fact, if Christians read the book, one of the things I tell them is I say, “Don’t just recognize how I answer, like the information I give, the content, but notice the how and the tone that I use.” Because I think that's just as important. Because we can give people good information and turn them off at the same time. At Search, we talk about that there are not just intellectual barriers that people have. They don't have answers to good questions. But they have emotional barriers, too, that can keep them from God and considering God. And we can answer people's intellectual questions, and at the same time, build up their emotional barrier. Because we're sort of in their face with it, right? So I think the book, what it accomplishes, what I tried to do with it, is that it provides sort of friendly answers that are like, “Hey, consider this. You might think about it this way,” rather than proving a point.

Yeah. You know, I often think… There was a heyday for apologetics in America, flowing out of the 1960s and 1970s, and culturally, in the 1960s and 70s, a whole lot of people were yelling. They weren't necessarily mean-spirited towards each other, the way things are today, but people stood on street corners and yelled, protesting the Vietnam War or protesting this. There was just a whole lot of yelling going on. I mean when you say in your face, I think that defines the whole decade. And so apologetics took on that tone, and that's not the tone we want. I mean, I think it worked. I think God chose to bless it in the sixties and seventies. I think today people are just, they're so tired of that. Like, “Could you just say something nicely and then stop? And let me think about it. Let me chew on it a little bit.” So, yeah, the tone is really important. And I think you really do strike that tone in the book. So that's a success.

Let's talk about your second book. Is it out yet? I have an advanced reader copy, which I'm hoping they don't mean that I'm an advanced reader. Because I'm not. I'm a mediocre, middle-level reader. Has this been released? It's called Giving Jesus Away.

Giving Jesus Away was released last Friday.

Oh, man!

On September 15th. So, it is out on Amazon.

Great!

So you can get it there. We're excited about it.

I'm excited. The title is Giving Jesus Away. The subtitle is “Finding Joy in Sharing the Gospel.” I have a feeling there's a whole lot of people who say, “Joy? Really?” Wow! Here, let me read from the back cover. It says, “I'd like to tell others about Jesus, but…” and then there's this whole list. I get too nervous. I don't know how to start the conversation. I tried once, but it wasn't well received. And you’ve got a few more, and then you say, “If this sounds like you, you're not alone. Many Christians want to tell others about Jesus, but don't know how to do so in a friendly and inviting way. Give us a little more of a sales pitch. Don't tell us everything about the book, because I want people to buy it.

Sure. Sure.

Give us a little more promo of what.

Well, I do think that people feel that evangelism’s a little bit like going to the dentist, right? Like you should do it, but it’s kind of painful to do it. And I did subtitle it finding joy in sharing the gospel because I find a lot of joy in it. In fact, the times I get most excited coming home to my wife at the end of the day is when I've had good conversations with people. And really, the times that I kind of walk away going, “Boy, that was terrible! That was so uncomfortable,” or, “I really turned that person off.” That's a small minority of the amount of times. So I do find joy in it, and I want other people to find joy as well. And a lot of that has to do with, I guess you might say, the approach that we come to evangelism. So if the approach is, “I've got this body of information, and I need to make sure that I tell it to the other person, whether they really want to hear it or not.”

“I’ve got to give this. Okay, please don’t say anything because I’ve got a spiel that I’ve got to make.”

Exactly. Then you're probably not going to find a lot of joy, and the person you're telling it to is probably not going to be very joyful, right? But if it's a part of a conversation, right? Then I think it can be a great joy. So the book is about building friendships with people, with non-Christians. A lot of people have even lost friendships with unbelievers. Then how do we have conversations that go to more meaningful topics? How do we clearly share the gospel? I think sometimes we think we know it, so we can share it clearly, but if we were to share it to someone, we might get them more confused than we actually help them. So we do that in a real clear way.

So the book is full of a practical advice, not just from my experience, but Search has been around for like 46 years now, and so there have been a lot of people that have been sharing Jesus that I really drew from for this book.

Nice, nice! You know, I do think… I'm going to think out loud. I might be wrong, so please correct me, but I think there was a time when, given the way our society worked, people felt like, “Okay, I have this one and this only one shot to talk to this person about Jesus, I better give them the whole deal or else, or something. We are now so connected with people. Now, we're still lonely, and we're not having decent conversations, but texting, emails, Facebook, sending people links, sending people, “Hey, I just saw this short video, What do you think?” We can present a piece of the puzzle. And then, “Well, let's talk about this again sometime,” and make it a sequence of conversations. And I think your approach lends itself for that. Am I just remembering something that's too old? Are people still thinking like, “Oh, I better deliver the whole package right now.”

Well, I think people, they still kind of have that in mind but they intuitively know it doesn't work.

Okay.

So they either, “Okay, I’ve got to do it because I'm supposed to share with somebody,” and it doesn't really work, or they just don't share because they know it won't work that way. So I think you're right, Randy, is that we need to think of it more in terms of a series of conversations. So if we do look at days of old, and hey, I remember when I would go into a shopping mall, and I would approach people and sit down with them with a Christian tract and try to share Jesus with them, right?

Total strangers? You walked into a mall with total strangers. First of all, malls are empty now, so that’d be really hard to do.

That’s right.

Oh, so you’re one of those guys. You used to walk up to total strangers with a booklet.

I would even do that. That’s right. Yeah. But what I found is today there are so many missing pieces for people, so before people may have believed in God. They may have had respect for the Bible. They may have even seen themselves as someone who was a sinner. They might have even been willing to adopt that term. So, they just didn't really understand that it was through faith in Christ that they could be made right with God, right? So, they had a lot of pieces of the puzzle. But, in conversations with people today, that's not necessarily the case. They’re unsure about God. They may have received a lot of misinformation about the Bible, in terms of its veracity and reliability. So they certainly don't necessarily think of themselves as sinners. So there are all these pieces. So if we even did a gospel presentation, there would be so many things that would have to be explained to make sure that people are even understanding what we're saying. So I do think it has to be a series of conversations.

I think one of the little stories I share in the book along the way is a fellow by the name of Ted that I met. He was an older man, and he's actually passed away now. But I sort of made a friendship with him through helping him after a flood. It had flooded his house, and he wanted to take me to lunch, so we went to lunch. And he learned what I do, and he said, “Well, you know, I've started to read the Bible in the last year.” And he’s in his eighties. And I said, “Oh, really?” And he said, “Yeah. I'm liking what I read mostly, but I don't really agree with the part that says that we're all sinners.” He just flat out told me, like, “I don’t think that’s true. I'm a good person.” He’s began to tell me all the things he's done in his life, and he had done a lot of good things. And so I explained to him a couple of passages that sort of opened his eyes about what the Bible calls sin, and he left that conversation, where he said, “You have given me much to think about.”

Ah! Great success!

And really, I didn't press it any more. He needed to process this idea that he was actually someone who was a sinner in the eyes of God, that fell short of God. He’d never really had thought of that before. And so we picked up… We had many lunches and many more conversations. But I didn't feel like I had to like, “Okay, well he’s it's kind of beginning to think he might be a sinner, so I’ve got to give him Jesus, and I got to get him to say the sinner’s prayer or whatever. So it was a series of conversations, and ultimately, we began to see faith sort of grow up in his life.

Oh, man. Well, you and I could continue this conversation quite a bit. I hope we will. But for this podcast, I want to draw things to a close. Any any last thoughts? Our listeners are very serious about their faith, and I know enough of them through various things we do with the Institute that they really do want to be able to tell people about the Lord. So, any last pep talk nuggets you want to share?

Yeah. I think I'll just go back to the comment was made earlier is, if you just today become a more curious person about those around you, and I think if you do that, then it’ll begin to open up doorways to conversation, so much easier.

Well said. Well said. And I'm so grateful for you and Search Ministries. To our listeners, we're going to put some links in the show notes about Search and about John's books. We hope that they’ll be great resources for you and, all of the material on our cslewisinstitute.org website. We hope you'll check out the things there, that all of them will help you grow in heart and mind discipleship, that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Thanks. 

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