Have you ordered your copy of Mere Evangelism by Randy Newman yet? This episode will highlight some of the key concepts in the book.

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Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today my conversation partner is me, myself. I know that may sound like a mental illness, but my C.S. Lewis Institute colleagues thought that it would be good for me to take an entire episode to tell you about a new book that I wrote. And I'm so thrilled that the Good Book Company chose to publish it. It comes out, or it came out, depending on when this is aired, September 1. It's called Mere Evangelism. And the subtitle is: “Ten Insights from C.S. Lewis to Help You Share Your Faith.” And I just was so delighted when The Good Book Company agreed that this was a good idea.

I was in a conversation with Tim Thorn borough, one of their leaders and editors, and I said to him, “I really think that the biggest need we have in the Christian world today is for Christians to learn the art and the science and the practice of pre-evangelism.” When I do evangelism training for the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows and at churches and even in some seminary classes where I've taught, I talk a great deal about pre-evangelism or sometimes even pre-pre-evangelism or pre-pre-pre-evangelism, about what kind of things we can say before we ever get to, “Would you like to know God personally?” or, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could have eternal life?” those kinds of transition sentences. But there's a tremendous need for pre-evangelism, and C.S. Lewis recognized that to be so in the UK in the 1940s e when he was asked to do those radio broadcasts for the BBC. And I just think that he modeled it for us so brilliantly that I thought, “Surely someone has written about what we can learn from C.S. Lewis about pre-evangelism and then also evangelism, about how we actually proclaim the gospel.”

And as Tim and I did some research, we found that there were a few articles and some things here and there, but we just thought it would be good to put together a relatively short book that looks at Lewis, looks at our world, looks at the gospel, and looks at what scripture has to say about the proclaiming of the gospel. And so my prayer is that this book would really equip and help Christians have great conversations that pave the way for gospel presentations.

Now, I probably do need to do a little bit of defining of my terms early on. I think evangelism is a very precise word, and it's a very narrow word in a sense. It's a very specific task of verbal proclamation of the gospel message. It's the pronouncing of that concise message that there is a God, He loves people, but people have rebelled and sinned against Him, and God sent His Son to solve that problem of the alienation between people and God, and that people need to individually respond to that offer of salvation. So that's a very narrow, precise message. Now, it can be expressed in a lot of different ways, but there's a whole ton of things that we can say that lead up to that. So, for example, sharing our testimony is not really evangelism, but it's a great and an important pre-evangelistic tactic, if I can use that term, and telling people why you think it's reasonable to believe that there is a God, rather than that there isn't a God. That’s not evangelism, but it certainly can pave the way for evangelism. And there's just a whole lot that we need to say in our world today that has moved so dramatically away from a good starting point of a gospel presentation.

And the classic examples of this are Jesus in John 4, where Jesus talked about water and talked to a woman who was thirsty, and He promised a kind of water that, if you drank it, you'd never be thirsty again. And then He talked to her about her morality and her failed marriages and the relationship she was having with a man now. And all of that was paving the way for the good news of Him saying to her that He was the Messiah. And then what Paul did in Acts 17, when he preached on Mars Hill in Athens, where he talked about quoting their poets and saying that there are things inside of us that reinforce the statement the poet made, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” So that was a big motivation for starting the book.

And then it gave me the opportunity just to read through lots and lots of what C.S. Lewis did, what he thought about his own approach to evangelism. There are a number of essays that he wrote about apologetics. You can read them in God in the Dock. Certainly what he did in Mere Christianity is a model for us. But even the way he crafted certain portions of The Chronicles of Narnia and other apologetic works, more directly apologetic works, like The Problem of Pain. And so I'm really hoping that you will get a chance to get this book, read through it, and try to apply some of the lessons.

Let me share a few encouragements along the way, because I know some people have said to me, “Boy, I wish I was as brilliant as C.S. Lewis. I just don't think I can ever come close,” and that is a potential danger of lifting up C.S. Lewis as an example, because none of us are as brilliant as Lewis. But what I do think is we can look at things that he did and then say, now, “How can I do that?” So, for example, Lewis engaged the imagination. He wanted people not just to understand the truth of the Gospel, but to feel its goodness. And so he would paint pictures. And he has a whole number of analogies of what it's like to become a Christian. So yes, sometimes we need to say to our non-Christian friends, “Well, becoming a Christian involves repentance, and repentance means being sorry for our sin and realizing that we can't save ourselves,” and we do need to say those things and explain those things. But we could also use imagery, like Lewis said becoming a Christian is like laying down your arms or turning full speed astern, turning around. It's like when someone gradually wakes up and realizes that they're now awake. Or it's like stone statues becoming alive creatures. And he just had dozens of these analogies.

And so I want to say to people, “Is there an image or an analogy about your coming to faith that you might be able to share with people when you talk to them?” So you don't just tell them what happened and what you understood, and yes, we should do that, but also create images. So I tell, in the book, that my wife, Pam, when she talks about how she became a Christian, she says, “You know, we've heard about pirates who are looking for buried treasure, and they don't necessarily know where the treasure is, but they for some reason believe that there is treasure, and they have this idea that it's something really good and beautiful and valuable. And so they're searching and searching, looking for something, even though they don't necessarily know where it is.” And she says that was what she felt like in her first year in college. So I love that image. And we need to come up with imagery.

But maybe a bigger encouragement about how God chose to use C.S. Lewis. On the one hand, so we know the story that C.S. Lewis got on the radio, and he did these 15-minute broadcasts, and they were one week apart, and so when you read Mere Christianity, they're short chapters, and we can read them pretty briefly and then go on to the next, and go on to the next. You could read the whole book in just a few hours. So imagine, though, that each chapter was 15 minutes on a radio broadcast and then it came to an end, and you had a whole week to kind of ponder and chew on it. And somehow that's the way God chose to work at that time. But you should know C.S. Lewis was not a radio personality. He wasn't an entertaining speaker. He was an Oxford professor of old English literature, and he studied old words and old languages. And so when he was asked to be on the radio, I imagine some people said, “Couldn’t we get an actor? Or couldn't we get a preacher?” But Lewis thought that that was actually a strength that he wasn't a polished professional and he wasn't a trained theologian or a preacher. And so he was a layman. That's what he said. And he worked a secular job. And so people listened to him. But he crafted his messages in a way…. He thought of himself as a translator. He took deep biblical truths and put them in the vernacular and used illustrations and backed up to where people's assumptions were. So it should be encouraging to us that God chose to use, in some ways, not a polished professional to convey this message.

But here's what I find even more beautiful. These radio broadcasts: Millions of people tuned in and listened every week. It was astonishing. When the people at the BBC planned it, they thought they would just do five or maybe six weeks, and then that would be it. And they did those five weeks, and it was such a success that they planned a second series, but originally it was just to be these five messages, or maybe it was six. And so then there was a good response, so they did another five or six. But it was almost six or seven months later that the second series came. And then, again, there was a gap in time, and then they put together ten messages, and then another gap in time. So the whole entire book that we now have as Mere Christianity is in four books or four sections. And that came over the airwaves over the course of over two years.

But here's what I find even more delightful, of how God chose to work. C.S. Lewis's 15-minute broadcasts came on at 7:45 in the evening. From 7:00 to 7:30, on the radio, was a variety talent show kind of program of amateurs who were notoriously not very good. There would be firemen from a firehouse singing a barbershop quartet, and anyway, it didn't get the repeat that Lewis’s brought him, so that was 30 minutes, from 7:00 to 7:30. Then, from 7:30 to 7:45, the BBC broadcast the news, but not in English, and not even in Welsh, which was for people nearby. They broadcast the news in Norwegian. You wonder, why in the world would you do that? Were there a whole lot of Norwegians living in London at the time? No, there weren't.

But the Nazis had recently invaded Norway, and one of the things they did was shut down all radio broadcasts, so that they could control the propaganda that they wanted to broadcast to people. They didn't want nationals telling the Norwegian people the news. And so the BBC decided to sort of sneak in through the airways, and they broadcast the news for 15 minutes. But if someone's tuning around on their radio dial or tuning in the BBC, for 15 minutes, they're going to hear the news in another language. Now, I don't know about you, but it would seem to me that would be a good excuse, with apologies to anybody who is Norwegian or a Norwegian speaker, I do apologize. But anyway, how is it that people tuned in?

There's even kind of a famous story in George Sayer's biography of C.S. Lewis. George Sayer was a student and a friend of C.S. Lewis. He wrote a great biography of C.S. Lewis, simply called Jack, which is what C.S. Lewis called himself. And in that story, he tells about one time, when George Sayer was in the military, and he was in a very crowded pub with lots of other soldiers, and at 7:45, the BBC announced that C.S. Lewis was going to be broadcasting. And the bartender turned up the volume on the radio and yelled at everybody, “Hey, everybody! Listen up! This bloke's got good things to say!” And George Sayer reports that people did listen, and they listened intently. So if God can use a radio broadcast by someone who's not a professional radio broadcaster, after news in another language, after a variety show, I think we must see, in C.S. Lewis's life, yes, God blessed him with a brilliant mind and the ability to write such engaging sentences and stories and books…

This is Randy Newman. I'm the Senior Teaching Fellow for Apologetics and Evangelism at the C.S. Lewis Institute. And it is my great privilege to invite you to an event that we're hosting on September 24 at 8 PM Eastern time. It'll be a live stream event, so you can join us from anywhere, and it's centered around a discussion about my book, my new book, Mere Evangelism: Ten Insights from C.S. Lewis to Help You Share Your Faith. It's free, but you do need to register and sign up. Please go to our website, cslewisinstitute.org/mere-evangelism, and sign up. I am praying that God uses that event in great and powerful things. Thanks.

… but it was God's sovereign hand that chose to save C.S. Lewis after decades of atheism, and God's sovereign hand that chose to use him for the proclaiming of the gospel in that time and then throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Christianity Today magazine did a survey once about the most influential books that shaped people's conversions and their lives, and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity was declared to be the most influential Christian book of the 20th century. It may prove to be the most influential book of the 21st century.

And so we need to step into evangelism remembering that it's not up to us. God chooses to use us and our words, but ultimately it's God taking what we say and what we do, and God saying, “I can work with that. I can do that. I can use those words. I can use that radio broadcast.”

Let me just share a few things about the book: I came up with ten insights that we could learn from C.S. Lewis. So let me just say a few things like, the chapters are: “The Necessity of Pre-Evangelism.” I think I've already mentioned that. “The appeal to clues.” C.S. Lewis looked at things in our world that seemed to say more than just what was on the surface, so why is it that nature is so beautiful? Why is it that we have an innate sense of right and wrong in us? That's how he began the very first broadcast. In the beginning of Mere Christianity, he says, “We’ve all heard people quarreling,” and then he engaged our imagination so that we could think of people arguing, “Hey, I was sitting there first. You took my seat!” And so he's saying there's this appeal to right and wrong. And he says that that appeal is a clue to the meaning of the universe. I address things like how we can honor people's questions and honor their objections.

Lewis anticipated people's questions because he had them not all that long ago. You may know: C.S. Lewis, he was born into a Christian family. His grandfather was a rector of a church. But when Lewis’s mother died when he was only ten years old, he gave up on God, and he just didn't want anything to do with a belief in God. And so, from ten until his early thirties, he was an avowed atheist and a strongly rigorous intellectual atheist. He was trained brilliantly by an atheist tutor to marshal arguments about everything. And so he just channeled that to his atheism. But then he also channeled that kind of intellectual rigor when he was challenged by Tolkien and Hugo Dyson and other friends to really think through and consider, and he had to get to that painful point when he was honest about his unbelief, and he said, “I did not believe that God existed, and I was angry at God for not existing.” And so I think that that's just delightful that he could see his own hypocrisy and his own inconsistency of unbelief. But he knew the questions people were thinking in their minds, so he anticipated them, and he honored them, and he gave them, I think, respectful answers. He would engage people so many places in his letters, and I quote many of them about answering people's questions.

Of course, I do have a chapter later in the book, toward the end, about the need for push back, because sometimes the honoring of the question requires a little bit of push back, of pointing out to people that maybe their question is not sincere, or maybe their question is not respectful, from their point of view. So I love quoting this, because there were times when Lewis felt the need not to mince words. There's a whole lot of times when he was very gentle in responding. He would raise something that people would say, and he would say something like, “I don't think that's the best way to think about it,” or, “Here’s another way to consider it,” and we need to learn how to say those kinds of things gently and lovingly. But he also at times knew that sometimes you had to be a little bit strong. Now, granted, when you're on a radio program or when you're in a lecture and you're the speaker, you can be more forceful. Whether we would be this forceful in a one-on-one conversation over a cup of coffee, I'm not so sure. But if nothing else, I find this entertaining. Toward the end of one of the chapters in Mere Christianity, he says, “There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of heaven ridiculous by saying that they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grownups, they should not talk about them.” So I wouldn't necessarily recommend those exact words, but there are times for push back.

And then I explore some other topics, like the power of prayer, the value of imagery, the centrality of the gospel, the need to call for a response. I do want to say a few things about a chapter I wrote on the reality of opposition. Sometimes we think, “Oh, C.S. Lewis. He was so brilliant, and people responded so greatly. He kept getting invited to places to speak,” and, “Wasn’t that wonderful, they kept bringing him back on the BBC?” and, “Oh, look at how his books have sold so well.” Yes, but he was not without opposition or even persecution. And so it's important to know. He taught for many years at Oxford, and for many years, every year, he got passed over for a promotion. It would be perhaps similar to our American University system of not getting tenure. Not exactly the same. But instead of getting promoted, he got passed over. And it became rather obvious that it wasn't because of lack of scholarship or lack of brilliance on his part, but his English department colleagues were annoyed with him that he spent so much time and effort in things that were not academically rigorous. He wrote children's books. He went and spoke to soldiers. He spent long hours writing letters to anybody who wrote to him with serious questions about the Christian faith.

I subscribe to a number of different newsletters, and I read about what God is doing around the world. And frequently, repeatedly, I see and hear pleas for the need for discipleship all around the world. That is the crying need of our time, and that is the specific focus that God has placed on the C.S. Lewis Institute. So we're so very grateful to be involved, and have been for decades, in something that could very well be the greatest need of our world today. So please consider becoming a financial partner with us. It would be at the very core and centrality of what God is doing in our world today.

And so they resented his fame, in a sense, and eventually kind of, not exactly, forced him out. But when Cambridge University offered him a position that would respect him and paid three times his salary, by the way, well, actually, Lewis said no several times because he just loved Oxford so much. That's where he was a student, and he had spent so many years there, and he just loved Oxford. Somebody once asked him what heaven would be like. He said, “Well, imagine Oxford being picked up and then transported over to County Down in Northern Ireland.” That was his view of heaven. So he just loved Oxford so much. He loved his home, The Kilns, but eventually he took the position at Cambridge, and that's where he finished his career. He taught there for the last, I forget, seven or nine years of his life.

But it was a painful move because it was the result of persecution. And we need to be not surprised if our efforts of evangelism get responses of unbelief and rejection and even some harsh rejection. And even if it's not from the life of C.S. Lewis, it's certainly from the scriptures themselves. Jesus gave us ample warning that people would hate us. That's the word He used, hate. Even in the Beatitudes of all these wonderful things about who is blessed by God. He even said, “Blessed are you when men persecute you and say all kinds of evil things against you because of Me.” And so that's a very, very important part of evangelism training and evangelism preparedness, that we can say the exact same words, use the exact same booklet or the same diagram or the same quotation, the same scripture reference, and some people will say, “Ooh! Please do tell me more,” and other people will say, “Oh, please stop talking,” or worse.

So I'm hoping that this is a book that's relatively easy to read and will help us convey this great gospel message to people around us in ways that are similar to what the British listening audience was like back in the 1940s. So the book is being released on September 1, and you can get it at all those great places where you get books. There's an eBook version of it. There's going to be, if not already, an audiobook version. I was delighted they asked me to read the audiobook. That was quite a rigorous endeavor, but a really fun project. And may it be, here's my prayer for this book, that God would use this to embolden the proclamation of the good news of the Gospel, so that more and more people will be like C.S. Lewis was on the receiving end, that night when he and Tolkien walked around and around that path outside Maudlin College in Oxford University, where Lewis heard that, “Maybe there's a reason why I love mythology so much, that there is a grander story, that there's a bigger story that we're all longing to be a part of. And if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

So my prayer is that God will bless this book and use it in many Christians’ lives, so that the good news will go forth to many, many non-Christians who will hear it and be saved. Thanks so much for listening to Questions That Matter. If you like what we do here, please like us on social media, write a positive review wherever you can, tell your friends about it, and also point them to the C.S. Lewis Institute website, cslewisinstitute.org. We have lots of resources there that we hope will help you develop discipleship of the heart and mind. Thanks.

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