Back to series

Listen or Download the Podcast

EPISODE 17: Unlikely Converts

Randy Newman’s last book Unlikely Converts and his upcoming release Mere Evangelism provide the backdrop of this discussion about how people believe the gospel and what lessons we can learn from those insights.

Show Notes:

Unlikely Converts by Randy Newman

Christian Book Distributors

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 on Questions That Matter is me, myself, Randy Newman.

Research about Evangelism

Now, immediately, some of you are thinking, isn't that a mental condition? And isn't there medication to help him with this? But I want to quickly say that my friends at the C.S. Lewis Institute suggested that I do this podcast by, not necessarily interviewing myself, but telling you about two of my books, my most recent book, Unlikely Converts, that came out a little over a year ago and a soon to be released, in September, new book called Mere Evangelism: Ten Insights from C.S. Lewis for Sharing Your Faith. And I'm excited about both books, and I was honored and humbled when they suggested it. And I want to tell you a little bit about what I've learned in my research about evangelism to encourage you as you reach out to people.

Maybe I'll start with the new book because we'll do a lot more about this book when it comes out in September. So I'll just give you a little tease at this point about Mere Evangelism: Ten Insights from C.S. Lewis for Sharing Your faith. I've always been intrigued with how Lewis presented things in Mere Christianity, that book that has sold so well and has played a strategic part in so many, many people's conversions and coming to faith, including my own. I've always been fascinated that he spent so much time in what I call and what many people call pre-evangelism. He spent weeks and weeks talking about: How do we know anything? And how do we have a sense of right and wrong? And all sorts of preliminary issues that many people in evangelism today just assume that the person they're talking to is already on board with these assumptions. And in fact, as a result, we miss connecting with people. They don't quite understand anything about what we're saying.

You may know, I hope you know, that C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity became a book after it was a series of radio broadcasts, actually over several years. And so it started out as a series of just six 15-minute radio broadcasts. And it went over so well that they added another ten, and then several months later, they added more. There were four different cycles of these messages. Each of them were only 15 minutes, which is why the written chapters are so very brief. And Louis crafted very, very carefully what he was going to say. In addition to wanting to be very, very clear and be very efficient with the short amount of time he had, they had the added difficulty of this was during World War II, when they were very concerned about the Nazis being able to intercept and tap into radio lines and do spying. And so he had to deliver these messages with very little pauses and very, very clearly thought through statements.

It was really fascinating to learn about the backdrop of this, but so Lewis began with a presentation, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” And then he went on for several weeks. And it was during the fourth week of this, and by the way, this happened just once a week, so you'd hear a 15-minute broadcast, and then you would have seven days to kind of mull it over and think about it. And I think maybe that was part of the genius or part of the way God worked, in giving people time to just sort of chew on and digest things before moving on to the next proposition to consider. Sometimes maybe our evangelism processes are too quick or too streamlined, and we need to give people time to just kind of wrestle with things. And I think this weekly 15-minute broadcast enabled people to do just that.

But it was during the fourth or fifth week when Lewis admitted something like, “Don’t think that I'm anywhere within 100 miles yet of the Christian God. I'm still in the preliminary stages.” So he understood that preparing people to hear propositions like, “God loves you and wants to have a personal relationship with you,” “We have all sinned and separated ourselves from God.” Those kinds of very theologically packed statements have to be prepared with, “How do we know anything?” And, “Are there some clues within our own heart or within what we see in the world around us that point us in the direction of where Christianity provides answers?”

So I just thought it was worth examining what kind of things we could learn from Lewis. And pre-evangelism was a very big one, a very big lesson. Engaging the imagination was so very important. Lewis was an absolute master at giving imagery of what it would be like to become a Christian. It was almost as if you were listening to those radio broadcasts or reading Mere Christianity, he explained what it means to become a Christian, but he also engaged your imagination of what it would feel like or what it seems like.

And he gave all of these analogies, like becoming a Christian is like someone waking up from a long sleep and realizing that they're awake. Or it was like concrete statues becoming real people. It's like someone laying down their arms and surrendering. It's like a complete reversal of direction. It's full speed astern.

Lewis was just this genius with engaging the imagination. And sometimes I think our evangelism is too cerebral. I'm not saying it needs to be dumbed down or less intelligent, but it does need to be more imaginary or engaging in the imagination. So I look at ten different things that Lewis models for us, although that wasn't his aim. He wasn't trying to say, “Gee, let me put together a training manual about how people can do evangelism.” He just wanted to do evangelism and wanted to use his unique set of skills and gifts towards that purpose. Lewis would say that he wasn't an evangelist. He was an English professor, but he knew how to use words and engage people's imaginations to set people up. One of the principles I look at in the book is the need to be part of a team or the need to see our unique place in the body of Christ. And Lewis said the ideal situation would be for him to come in and prepare the way and then to have an evangelist close the deal afterwards. And I just thought, “Well, knowing what our gifts are and what our spiritual giftedness and calling is can help us see where we fit into God using the body of Christ, not just an individual person, in the process of evangelism.”

So we'll do another podcast—maybe someone will interview me—in September, and we'll explore this book more thoroughly. But I would certainly appreciate your prayers as the final edits and printing are being done and that that book will come out, like I said, in September.

But let me tell you about this previous book, Unlikely Converts. I actually did a doctoral dissertation where I researched how people come to faith. I read a whole lot of books about what people say about conversion from a wide variety of different theological perspectives. But I was particularly interested in what the Bible says about conversion, coming to faith, regeneration. And then I interviewed over 40 college students who had become Christians within the last two years. These were extensive interviews that took at least 45 minutes. And I then had these audio interviews transcribed, and I looked for patterns and similarities, and it was really encouraging to me and really beautiful. There were so many interviews that I had where I was choking back tears or actually crying and hearing how God had worked in people's lives. And the whole entire process was so encouraging to me that the process of evangelism is a supernatural process. It involves human natural processes, like listening carefully to people, asking good questions, challenging people, offering people information, using reason and logic, and those are all very, very important and absolutely crucial. And so that's the human or the natural side of evangelism.

But then there's the supernatural side. There's the side that God does, that only God can do. He opens blind eyes. He raises people from the dead spiritually. He softens hardened hearts. He brings, sovereignly, different people to say just the right thing that a person needs to hear. And these stories were so encouraging that I thought I needed to write them down and share them with Christians, so that they wouldn't just hear stories about how people come to faith, but they could also learn, “What does this teach us about evangelism?” So the subtitle of Unlikely Converts is “Improbable Stories of Faith and What They Teach Us about Evangelism.”

So let me just share with you the four major findings I found in my research, which amounts to the first half of the book. People tend to come to faith gradually, communally, variously, and all people always come to faith supernaturally. There's a gradual process, there's a communal process, there's a variety of processes, and there's always the supernatural hand of God. And if we can remember these things and start seeing God's hand at work in these kinds of conversations we might have with our neighbors or coworkers or relatives, many of whom are nonbelievers, many of whom think that this is just crazy, what we believe, we can see God do crazy things, improbable things, impossible things.

So let me just share a few things, and I'll share a few stories along the way. Something that if you've ever heard me speak at a training seminar, you've heard me talk about this: People tend to come to faith gradually. They tend to move incrementally from, “No, I don't believe this,” to, “Hm, maybe there's something there that I should consider,” or, “Wow! Maybe I've been wrong about some of my assumptions,” or, “You know, I think I should maybe try to check this out and find out,” or, “There's something to this!” And so people move from no to yes with a series of maybes in between. And we need to ask God to give us patience and wisdom and discernment to see what's the next ingredient that people need to have added to their process?

We're really grateful that you are tuning in to our podcast. Hope you'll consider looking at our other podcast, Side B, and see the kinds of resources that we provide there. And if these podcasts are helpful for you in your own personal walk with the Lord, please tell others, share about it on social media platforms. We'd love for the word to get out and for you to give us some good reviews on all those places online where lots and lots of people hear about us.

Process of Evangelism

I very often say, when I'm doing training seminars, I think the process of evangelism can be like following a recipe. And here's what I mean: If you've ever tried to follow a recipe, or ever even just seen one in a cookbook or a magazine or online, you know that there's a top part to the recipe and there's a bottom part. The top part is just the list of ingredients, one cup of sugar, one cup of flour, etc. And then the bottom half of the recipe tells you the procedures that you need to follow in combining these ingredients, so that actually something comes out that's edible. If all you had was just the list of ingredients, you might come up with a delicious meal, but chances are you'd come up with some things that are less than ideal. So what we need is procedures, like preheat the oven to this particular temperature, mix these two ingredients together and let them marinate for 2 hours, combine these two ingredients and use this kind of tool to combine them, then…. You understand that.

So a lot of people, I think, think of evangelism only as the top part of the recipe. Well, I need to tell them these four ingredients, and I've even shared a podcast about what those ingredients are of a good gospel presentation. We need to tell people some things about God, some things about people, some things about Jesus, some things about a response. God, people, Jesus, response. And within each of those four main categories, there's two key subcategories. So we need to communicate the ingredients that God is both holy and loving. People are both created in God's image but sinful. Jesus died and rose again. And we need to respond with repentance and faith. There. There’s the eight key ingredients of a good gospel recipe. But just knowing that and just saying those things to people may not really connect with them. Sometimes we need to preheat the oven with preparatory questions like, “Do you ever think much about spiritual things?” “Have you ever read anything that challenged you along these lines?” “Would you be willing to discuss this with me at length sometime? Maybe we could grab lunch together.”

And so it's the procedure. And what I found was that there were people who came to faith gradually. They had to move along incrementally. I begin and end my book with the story of Lawrence and the pigs, and I'll share just part of that story: So Lawrence was a skeptic. He got invited to an event on his college campus that was going to be a question and answer period with supposedly a very smart person who knew answers about the Bible and about God. Turns out he was actually a very, very brilliant scholar about these things, who was also a great preacher and knew how to communicate well, so Lawrence decided he would go to the event when he was invited by some friends simply to make a fool of the speaker and to try to give the Christians a hard time, because he thought that all Christians were stupid and their beliefs were foolish. So that was his starting point.

And he goes to the very first event, and he said that he was really pretty mean to these people, but they were very nice to him. And he tried to ask a question to embarrass the speaker, but the speaker kind of handled it very nicely and gently and respectfully, and that was surprising to Lawrence. And so he agreed to start going to a weekly study of a discussion of the Gospel of Mark. And over time, his arrogance and his haughtiness got chipped away by the kindness of Christians, and his thinking got challenged, that who he thought Jesus was was completely wrong, and he needed to learn a whole new way of thinking about who this person Jesus was.

So many people move along gradually, and we need to have patience and ask God to show us where people are. Sometimes, I like to illustrate it, imagine in front of you a line with the alphabet on it, moving from A to Z, moving from left to right, A to Z, and this would be a spectrum of unbelief. A would be someone really, really very, very far from God. A hardened, angry atheist. Z would be someone who's really, really close to becoming a Christian. I think all somebody would need to do is say to them, “Would you like to become a Christian?” And they'd say, “Why, yes. I've been thinking about this for years, and I've been wondering what I need to do next.”

It used to be that a whole lot of our evangelistic presentations began somewhere around letter T, and that was a safe starting point with people. They already shared some common assumptions with us. And we could say to them, “If you were to die tonight, how sure are you that you'd go to heaven?” And that question assumes they really do believe in God. They believe in heaven. They believe there's something about their life that could determine whether they go to heaven or not. But as more and more people have moved, because of all sorts of cultural reasons, further down the alphabet to closer to letter A, some of those questions that we used to think were good starting points, and they were at some point, 50, 40 years ago, but now they're absurd questions.

So you say to someone at letter D, “If you were to die tonight, how sure are you that you'd go to heaven?” They would just look at you and think, “Why are you always so concerned about dying? You Christians are just so morbid. Would you stop asking questions about dying? Are you trying to sell me a life insurance policy?” I mean, it's just a bad starting point for someone who's at letter D.

And so what we need is to think about: How do we engage in a conversation with someone to find out where they are on that spectrum? And some very open-ended questions like, “Do you ever think much about spiritual stuff?” is a good starting point. And then think about, “Well, how can I move them from letter D to letter E or from letter L to letter M?” People tend to come to faith gradually. That's the first chapter of Unlikely Converts.

The second one is that people tend to come to faith communally. And what I mean by that is they tend to hear and see the gospel in a wide variety of people's lives and through people's voices. It's not just one main conversation. Now, usually there is one main conversation, but then there's a dozen other auxiliary conversations. Or they're not always conversations. They're displays of the gospel. So this one young woman that I interviewed talked about how she heard the gospel from a speaker at a campus meeting because she was invited to the campus meeting. But then it was in follow-up conversations with some of her friends that she heard answers to questions that weren't answered by the speaker. And then she read some things in a number of books, and then she watched a couple of videos online, and then she went to a church. And she was so struck that, at this church, there were people of a number of different ethnic backgrounds, some the same as hers, some very, very different than hers. And there was a wide range of people by age. Some were younger than her, some were her age, many were older, some were much older. So she saw married couples who had been married for 50 years talking about how their Christian faith made a difference in their marriage and younger couples with new children about how faith helped them handle the struggles of parenting and single people and married people. And the diversity and the number of all of these different voices that said the same gospel message, but looking at it from a variety of vantage points, made a tremendous difference.

So evangelism for us today needs a very big part of us knowing what are the resources out there? What are the videos I can point people to on YouTube? What are the articles or blogs that I could point them to at the cslewisinstitute.org website or the Gospel Coalition's website? Or you want to find some websites that particularly address issues that the non-Christians you know are inclined to ask. So it's knowing the resources out there, as well as knowing how to answer questions, but realizing that, when you don't know the answer to something, that may actually be a plus.

There is evangelistic power in saying the words, “I don't know.” First of all, it’s humble. And secondly, it shatters some non-Christian’s presuppositions that Christians are a bunch of know-it-alls. And it also shows that you'd be willing to find out or you're willing to point them to people who could help better than you can. That's a very important part of evangelism today. So that's the second thing. People tend to come to faith communally.

Third, and I think as people ask me about it, I think this was my favorite discovery in my research. People tend to come to faith variously. They come for a variety of reasons at a wide variety of starting points. What I mean is some people feel guilty about things that they've done, and they want to find if there's a way to be forgiven. But a whole lot of people don't feel guilty, but they do feel shame. They feel ashamed. There's something about them that doesn't seem right, and so they're looking: “Is there a way I could become a completely different kind of person?” Or some people don't necessarily feel bad about themselves. They just think that life doesn't make any sense, and they're looking for a larger picture that explains things. And the gospel is good news for all of these people.

At the C.S. Lewis Institute, we’re very concerned about the fact that we're living in a time when the church, particularly the American church, is remarkably shallow and not very deep in thought. And so, in the ways that C. S. Lewis challenged the prevailing assumptions of his time and then pressed people to consider things deeply, we're hoping that our resources can deepen the body of Christ. And so please check out our resources on our website, explore the different articles and resources that we have, and please seriously consider becoming a partner with us, clicking that button that says Donate. Thanks.

The Core of the Gospel

What I want to point out to people is to see all of the different words used in the New Testament about the gospel message. At its core, the absolute, undeniable, nonnegotiable core of the gospel is forgiveness of sins, atonement, sacrificial atonement, propitiation. That's where we must get to in our Gospel presentations eventually. But it may not necessarily be the starting point, because the New Testament also uses words like regeneration, a new birth, reconciliation, two parties that were alienated being brought back together, redemption, somebody that was sold into slavery being bought out and returned to the purpose for which they were created.

And there's many other words about this, and there's also different motivations. If you study the way Jesus appealed to people or the way the apostles appealed for salvation. In the Book of Acts, we see that sometimes they talk about there's going to be a judgment, and you need to understand that you're going to be judged. Sometimes there's the attractiveness of truth. This is just really good things you should consider. Sometimes there's an emphasis on God's love and His grace drawing people, and different people are attracted or drawn into the gospel from a variety of different starting points.

And so our task is to study the scriptures so well that we know those different facets of that diamond of the gospel message. And to say to some people, “You should believe this because you can experience forgiveness,” or, “You should believe this because it offers the hope of eternal life,” or, “You should believe this because it can make you a brand new person,” or, “You should believe this because it makes sense out of a seemingly insane, chaotic world.” And what we need to do is to know how to be able to articulate the different aspects of the gospel.

Just in case some of you are thinking this is heresy, just think about just the contrast of Jesus talking to Nicodemus in John 3 and Jesus talking to the woman at the well in John 4, just chapters right next to each other. With Nicodemus, it was a religious theological conversation about abstract theological truths. You must be born again. But to the woman at the well, it was much more of an emotional conversation about water that would never leave you thirsty. And wouldn't it be great if you found water that wouldn't leave you thirsty. And, oh, by the way, you've been looking to men in marriage, and you've had five husbands, and the guy you're living with now isn't satisfying. So it was a moral conversation, it was an emotional conversation, but very different than a religious theological one. And Jesus knew that different aspects of the gospel touch people at different places. And we need to become good communicators of the gospel message in all of the ways that it is expressed in scripture.

Finally, one last consideration: People always come to faith supernaturally. There are forces at work. There is God drawing people to Himself. It's God making people hungry. It's God making people dissatisfied with their experience in life, that is working that we can't necessarily see. And there were so many beautiful stories I heard, where people responded to an invitation to a Bible study or to some kind of an event or listening in on a conversation that, if you were just looking at it from the outside, from a human point of view, you would think, “There’s not a chance in the world this person’s ever going to respond.” And yet, because there was a hunger building inside of them, God used that to draw people to Himself.

I love this one conversation a woman told me. I always ask people, just tell me how you became a Christian. You can take however long you want. And this particular woman took about ten minutes to tell a story that was every parent's worst nightmare of lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of experimentation with things, and just a very destructive lifestyle that was leading her in a pretty bad way, all at the ripe old age of 17. And one day she was outside in the backyard of her house smoking her cigarette, because her mother wouldn't let her smoke inside the house. And her neighbor came out and invited her to a Bible study.

And I remember interrupting her at this point. I said, “Wait, so how did she invite you to a Bible study?” And she said, “Well, she just came over to me and said, ‘Would you like to come to a Bible study?’” I thought, “Oh, that's clever.” And I said, “Was this a neighbor that you knew already? You had a relationship with her?” “Well, not really. I'd seen her, but I probably had never talked to her. The first words I ever heard her say were, ‘Would you like to come to a Bible study?’” I said, “Did she know about your life and your lifestyle?” And she said, “Oh, yeah. Everybody did, because every night I was coming home late at night with a different car, a different guy, and they knew what was going on.” And I said, “So was this someone close to your age?” And she said, “Oh, no! She was way older. She was like 25.” Way older! All right, so this old lady comes out, invites you to her Bible study. What did you say? And she said to me, “I said to her, ‘I would love to come to a Bible study.’” Again, I interrupted her and said, “Wait, wait, wait. Hold it. Did you say love? Did you use the word love?” “Yes.” “You would love to come to a Bible study?” “Yes.” “Why did you say that?”  And she said, “Because I'd been reading the Bible for the last year and a half, and I couldn't make any sense out of it.” I said, “You were reading the Bible while you're doing the drugs, doing the alcohol, doing the sleeping around?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” “Why?” She said, “Well, I just knew that nothing else was working in my life, and all of these guys were a bunch of jerks, and I thought, ‘Well, gee, maybe God could help me,’ but I couldn't seem to find out any answers, so when she invited me to a Bible study, I just thought, ‘Oh, these are people who can help me!’”

Isn't that wonderful? And in fact, they did help her. And they did help her understand the Bible and the gospel. And she became a Christian just a few weeks later. So you never know the drama that's going on behind the face. And God is doing supernatural work to draw people to Himself. And I hope that all of these lessons that I've shared are encouraging for you in your attempts to reach out to people.

Very often, people ask me what advice would I give them about evangelism, and I want to say, well, there's two approaches you can take. One is you kind of map out the whole thing exactly how you think it'll go. And if they ask this question, here's this answer. And you say this, and it's like a flowchart. And you'd have to be really, really brilliant and almost omniscient to plan that all out. So I don't recommend that plan. The other plan is start a conversation, see where it goes. Pray and ask God to work. Pray before the conversation. Pray during the conversation. Ask God for wisdom after the conversation. What do I say next? And watch God use you in the absolutely supernatural process that combines human effort and supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

So that's the first half of my book Unlikely Converts. You can buy it wherever they sell books, and I hope you will, and I hope it's very helpful for you, just as we hope that all of the resources at the cslewisinstitute.org website are helpful for you. We have a number of short articles. We have longer articles. We have audio and video, things to help you share your faith, help you grow in your faith, and we hope you'll check that out and find these to be helpful resources as you grow in your love for the Lord with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.

COPYRIGHT: This publication is published by C.S. Lewis Institute; 8001 Braddock Road, Suite 301; Springfield, VA 22151. Portions of the publication may be reproduced for noncommercial, local church or ministry use without prior permission. Electronic copies of the PDF files may be duplicated and transmitted via e-mail for personal and church use. Articles may not be modified without prior written permission of the Institute. For questions, contact the Institute: 703.914.5602 or email us.

0 All Booked 0.00 All Booked 0.00 All Booked 21934 GLOBAL EVENT: The Adventures of Eustace Clarence Scrubb (CSLI-Atlanta & CSLI-Chicago) 7:30PM ET/ 6:30PM CT https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/?event=global-event-the-adventures-of-eustace-clarence-scrubb-csli-atlanta-csli-chicago-730pm-et-630pm-ct&event_date=2024-04-18&reg=1 https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr 2024-04-18
Next coming event
Days
Hours
Minutes
Seconds

GLOBAL EVENT: The Adventures of Eustace Clarence Scrubb (CSLI-Atlanta & CSLI-Chicago) 7:30PM ET/ 6:30PM CT

Print your tickets