Evangelistic intelligence
One of the qualities that helps us navigate life well is emotional intelligence. In contrast to the more objective measurement of our intelligence quotient, emotional intelligence is the capability to recognise and process our own emotions as we engage with others and to adjust our thinking, behaviour and conversation to create healthy connections. Emotional intelligence is often associated with empathy because it involves the ability to see and feel things as others experience them.
The period of the coronavirus pandemic has been one of heightened emotion and feeling across society and in individual lives. Fear has spread quicker than the virus itself. A sense of the fragility of life has returned to what was previously a hyper-confident world. Many people feel rocked to the core.
As followers of Jesus this may at first feel like an amazing opportunity for evangelism as the secular bandwagon begins to totter on ever shakier wheels. However, adopting the wrong posture, tone, tenor and texture of approach might cause us to miss the moment. As we go forward, what might it look like to deftly engage a tender and broken world with evangelistic intelligence?
Empathetic evangelism
Perhaps doing so begins with ensuring we empathise with the depth of devastation and the shadow of death that looms large over the whole world just now. The Bible gives many examples of what that looks and feels like and how to give proper inward and outward expression to it. Whether it is Job crying out in his anguish, Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of a Jerusalem that had forsaken its founder or Jesus weeping over that same city and its inhabitants many years later, in every case there is anguish, sadness, compassion and fellow feeling with those who suffer. But more than that, there is a deep inner questioning of what is unfolding without corresponding quick or easy answers to the problem of pain.
John C. Lennox, Ulster born Adjunct Lecturer at the Oxford Centre of Apologetics, must have been one of the quickest authors off the mark in publishing a book that speaks to our current crisis. Where is God in a coronavirus world? is a quick read of just fifty-seven pages, offering a well written summary of how Christianity makes sense of the coronavirus pandemic and offers hope to a hurting world. In it he observes that,
A Christian is not so much a person who has solved the problem of pain, suffering and the coronavirus, but one who has come to love and trust a God who has himself suffered.
We would do well to ensure we have adopted that posture of empathy and humility before we rush to speak to present circumstances.
Strange story
Just because we tend to make connections between the message of the gospel and current events we shouldn’t expect that most of the people we are trying to connect with will do so naturally or easily. In previous ages, world changing events were commonly viewed through the lens of the shared story of Christianity as the bigger perspective which brought meaning and made sense of what was happening. God was assumed to be in it and that brought comfort, even if much mystery about his purposes remained.
By contrast, we live in an age of biblical illiteracy. A whole generation has grown up with very little knowledge of Christianity or exposure to basic gospel stories. As we attempt to explain the gospel to them, they have very little on which to draw. The gospel comes across as a very strange story.
This has been the case for some time, but most of our gospel presentations still assume far too much and don’t start far enough back. We are on a journey of learning how to line up gospel truths alongside the culture shaping stories and symbols of contemporary life, either drawing upon them as illustration of gospel content or contrasting them with Christian values. We need to pray that God would root us deeply in his Word and expand our imaginations as to how to make meaningful connections between his truth and the felt experience of an increasingly secular world.
Heads and hearts
Recent years have seen a helpful exposure of church members to the big story of the Bible. An explosion of resources have helped us better understand God’s overarching plan of creation, fall, redemption and restoration. It is so helpful to see the coronavirus pandemic through this frame of reference.
The effects of a good creation warped by the effects of sin brings balance to our understanding. The wonder of a God who in Jesus suffers with us and for us brings comfort in our pain. The anticipation of a new heaven and new earth brings hope of healing and restoration.
Intellectually the Christian worldview has so much more to offer than the new atheism, but a still suffering world will process its pain as much, if not more, by heart than by head. As much as our big story will be helpful to us in post pandemic evangelism, it probably won’t provide the place to start with most people. It may provide more of a destination towards which to travel gently and patiently. As Lennox, reflecting on times of significant natural disaster, helpfully reminds us,
For many at such times, the picture is more than ragged – it is extremely raw. Those of us who stand outside the immediate pain of others run the risk of failing to be sufficiently sensitive to that rawness.
Wisdom and winsomeness
So, as we seek to respond with the gospel to a coronavirus virus world let’s ask that God would teach us to do so with evangelistic intelligence. With boldness, but not brashness. With a timely word, not timidity. With courage, but also with craft. Lennox sets himself in his book to,
‘…make clear why I think that Christianity has something to say about the issue of natural disasters like coronavirus – something that is not to be found elsewhere. Perhaps you will agree with me, perhaps not. But I hope you will end this book understanding why Christians are able to speak confidently about hope and to feel a sense of peace, even in a world of uncertainty in which death has suddenly loomed closer.’
May our witness be characterised by that same blend of wisdom and winsomeness.
Where is God in a Coronavirus World? by John C. Lennox is published by the Good Book Company.
This blog is part of a wider series under the campaign, These Three Remain to help members and congregations during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Visit the These Three Remain hub here.