Meet the Goodpeople: Wesley's 7 Ways to Share Faith

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meet the goodpeople:

wesley’s seven ways to share faith

Copyright © 2015 by Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Permissions, Abingdon Press, 2222 Rosa L. Parks Blvd., PO Box 280988, Nashville, TN 37228-0988, or permissions

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ross, Roger, 1959- author.

Meet the goodpeople : Wesley’s Seven ways to share faith / Roger Ross.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-63088-572-4 (binding: soft back : alk. paper) 1. Non church-affiliated people. 2. Evangelistic work. 3. Witness bearing (Christianity) 4. Wesley, John, 1703-1791. I. Title.

BV4921.3.R67 2015

269'.2—dc23

2015030749

All scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted (CEB) are from the Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.CommonEnglish

Bible.com.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

Scripture quotations marked (GNT) are from the Good News Translation in Today’s English Version-Second Edition © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by Permission.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction They Are Everywhere

Chapter One: Stay Close to the Power

Chapter Two: On the Go

Chapter Three: Plain Talk

Chapter Four: Tune In to Their Hearts

Chapter Five: Do Life Together

Chapter Six: Get Everyone in the Game

Chapter Seven: Go Global

Conclusion: Why Not Now?

Dedication

To my dad, Hugh Ross

Storyteller extraordinaire and luckiest golfer ever

Your love for people is in these pages

Acknowledgments

Adecade passed while this book sat on a shelf in my heart, deferred. It would still be there if not for a small group of people who began asking God to bring it to life more than two years ago. Thank you Tom Albin, Patty Altstetter, Mike Potts, Teresa Pratt, Barb Rudsell-Cray, and Tom Tumblin for praying with faith when there were only blank pages. Thanks, too, to our Pastors’ Prayer Partners at Springfield First who have held this project in prayer for over a year.

Along the way, when self-doubt or urgent demands threatened to tank the project, God sent angels. For no apparent reason, author

and editor Eddie Jones took a personal interest and made it all seem possible. Amazingly, the gracious people at Abingdon Press saw something of value and took a risk on me. Thank you Connie Stella, Kelsey Spinnato, Peggy Shearon, and Stephen Graham-Ching for your excellent guidance and stellar work.

Throughout the writing process, Patty Altstetter served as God’s CEO (Chief Encouragement Officer). Thank you, Patty, for believing when things bogged down and somehow finding something posi-

tive in all 106 drafts. Thanks, too, to Cindy Arnold for her editing and formatting excellence.

God also used choruses of angels. The life-shaping impact of every faith community in my life is in this book. Thank you for showing Christ to me. I’m deeply grateful for the fantastic staff team and great people of Springfield First United Methodist Church who encouraged this work. I love putting Wesley’s ways into practice

with you.

Finally, special thanks to my wife, Leanne, and to my children, Zach and Jane. Day in and day out, your support, sacrifices, and love made this dream come true. Of all the angels in my life, you are the best. Now, let’s get back to that board game from last year.

Introduction

Meet Joe and Sally Goodpeople. They pay their bills on time, take care of their neighbor’s yard, and volunteer at the Boys and Girls Club. They have never committed a crime, don’t kick their dog, and don’t know God. On the outside their lives are filled with OK-ness. Their marriage is OK. Their work is OK. But inside, they don’t feel OK. When pushed, they admit something is missing. There is a void at the center of their lives that won’t go away, no matter how they try to fill it. They are bright, funny, articulate people who have a deep-down longing to connect with something bigger than them, but they are confused about how to do it or whether it is even possible. In their minds, church is hopelessly bor ing and outdated, and it is difficult to know who to trust among the dizzying array of spiritual guides and religious options in today’s market. Yet every time they hear a young child pray, they think, I wish I could talk to God like that. Welcome to post-Christian America.

Our friends, Joe and Sally, are not alone in this new spiritual frontier. Distinguished professor of evangelism George Hunter estimates at least 180 million people in the United States are just like them, functionally non-Christian. Unlike the spiritual landscape in previous generations, the United States of America is now the largest mission field in the Western hemisphere and the third largest in the world.¹

At the same time, curiosity about spiritual things is at peak levels in US culture. TV shows and movies about the paranormal and the coming zombie apocalypse proliferate like rabbits in the spring. Google spirituality, and over a quarter of a billion sites come up. The demand for values-based education, business ethics courses, and instruction on how to achieve peace of mind has never been greater. There is seemingly endless fascination with how the unseen world breaks into our everyday one.

But somehow this spiritual awakening has not translated into church involvement. Eighty-one percent of nonchurched adults ages twenty to twenty-nine believe that God, or a supreme being, exists, and 74 percent describe themselves as spiritual. When asked about their practice of faith, though, the most common response is, I am spiritual, but not religious.² Nonchurched persons age thirty and over expressed a similar aversion to religious behaviors.

Here’s the dilemma. How do smart, spiritually curious people who feel a void they can’t fill find personal faith in Jesus Christ and a loving community to help them live a God-directed life? It’s a question that has plagued me since deciding to follow Jesus my freshman year of college. Over the years, I’ve tried a variety of ways to encourage others to open a door to God: personal faith sharing, starting small-group Bible studies, inviting people to worship experiences—I’ve even drafted friends to serve the poor across the street and across the ocean. Graciously, God has used each approach to help people connect with life-changing faith. It just seemed so random. There had to be a better way, a process of some kind that would consistently produce freshly redeemed lives. Turns out, there is.

It first existed in the early church. The second chapter of Acts paints a beautiful picture of God’s design for the church. In this Holy Spirit–formed community, they experienced a sense of awe, a unity, and a spirit of generosity no one had ever known. As they prayed and worshipped together in the temple courts and joyfully ate in each other’s homes, God gave them favor with everyone around them. As a result, the number of love-marked lives quickly multiplied, and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.³

Did you notice the d-word in that scripture? God did not add to their number only on Sundays. It was not during special evangelistic services that people were being saved. Deep spiritual change was happening daily. Could this be God’s natural design for church life? Could new people come to faith just as easily on a Tuesday as a Sunday? If so, why does that seem so unnatural now? Perhaps something is missing—something that can be found and reinstalled in the operating system of our everyday church experience. That new community in Acts 2 drew people from all walks of life into a life-changing movement of God.

Experience tells me nonchurched Goodpeople like Joe and Sally would be drawn to a movement like that too. In 1994, my wife and I moved to Champaign, Illinois, to start a new church from scratch. We had no people, no buildings, and no land (and my wife says, no brains), but there were three factors in our favor: (1) the prayers of hundreds of people, (2) financial support from our denomination, and (3) a white-hot vision to plant a church for people who don’t go to church. Over the next thirteen years, we saw several hundred nonchurched, spiritually curious people turn their lives over to Jesus Christ and join Jesus’s mission to reach the lost, the least, and the lonely of this world. In 2004, we planted a daughter church to further extend Christ’s reach into the community while the mother church continued to grow to nearly eight hundred children, youth, and adults in weekly attendance. Life change toward Christ was a near-daily experience. There was a spiritual momentum that drew people to faith and sent them back to the community to serve and bless others. We could sense we were part of something larger than ourselves.

Early in this process, I stumbled onto some practices that the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, used to fuel the spiritual revival in eighteenth-century England. They arose out of the challenges Wesley faced in making Christ real to both the church and the culture of his day. As a priest in the Church of England, Wesley was distraught by the powerlessness of the church to reach the vast majority of the British people. The clergy were aloof, the services were lifeless, and the poor and working class people lived their lives as if the church didn’t exist. On most Sundays, only a few of society’s upper crust would dot the cavernous cathedrals built to house hundreds. For all practical purposes, the church was dead.

In this dry tinder, God sparked a