Back in 2008, my fellow single teammates and I were invited to help with some English clubs that Ron*, an older missionary veteran, had set up at various universities. One of these clubs was the setting for that one time when a few of us donned overalls and fake hillbilly beards and tried to lead an auditorium of very perplexed Central Asian students in a rousing rendition of Soggy Bottom Boys’ Man of Constant Sorrow.
I also started traveling with Ron once a month to a university in a city three hours south of us. This city was down in the desert flatlands, and much hotter than Poet City, the kind of place where after a five-minute walk in the bazaar your shirt is already soaked through with sweat.
I remember making this drive one time with Ron when he pointed out the old ruins of Zoroastrian fire towers up on a nearby peak.
“A.W.,” he said in his Texan accent, “Next time we do this drive, we should stop and climb up to those towers, lay hands on them, and pray down Chemosh! Pretty sure he’s the territorial spirit still in charge of this land.”
I turned to see if Ron was joking. Nope. He was dead serious. I did my best to answer diplomatically. Ron was, after all, an older veteran missionary who had served in multiple countries. He regularly published articles in well-known missions periodicals and had been in leadership positions probably longer than I had been alive. But I was pretty sure then, and still am now, that Ron and I laying hands on Zoroastrian ruins and attempting to rebuke an ancient Babylonian god would have little effect on the power that Islam currently exerted over our local friends. Not that the same cadre of demons can’t be behind these three very different evil religious systems. And not that prayer is ineffective. But more because the Bible seems to have us taking on demonic rulers, powers, and principalities asymmetrically, primarily as we engage other humans with gospel proclamation, pray for them, and plant healthy churches. As well as, of course, the occasional exorcism.
Even then, as a newly continuationist twenty-year-old, something felt very off about the way that certain missions circles turn casting down territorial spirits and doing spiritual mapping into their own kinds of pseudo-science, theories that they discuss and act on so confidently with so little actual biblical grounding.
But I digress. This is not a post about territorial spirits and spiritual mapping. This is a post about evangelism gone wrong.
Ron was leaving the country. Like other missionaries at the time, he looked at the young network of indigenous house churches that had been planted across our region and assumed that it was high time for the Westerners to “trust the Spirit” and “get out of the way.” This kind of assumption would, of course, lead to the tragic implosion of most of these house churches just a couple of years later. Their leaders weren’t even close to being ready for their mentors to leave them on their own. And most of the young local believers, like my friend Adam*, would be scattered to the wind.
But in the summer of 2008, things were looking so promising that our people group was being held up by some organizations as a good example of how missionaries among Muslim people groups could get it right. And pioneering types like Ron were itching to move on and to hand off the projects they had started. That was the intention for this trip. Ron was going to say his goodbyes in this desert city and try to set things up so that my team (which was three college dudes at that point) could take over the English club.
After the meetings were finished, a group of us went out to dinner together to celebrate over some good local food. Ron, his wife, and a single gal who was on their team were all flying out that week. So, this was their final meal with Muhammad*, a young local man who had been working as their project facilitator/translator for some time.
These young local fixer-types are absolutely crucial for so many of the NGOs operating in our corner of Central Asia. They help us expats navigate government processes, serve as our culture advisors, interpret for us when needed, and do all sorts of practical intern work, whether it’s vehicles or offices or even just knowing where to find things in the endless alleys of the bazaar. If they are working for a Christian NGO, then they usually end up hearing the gospel a lot. Some of them come to faith. Others of them stay stuck in a weird long-term posture of being pro-Western, Christianity-friendly, and very much still committed to Islam.
Apparently, the latter was Muhammad’s posture. But seeing that this was his last chance, Ron was determined to press him hard on the gospel. So, at some point toward the end of the meal, Ron suddenly called Muhammad out, asking him if he was ready to leave Islam and believe in Jesus. The abruptness of this pivot in the middle of the meal we’d been having caught us all a bit off-guard, Muhammad included. But Muhammad was a respectful and tactful guy from a culture not as uncomfortable as ours is with direct questions about religion. So, he recovered quickly, finding an honorable way to tell his boss, a much older man, that no, he was not going to do what he was suggesting.
Ron, however, didn’t take the way out of the conversation that Muhammad had just extended to him. Instead, he pressed harder. Muhammad, sensing that he now needed to defend his beliefs which were being publicly challenged, starting pushing back more himself, bringing up many of the typical objections Muslims have against Christianity: Jesus isn’t the Son of God, Jesus didn’t die on the cross, the Bible’s been changed, the Trinity is illogical, and of course man can get to paradise by doing enough good deeds.
This is where I came in. For some months, I had been engaged in almost daily evangelistic and apologetic conversations with my Central Asian friends. And I had been loving it. I had developed a strong arsenal of biblical, logical, and cultural responses to all of the typical Islamic objections to the gospel. One by one, I began to dismantle everything Muhammad was saying.
This went on for some time. Ron would press. Muhammad would defend. I would dismantle. I was downright energized at how quickly my mind was working and how effectively the arguments seemed to be rolling off my tongue. I knew the case I was building was a powerful one. I didn’t know Muhammad super well, but surely, he would sense the truth in what we were saying and come around. I could clearly see that Muhammad’s claims were being destroyed, one by one, and I was encouraged by this. That is, until I looked up and noticed Rachel*, the single gal on Ron’s team, sitting off to the side of the table and looking at Muhammad with a look of pain on her face.
What does that mean? I wondered to myself.
I followed her gaze to Muhammad’s face, and that’s when I also noticed. Muhammad’s expression had become defensive, his eyes dark and hurt. It was the face of someone who had been trapped by those he thought were his friends, someone whose trust had been betrayed in the middle of a meal meant to honor his departing coworkers. It was the demeanor of someone who had been shamed by those he had been loyal to, not the look of someone being won by the beauty of the gospel at all. No, I suddenly realized, it was the look of someone who had been driven further away from Jesus by evangelism – evangelism done in truth, but not in love.
Muhammad left that night very upset, not even wanting to say goodbye to Ron. Rachel left grieved. I left confused. But Ron left with a confident smile on his face, seemingly feeling like he had done his duty. Later on, he complimented me on how well I had done in the conversation.
“You were on fire tonight, A.W.”
But I didn’t feel very happy about how things had gone. Yes, my arguments had been great. But something had gone very wrong in the whole relational dynamic of the evening. I had participated in some sort of evangelism that was so right it was wrong. We had won the argument, but lost the relationship. We had pinned Muhammad to the wall. In doing so, we had inadvertently communicated to him that he was only valuable to us if he believed in Jesus in the end.
I don’t know what ever became of Muhammad. I’ve never run into him in the years that have passed since that summer evening back in ’08. But I’ve thought of him many times over the years, regretting how things went down. It’s easy for evangelistic conversations to get emotional and even heated. To some extent, this is only natural when humans are debating things that are so personal and weighty. However, I’ve become convinced that faithful evangelism is just as much about the how as it is about the what.
Sure, some people will get offended and upset even if the evangelist’s demeanor remains loving and relational. But it is the duty of the evangelist, as much as it depends on them, to communicate grace and gentleness right alongside the bright and sharp truths of their words. The wise evangelist keeps a constant eye on the body language of the hearer, watching out for evidence that the tenor of the conversation is pushing them too far. And if it comes down to winning the argument or losing the relationship, the wise evangelist puts the argument aside for now and protects the relationship.
Again, this is not always possible. Some people will blow up at you or cut you off, even if your demeanor clearly communicates that you value them regardless of whether they accept your message or not. But far too often, Christians are only focused on winning the argument in the short-term. And they forget that a long-term friendship that revisits the gospel again and again is far more powerful than a one-time gospel smackdown that makes that unbeliever never want to see you again.
Is what I’m saying biblical? Consider Paul’s advice on evangelism in Colossians 4:5-6, “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”
Or, his advice to Timothy about how to navigate arguments, “And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:24-26).
The Bible has a category for prioritizing the relationship over the argument. That doesn’t mean we don’t speak the truth. But it does mean we need to pay careful attention to how we speak the truth. It’s possible to say the most offensive things with a demeanor that communicates care. That needs to be our goal. We want our unbelieving friends to be shocked by the hard truths we believe about them, and at the same time, shocked by how much we clearly love and care for them. This bizarre contrast should, in some ways, disturb them.
“How can they believe I deserve an eternal hell when they are the same ones who show me more genuine love than anyone else does?”
When our unbelieving friends are wrestling with these kinds of questions, we know we’ve gotten the posture right.
These days, most of my evangelism is taking place in my living room. Every week, we partner with some local believing friends by opening up our home for a long evening of chai, snacks, and spiritual conversation. About half of the fifteen or so men who come are believers, and about half are not. Many of these young unbelievers are post-Islamic angsty philosopher types, but a few mainstream Muslim guys come too. The conversations range all over the place, but every week a good number of us believers get to go deep into gospel truths.
As I’ve reflected on what exactly God is doing in these largely unstructured gatherings that leave our living room trashed every week and my wife and me with a ministry hangover the next morning, I think much of it might have to do with modeling relational evangelism for the local believers. Some of them, like a certain twenty-year-old I remember well, tend to get caught up in the emotion and the intensity of the discussions. One young believer, a passionate cage-stage Calvinist who is reading the Institutes via Google Translate, will often physically shake and have to excuse himself early because he’s gotten so worked up in an argument with an unbeliever about the gospel (or with a believer about TULIP).
However, the hope is that week in and week out, these brothers will continue to share the gospel even as they also show hospitality and steady friendship to the many unbelieving guys who are also coming. Yes, I delight to see these believers’ answers and arguments becoming more sound, biblical, and compelling. But just as much, I delight to see them light up with genuine joy when Mahmoud*, the stubborn taxi driver philosopher, arrives at the door after not coming around for a few weeks.
As with so many aspects of evangelism, it’s resting in the Spirit’s sovereignty that means that bold evangelism and genuine relational love need not be at odds with one another. Faithful evangelists can put the argument aside in order to care for the heart of the one they’ve been arguing with. How? Because they know that it’s not ultimately up to them to win. If Ron and I had leaned better on this truth all those years ago, we may still have shared the gospel with Muhammad that night. But once we sensed that he wasn’t yet open to Jesus, we could have put the conversation on pause, trusting that the Spirit would later open the door. It wasn’t necessary for us to force it. It wasn’t necessary for us to pin him against the wall and to publicly defeat him as we did.
Looking back, I’m sorry for the way things went down that night, even though I trust that God can sovereignly use even that aggressive conversation to draw Muhammad to himself. Who knows? He may already be a believer, wherever he is out there.
But I am also determined that, as much as it depends on me, I want to faithfully share the gospel, being willing to sometimes lose the argument. Why? To win the relationship. And that, perhaps forever.
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*Names changed for security
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Entrusted to the Dirt 