“What do we do with the Christian spokesperson whose message seems at best tangential to the gospel, and whose megaphone is the national media? How should an everyday, street-level apologist handle the backlash the Christian community receives from the very public statements of those who seem to make headlines instead of making a clearly reasoned case for the faith? When it comes to high-profile proclamations like these, the gospel doesn’t even seem to be in play. It gets lost in a public theater of the absurd and buried under an avalanche of disconcerting rhetoric. Then we are left to deal with the aftermath in our own little corners of the world. Instances like these certainly don’t make our evangelism any easier. Unfortunately, there is always the temptation to separate ourselves from the ridiculous by engaging in our own form of ridicule. We want to assure everyone we know that what they just heard in the news “is not my Christianity,” so we move a little too quickly to throw the offending believer under the bus. If our goal is evangelism, we need to think beyond the immediate relief we feel at separating ourselves from the ridiculous and focus instead on the greater goal of reflecting the character and cause of Christ.”
This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with Journal author Bob Perry about his Volume 41, No. 3 Effective Evangelism article, “Mere Ambassadors.”
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Other articles and Postmodern Realities podcasts featuring this author
Episode 99 Taking Jesus to Work
Episode 049: “That ‘Nones’ May Not Perish”
Margaret Sanger: “No Gods, No Masters”
Breaking Bad’s Addicting Defense of Moral Realism
Justice and Asymmetric Warfare