Evangelicals and Missionary Friendships

While reading articles about evangelization for yesterday’s post, I came upon this article on the Christianity Today website, which offers “Seven Surprising Ways to Prepare Yourself to Share the Gospel.” Most of the items on the list were fairly innocuous—“walk closely and intimately with Jesus”—until I came to this one:

6 – Build close and loving friendships with people outside the family of God. This might sound obvious, but you would be staggered to know that many Christians (including and especially pastors) have very few intimate and deep friendships with people who are far from Jesus. It is time for us to spend less time in the church and in Christian circles and more time making new friends with people who need to discover the amazing grace of God.

How would you feel if you met a new friend, and then spent several months or years building that friendship, only to learn that the entire reason that person befriended you was to try to get you to join their religion? I don’t know about you, but I would feel manipulated and betrayed.

Beyond this, this missionary friendship model assumes that everything goes one way. The evangelical has something to teach the person they seek to befriend. The evangelical does not, in turn, see themselves as having anything to learn from the person they seek to befriend. This isn’t how friendship is supposed to work.

I was homeschooled through high school. I was fairly insulated in the evangelical community. I decided to go to a secular college because I wanted to get out of my evangelical bubble so that I could convert people. Mind you, I didn’t think I had anything to learn from people outside of my bubble. I thought I had something to teach them.

Fortunately, I gave up this stance pretty quickly; I realized that real, actual people were a far cry from the caricatures I’d been taught about the unsaved, and decided that maybe I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. But that doesn’t change my initial intent in attending a secular college. I wanted to be in contact with non-evangelicals so that I could convert them. I didn’t think I had anything to learn from them in turn.

Maybe that’s the fundamental problem with missionary work, whether done in the traditional way or through what I call “missionary” friendships—there’s no interest in cultural exchange. It’s not “tell me about your religion and I’ll tell you about mine,” with an honest interest in learning and understanding. The missionary believes that they know more and know better, and that it is their job to get the other person to change their beliefs.

Remember, the article advises evangelicals interested in sharing the gospel to make friends with people “who need to discover the amazing grace of God.” The befriended person needs to learn something; the evangelical does not. The evangelical already has it all figured out; their beliefs are set.

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that the Christianity Today article follows its item about targeted friendships—or, rather, befriending targets—with this item:

7 – Get comfortable saying, “I don’t know!” Some people feel the best way to share our faith is being sure we have an answer for everything. Others are convinced they need to have answers that can defeat their non-believing friend and crush them with superior reason. I am a huge fan of reason and do believe we need to be ready to articulate our faith. I am also a great believer in apologetics, and we are wise to learn how to communicate intelligent answers to the questions people are asking.

But, it is also fine to say, “I don’t know” when confronted with a really good question. You might follow up by saying, “Maybe we can study that topic together.” Humility goes a long way. I have been a follower of Jesus for four decades and a pastor for more than three of those decades. There are still lots of things I don’t know, can’t wrap with a bow in a sixty-second response, and am still figuring out myself. When I admit this to people who are asking questions about the Christian faith, it is very disarming. It leads to a conversation rather than a debate or verbal battle.

Note that the author urges readers engaged in evangelism to respond to hard questions with “I don’t know” because doing so “is very disarming.” The author argues that this “leads to a conversation rather than a debate or verbal battle” without acknowledging that he used a military metaphor when he called this tactic “disarming.” He is still approaching the evangelization process not as a mere conversation but as a battle that must be won.

The other thing the author does not acknowledge is that if someone doing evangelization work actually responds with “I don’t know” and in good faith works to study and better understand a troubling subject or area of theology, they might end up walking away from the faith altogether. That’s what happened to me, in fact. And when that happened, the evangelicals in my life turned on me as I became the problem.

Given all this, I don’t think the advice in the item above is intended to lead to actual good faith investigation. There’s a difference between saying “I don’t understand every detail of my religion’s theology as well as I could if I studied it more” and saying “I’m willing to reconsider my religion if its theology doesn’t stand up to hard questions.”

Underlying missionary efforts is the idea that Christianity has all the answers. Even if an evangelical never finds a perfectly satisfying answer to their “I don’t know,” they’re still supposed to trust God, and assume that he knows best. This can make many evangelicals rather bad at listening or actually considering other perspectives, which in turn is going to play a role in how they approach missionary friendships.

I’m not completely satisfied with the term “missionary friendship.” What is described doesn’t really feel like a friendship. There is no give and take. If you aren’t befriending a person because you have common interests or because you genuinely like them—if you’re only befriending them because you want to get them to join your religion—that feels predatory. That’s not friendship. It’s something else entirely.

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