How to Share the Gospel Without Losing Secular Seekers

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The reason why we struggle to share the gospel meaningfully with secular people is because the way that we frame the gospel and the questions that it answers are simply questions that secular people are not asking. Hey everyone, it's Pastor Marcus here, and I want to welcome you to episode three of Road Trip Theology. This is the podcast where I talk about the Bible study guide, the road, a journey through the narrative of scripture, and where I talk about theology and mission in a post-church secular world, and also where I answer your questions. And there's a question that I've received from you guys that seems to pop up more often than any other question. And that question is how do I share the gospel with my kids who don't believe in God? However, here's the thing: that question actually has two dimensions to it. Some of you, when you ask me that question, you're asking me about kids who are secular. Maybe they didn't grow up in church and don't have really any kind of religious imagination or religious identity that they're familiar with. So they're very secular. And then the other half of you, your kids grew up in church and they've left. And so it's one question, but it's really two questions. And in this episode, I want to answer the secular angle. And in the next episode, which is going to be next week's episode, I want to talk about the kids who've left church. So let's start with the secular kids today, and then we'll move on to the kids who've left church. But of course, not everyone who is sending these questions in is a parent. Some of you just have secular friends and you're curious about sharing the gospel with them in a way that's meaningful. So let's talk about that today. And by the way, before I get started, let me make something really clear. In this episode, I'm not going to talk about church culture and how to make a church that's relevant and meaningful for secular seekers. That's a completely separate question. It's not a question I'm going to wrestle with in road trip theology. Road trip theology is less about church culture and church structure and more just about the message itself and our friends. If you are interested in the question about church culture and church structure, you need to go to my other website, thestorychurchproject.com. That is where I do most of the content on church culture and church structure. But here on Road Trip Theology, we're just going to talk about the message, the relationships that we have with secular people in our lives, or with, or with, you know, we call them the unchurch, but there's also the dechurched, which is, you know, the young people who've left. But with all that out of the way, let's go ahead and talk about mission to secular culture. There are three common mistakes, three common fallacies that I have seen in all my years as a pastor. And these three things are the reason why secular people in our lives, in our worlds, often don't connect with the gospel, even though we share it and even though we want them, you know, we pray for them and we want them to know Jesus. And here are the three, here are the three fallacies. The first one is the assumed questions fallacy. And this is assuming, assuming that secular people's interest in God means they share the same spiritual questions we have. For example, I'm gonna give you guys a really, really clear example. And you're gonna be shocked by this at first if you haven't heard this before, but bear with me here. Example number one, preaching the assurance of salvation. Now, if you've grown up Adventist like me, the assurance of salvation is probably your favorite topic. And the reason for that is a lot of us grew up in fundamentalist, ultra-conservative, unhealthy, legalistic versions of Adventism. And so when we encountered assurance of salvation, that became our whole thing. I know that's certainly true for me. Became our whole thing because, you know, hey, it's a we're saved by Jesus, man. It's not works, it's not the works of the law, it's not the works of the flesh. It's like it's Jesus and it's the promise of Jesus and the, you know, the promise of the gospel and the good news and like wow, you know, that just it like becomes our whole thing. But what if I told you in all my years of connecting with secular people and navigating this the gospel with secular friends, the assurance of salvation never really made it as a topic that they found super interesting. And I'll tell you why. Because when you're coming from a secular background, an irreligious background, a background that doesn't have legalism and perfectionism and last generation theology and all that stuff in it, the assurance of salvation is not a difficult concept to grasp. It's actually a very simple concept to grasp. So I'll give you guys a quick story. I was leading a Bible study some years ago at a cafe, and there was a young secular guy there and two Adventists from Brazil. And the two Adventists from Brazil had grown up in very, very legalistic homes and um Adventist homes. And so we're talking about the, you know, we're talking about salvation, and all of their questions are around assurance. And it didn't matter how many verses I quoted or how much I explained assurance, they were so anxious about this that they just kept asking questions and they were trying to understand, but like, how do I know and how can I be sure? And, you know, they had a lot of anxiety around this because of their legalistic upbringing. And the whole time, a friend of mine was there who was from a secular background. And about a half hour into this conversation, I look over at this guy and he was bored out of his mind. And I asked him, hey, what do you think about all this? You know, I want to get, I want to get your thoughts. And I felt kind of bad, you know, because I was like, man, I forgot, I forgot he was here. You know, this is really this is for him, you know. But but the Adventists were like taking up all my space, all my energy. So I asked him, What do you think about this? And his reply was, I don't understand what the big deal is. It says that if you believe in Jesus that, you know, that you're saved, I don't know why we're still going on about it. And that's when it hit me like this isn't an anxiety for him, this isn't a question for him. He's not wondering, you know, hey, how can I be sure I'm going to heaven? Because that's not how secular people think. Those are not their anxieties, those are, those are not the questions that they have, right? And so for him, what he wanted to know was whether or not God is safe. Is God safe? Or is God is God an abuser? Is God a is God someone who abuses his power? Is God someone who's controlling? Is God someone who's coercive? Is God someone who, like the emperors and the and the governments that we're familiar with, flexes his muscles to get his way? Or is he actually safe and authentic? Is that those those were his questions? He didn't care whether or not, you know, um, assurance of salvation. And and look, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that the assurance of salvation is not a topic that we should bring. We should always bring that up. That's at the heart of the gospel. What I'm saying is it's not a huge deal for any of the secular people that I've ever navigated scripture with. It seems to be something that they grasp pretty easily and they're happy to move on from. It's those of us who have a religious legalistic background who make this the whole thing for obvious reasons, because for us it's a really important question. So that's the number one fallacy is assuming that a secular person's interest in God means that they share the same spiritual questions that we do and they do not. All right. The second fallacy is what I call the assumed problem fallacy. And that is assuming that you know what problem the gospel is solving for them before actually listening to them. So let me give you guys an example of this. Oftentimes when Adventists preach the gospel, and it's not just Adventist, I think it's evangelicals, Western evangelicals as a whole, oftentimes when we preach the gospel, we are we are dealing with a specific problem, right? We are answering guilt and we're offering forgiveness, right? Guilt and forgiveness questions. And so we approach secular people with this guilt and forgiveness framework. But here's, again, here's the thing. In all my time, in all my friends and all the secular people that I've ever journeyed with, and look, I'm not pretending I'm a guru here, and I'm not pretending I know every secular person, I can't be the spokesperson for every secular person in the world. But in my experience, that's all I can really talk about, right? In my experience, guilt and forgiveness frameworks don't really scratch the itch for secular people because a guilt and forgiveness framework, first, you have to have a framework of sin and you have to have a framework of, you know, a really sort of narrow moral code, and you feel like you've failed in that moral code and you're wondering, oh, I'm guilty. Am I going to be punished? Am I going to go to heaven? Again, these are all religious frames. And uh, in my experience, secular people just don't share these frames. And so what they're really, the problems that they're really wet wrestling with are problems around meaning, belonging, power, harm, right? Those are the questions and the problems that they are really trying to understand and the problems they want to resolve. How does the gospel resolve the problem of the meaning crisis that the metamodern world is currently inhabiting? How does the proposal resolve the problem of belonging? We live in the loneliest generation in human history, is what the researchers say anyway, right? Uh, how do we solve the problem of the abuse of power? This was postmodernism's whole thing, how power moves upwards and creates systems of control and harm to essentially perpetuate itself. And so these are the questions and the problems that most of my secular friends were actually dealing with. They weren't worried about whether they had sinned too much and maybe they're not going to heaven. These, again, that's a religious problem. It is not a secular problem. And so assuming that they share the same problems means we start explaining the gospel to them using frames that make sense to us, but that don't make sense to them. Okay, I'm gonna move on to the last one now. And I call this the anxiety inheritance fallacy. And by the way, all of these are connected, right? Questions, problems, anxieties, they're all interconnected to varying degrees. So they're not, it's not like they're completely separate. They overlap, right? But here's the anxiety inheritance fallacy. So assuming that your secular friends carry the same spiritual anxieties that previous generations carried. So, for example, if you look at previous generations in the West, uh, particularly generations that were more religious, we call this pre-modern generations, right? We talk about pre-modern generations that were more religious, modern generations that were more like scientific. And then from there, we get the postmodern and meta-modern generations, which we'll talk about again in the future. Uh, but but for now, you don't need to understand all that. The point that I'm trying to make here is that the religious generations, they had specific religious anxieties. And those anxieties were things like the fear of hell or the fear of judgment, or as we've already talked about in the questions and problems section, right? The anxiety around assurance or the anxiety around whether or not I'm actually going to go to heaven or not. These are religious anxieties, religious questions, religious problems. They are not the sorts of things that people who have never read a Bible or never been to church or not been raised in that context at all, uh, they are not the kind of anxieties that they have. And by the way, these anxieties, these questions, these problems are not just Christian problems. They're religious problems, right? Islam wrestles with these questions, Judaism wrestles with these questions, uh, Buddhism and Hinduism to varying degrees wrestle with these questions. Secular seekers do not, right? Secular seekers are wrestling with different questions. And if we assume that they have the same anxieties that we have, that our fathers had, that our grandfathers had, and we keep explaining the gospel to them as an answer to anxieties that previous generations had, we're literally talking over their heads because they don't share those anxieties. Never met a secular person who was terrified that they might end up in hell, or who was worried that in the judgment, you know, God was gonna say, hey, you know, you didn't do good enough. Those are religious anxieties. The anxieties that a lot of my secular friends are wrestling with are anxieties, again, around meaning, around injustice, around economics. These are the kinds of things that they're actually thinking and worried about and stay up at night, you know, sort of wrestling with. And if we are going to share the gospel in a way that's meaningful, we have to figure out how do I share the gospel in a way that speaks to their questions, to their problems, and to their anxieties. I call these the QPAs, right? Questions, problems, and anxieties. How can I share the gospel in a way that's actually going to address their questions, their problems, and their anxieties, not mine. So let me give you guys another example just to just to make sure this is nice and clear. Think of Martin Luther, right? We as believers often think of Martin Luther as, you know, the champion of the Reformation. And in Martin Luther's day, uh, the revolution that he launched was extremely radical and extremely relevant. But we need to understand why, right? In Luther's day, salvation wasn't just something that you hoped for in a spiritual sense. In Luther's day, salvation was a system that you moved through. And the church was the gate of that system. So if you wanted to know if you're right with God, you went through the church. If you wanted forgiveness for your sins, you went through the church. If you wanted assurance that your sins were washed away, you went through the church. If you wanted to die well with peace instead of terror, you went through the church. If you wanted to make sure that your loved one isn't burning in hell forever, you went through the church. The church was the answer to everything. It was at the center of everything in Luther's time. So when Luther challenged the church's authority, he was challenging the system that controlled everyone's access to God at that time and in that part of the world. So when he turned around and started preaching justification by faith, it wasn't irrelevant. It was an absolute earthquake. Because in Luther's day, the QPA, again, questions, problems, anxieties, the QPA of Luther's day was peace with God. That's what people were wrestling with. That's what people were anxious about. People's questions revolve around that, the problems they wanted to resolve, spiritual problems, anyways, revolved around that. And of course, their anxieties were deeply embedded in that. And so Luther comes along and says, We, you know, it's not the church, it's not the system, it's not the Pope, it's not the priests, it's faith. And this is an absolute radical, radical proposition that essentially flipped the Western world upside down. But I want to fast forward to today. In our day, the church isn't the gatekeeper of salvation in the public imagination. In fact, the church isn't at the center of anything anymore. I mean, in Luther's day, you know, you you were a farmer and you had to, you know, give crops to the church and you wanted to get married and you went through the church and you wanted to sell property and you went everything went through the church, right? Today, the church is no longer at the center of the public imagination. That's what a secular world means. That's what it means to be secular, right? And so because the church isn't at the center of the public imagination anymore, the anxieties and the questions that come with its system of thought, its religion, its dogma, et cetera, all those things fade away. So to questions like, Am I right with God? Well, most people today, secular people, aren't really asking that question. Do you want forgiveness? For many, those categories don't even feel real. They engage in things like therapy, self-care, or simply being a good person, and this tends to be enough. What about assurance about eternity? A lot of people don't think about eternity at all. The horizon is this life, meaning, mental health, relationships, social justice, purpose. Uh, do you want a pastor at your deathbed to tell you what happens next? Well, many will never even have that moment because the church isn't where they go to for existential security. So Luther's gospel frame that we all as religious people, particularly Protestants, that we all really, really love, it doesn't land the same way because the QPA it addressed, how do I get saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? What happens to me after death, is no longer the QPA in opposed to meta-modern society. And so then the question becomes, how do we engage secular people with the gospel then, right? And my answer to this, and it's the answer that I want to look at today, and obviously we'll have many more episodes where we explore this in many more angles, but I want to just begin with this. We have to show them how the gospel answers their questions, speaks to their problems, and addresses their anxieties, not ours. But how exactly do you do this? Well, here's where I want to end this episode. And I'm not going to fully answer the question because I want you guys to participate in this. All right. I don't just want to sit here and like spoon feed answers. I want you to participate in this. How do you show them how the gospel answers their QPAs, their questions, problems, and anxieties? Step number one, listen. That's it, man. That's it. And you know what? You might think, oh, Marcus, that's a really simple answer. It is a really simple answer. And we're absolutely terrible at it because Adventists, all we want to do is talk. All we want to do is tell everyone what we think we know and what we think they need to know. And we don't pause long enough to listen, to just listen. Listen to those secular people in your life. Listen to their anxieties, listen to their don't preach, don't get defensive, don't, don't, you know, jump in there with all of your solutions. Just listen, man. Just listen. In fact, you know, I'm gonna jump ahead to next week's episode about young people who have grown up in church and left church as well. This is this is one of the big steps in that process as well. It's like listen, listen. If we could just stop talking and stop preaching and stop teaching long enough to just listen, the vast majority of our missional problems would go away. This is like 80% of the work right here. Yes, there's other things that are important as well. I'm not saying it's the only variable, but this is a huge variable. In my opinion, it's the biggest variable. Learn to listen, not listen to respond, listen to understand, listen to appreciate, listen to connect with and inhabit the world of the person that you're talking to. And this is huge, right? There's a big difference between listening to someone who's a postmodern so that you can find reasons to prove to them postmodernism is false versus listening to a person who's postmodern so that you can understand why they're postmodern, so that you can understand the reasons, the deep human, gnawing reasons underneath it all, and develop an appreciation for why they're there and why they see things the way they see it. This is the first step. Because if you're going to share the gospel with secular seekers in a way that answers their questions, you first have to know what their questions are. You can't assume what their questions are. You gotta know what their questions are. And secular people are different. There's not like one answer for all secular people. They differ from Australia to America to the UK to Canada. They differ from city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood. Like there's no like one size fits all secular blueprint, right? And so you gotta listen. You can't show them how the gospel answers their questions if you don't know what their questions are. You can't show them how the gospel speaks to their problems if you don't understand their problems. You can't show them how the gospel addresses their anxieties if you don't appreciate their anxieties. So this is step one, you guys. And I'm gonna talk about many more things. This is only the beginning of this podcast journey, but let's start here. Let's start here. If you can master this, if you can master the art of listening, if you can master the art of listening, everything else is actually a walk in the park. This is the part that we really, really, really struggle with. And I want to end with this because I think this helps make it practical. Years ago, when I was working as a pastor in the Western Australian Conference, there was a lady who was part of our team who came to one of my churches and did some training for the older, you know, to help older and younger generations communicate better with one another. And uh, and and she taught us something that I never forgot. And it was so simple and so practical that I've kept it with me, you know, all these years. And she said, whenever you're in a conversation with someone and you feel that urge to correct them or to get into an argument or to prove them wrong, defeat that urge by simply asking the person that you're connecting with, the person that you're talking to, just ask them this question. Just say this, not even a question, it's a statement. And here it is. Tell me more. That's it. That's it. Just tell me more, right? If you're in a conversation with a secular friend and they're saying things you don't agree with, tell me more. I want to understand that, but just tell me more, right? If you're in a conversation with it with a secular friend and you feel the urge to like, I gotta prove them wrong, you know, tell me more. That is the go-to class. That's how we make this practical, right? Tell me more. And the more you say that and the more you practice saying that, and the better you get at saying that, and the more you overcome that urge to just tell everyone why they're wrong and they have to see it your way, the more you'll come to understand the people around you. And when you understand them and when you have a really deep, rich, holistic appreciation of their QPAs, that's when you can then ask the question how does the gospel now speak to that? And we'll talk about what that looks like in the future. But for now, uh, let's leave it there, you guys. I think that's enough for now. All right, next episode, I want to talk about young people who've left the church. How do we re-engage with them? How do we connect with them in meaningful and beautiful ways? That's the next episode, which drops next week. And if you have a question that you'd like me to answer in one of these episodes, please send me an email, pastormarcos at the storychurchproject.com. And uh I will include your question in one of the upcoming episodes. Other than that, guys, tell your friends about it, give them a copy of the road, tell them to jump on the podcast. Let's go on this journey together. I'll catch you next week.