Evangelising the New Age

Evangelising the New Age

Clare Spiller from the Sion Community tells what happened when she and a team of young evangelists ran a booth for Christian prayer at a Mind, Body and Spirit Fair last summer.

It was a very hot and sunny weekend when eight excited and apprehensive members of the Sion Community ventured into a new mission field. The Sion Community for Evangelism have always aimed to be prophetic and innovative in their approach to sharing the good news and this weekend's outreach sat very comfortably within that challenge: A Mind, Body, Spirit Fair for Healing in Leamington Spa.

The initiative for the weekend was born out of the community's current vision: one of the aims of which is to establish a ministry modelling ways of evangelising the unchurched. For a community whose main areas of mission so far have been Catholic parishes and schools, outreach to the unchurched holds many unknown possibilities and unexplored avenues which are inspiring, exciting and challenging.

"What would we find?"

The young group who made their way to Leamington Spa that weekend held many preconceptions of what they would find and how they would feel running a stall offering prayer for healing alongside such stallholders as Hawks Shadow: 'offering Medicine Card Readings' and Austin Charles: 'a gifted spiritualist medium'. There was an underlying anxiety amongst them that they would be faced with very obvious spiritual warfare and that the people they would meet would be lost in the occult and dark crafts.

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"By the time we left for the fair we'd spent a lot of time in prayer asking both for protection and words of prophecy for the people we'd meet there." Matt, a member of the community for three years commented, "Although I felt fairly secure in God's protection, I still feared the worst."

"I feel empty"

"We prayed with a few people," Martin recalled, "we saw one man hanging around nervously and approached him and offered prayer. He backed away at first, but then decided to take the plunge. He approached us and said something like 'I felt like I should come, like it was God asking me to come. But I felt myself beginning to get defensive so I decided to go for a little walk to let myself cool down. When I came back round I decided to come in. I don't know why I am here. I don't know what I want. My daughter died a few years ago and I haven't gotten over it. It still hurts so much. I feel so empty.'

We prayed with him and placed him and his family into God's loving hands. He seemed really blessed by the occasion. We were also blessed, our faith was built up by seeing God call to someone and seeing him respond and be blessed by our prayer. Praise the Lord."

"Talking to the other stall holders"

But the number of people who came to the fair was poor by everyone's standards due to a local Peace Festival that was held on the same weekend and included many similar stalls. Although it was disappointing that the number of people to pray with was limited it was a great blessing to the group to have more time to spend with the fair's other stallholders. "When we arrived," said Gemma, "we got a few funny looks from the stallholders - people didn't really know how to take us - but as we set up and started talking to them, I realised that they were all just normal people."

It wasn't long before the eight community members realised that this was where most of the mission was going to happen - in reaching out to the people who would be with them for the weekend more than those who would drop in for half an hour.

They were able to find out a lot about the backgrounds, experiences and spirituality of the individuals they were working alongside. "I was surprised by how much my God was at work in those people, and I have had to seriously readdress my concept of where God is and where God is not," Matt said. "Every religion is tainted with a minority who distort something good into something bad: suicide bombers in Islam or the Klu Klux Clan who are Christians. For pagans you could say it's bad witches and child sacrificers. But don't tar everyone in a tie-dye tee-shirt with that brush."

"The value of listening to others"

Nothing had prepared the group for this aspect of their outreach. Very quickly they realised the value of listening, not going into a conversation aiming to mention Jesus as soon or as many times as possible, but allowing them to share their own experience. Clare said "We're told how in our postmodern world experience is what is important and we need to listen to others' experiences as much as we desire to share our own, but it was at the fair that I saw the reality behind that theory and how valuable that realisation is."

"It was amazing how many of them had been Catholics or had had negative experiences of Christians and it seemed that we went some way to healing some of those experiences and providing a positive example of Christians," Gemma shared. "One of the words of knowledge we'd had said 'Anna, lapsed Catholic, problem with ankles.' One of the mediums at the fair was called Anna Lee so I decided to go and chat with her. It turned out to be spot on. She'd had a very negative experience of going to a Catholic Convent School but said she still talked to the Virgin Mary and believed that Mary looked over her all the time."

"Challenge of reaching the unchurched"

The whole experience was incredibly positive and each of the group said they would love to do it again, but better this time. The challenge to reach the unchurched is a very big one and this is just one step on the road. Nobody thinks that this is the ultimate answer, but it is a response to a growing need that taps into the fact that our nation is largely a spiritual nation, just maybe not in the ways we might like or expect.

"What I found there was people looking for God, even looking for Jesus," said Matt. "And to my surprise they were very close. I may find myself as close in a mosque or a synagogue as at a stall in a mind, body, spirit setting."

If you are interested in finding out more about the Sion Community, its vision to evangelise the unchurched, or how to get involved please visit www.sioncommunity.org.uk

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THE EVANGELISING POWER OF LOVE

Kristina Cooper reflects on an interesting conversation she had with a Tarot Card devotee

When I was first converted I was unstoppable. I was determined to tell people the wonderful things God had done in my life, whether they wanted to hear or not! I was so full of enthusiasm.. and self.. that I didn't pick up those tell tale signs - the trapped looks, the glazed expressions, as I happily launched into evangelistic mode. Through experience, however, I have learnt that the key to evangelisation is not what you say, but what the Holy Spirit is doing in the life of the person you are talking to. It is thus important to home into their concerns and questions, not just batter them with what you think they should believe, however good that might be. "Just love people," I felt the Lord telling me once, "Let my Holy Spirit work through you and stop trying to put them right." I must say I wasn't quite sure how this was supposed to work in practice. Surely this love thing could be a cop out for those not bold enough to speak out. But very soon the Lord gave me an opportunity to test this out.

Some days later I was with some friends going for a meal in the Kings Road. We were quite numerous and there were no free tables in the caf? we went into, so we asked a woman sitting on her own, if she would mind if we joined her. She willingly agreed. It was only as we were sitting down that I noticed that in front of her she had a pile of books on tarot card reading. In the past I would have probably considered her a spiritual enemy and either ignored her or looked for a way to warn her of the evils of tarot cards. But this time I decided to try this new tack suggested by the Lord and see what happened. Thus I engaged her in conversation, asking her if she was a professional tarot card reader.

It turned out she wasn't but she was very interested in this and in many other new age practices which she proceeded to tell me about. I was genuinely interested in what she had to say and that made her want to know more about me too and she asked what I did. I thought when I mentioned that I worked for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal she would be immediately alienated as some people are. But far from it. She wanted to know all about it. Thus I was able to give her a simple overview of CCR as well as a 3 minute personal testimony, explaining how it had changed my life. To my surprise she was fascinated. "It's so nice to meet someone on my wave length," she said. "I could see you had something. Perhaps we could meet again sometime and discuss things more." In fact we never did, but I had learnt my lesson. If she was ever to become a committed Christian, she would, at some point, have to give up her tarot cards, as they are incompatible with Christian beliefs, but at this stage on her spiritual journey, this was not the first thing to tell her.

This is not to say that there is no place for sometimes being quite bold in speaking out against things like this. To my horror a few years ago, one of my sisters started to show an interest in tarot cards. I told her very clearly about what I considered the spiritual and psychological dangers associated with them. Amazingly my warning was effective and she gave them up. I suspect part of this, however, was that at some deep level, she herself had concerns, which was why she brought up the subject in the first place. In general New Age devotees are those who are likely to be the most open to our message because they are spiritual seekers. In former times many of them would have automatically been part of the Christian Church, but today because of our post modern culture and consumer attitude to religion, they have gone elsewhere for spiritual nourishment. It's up to us to win them over to the path that we know will ultimately be the most spiritually satisfying for them, rather than simply telling them they are wrong in their beliefs and should change to ours.