Nine Surprising Things about
GODISNOWHERE
The apologetics for an apologetics
ministry
by
Jim Schofield
Anyone who knows us or who has visited our tent surely knows we aren’t your average evangelism ministry. In fact, there are a number of things that make us unique, often in surprising ways. Even in ways that may seem counter-intuitive to many other Christians. We’ve never been accused of being typical, run-of-the-mill. People tend to leave with a lasting impression – whether positive or negative – and we sometimes run into people we spoke to even several years ago.
People usually love us or hate us. And the division doesn’t really follow along the divide of believer/unbeliever, either. There are folks on both sides of that line who love us, or who hate us. We have never felt a need to appease the believing masses or compromise to make others feel more comfortable. However, it recently occurred to me that it might be interesting or even edifying to explain why we do some of the surprising things we do.
1. Donations. One sometimes surprising trait is that we never ask for financial support or donations. We are almost entirely self-funded, and that includes paying hundreds of dollars for each major fair or festival we attend. The guys on the team represent a pretty diverse economic range, but we all chip in to whatever extent we can. If it needs doing, we make sure it gets done. Simple as that.
We won’t refuse donations, mind you, but they are extremely rare and far-between. And we do have a few shirts and hats and things with our logo which can be purchased online at CafePress.com, but that is also pretty rare. We’re happy with this policy, and it affords us a marginally greater degree of respect (or less derision at least) from the people we encounter in our tent, when they see that we’re not there to get their hard-earned cash.
2. Believer or unbeliever? Given a choice between a Christian and an unbeliever in our tent, who do you think we’d choose to talk to, spend time with? You might be surprised to hear that we’d take the Christian, any day of the week. But, aren’t we an evangelism ministry? Aren’t we there to share the gospel with the lost? Certainly. And there is great potential that can come from taking some time to witness to that sinner.
But… if we can challenge that Christian to grow, to get uncomfortable in his or her relationship with God, to get better equipped (even to get more equipped right there in our tent), then that believer can go out into the world and witness to three or ten or fifty sinners. It’s a matter of what is cost-effective! Indeed, we often challenge Christians harder than anyone else. It’s why the military takes some of its best and puts them in a boot camp to train new people. Naturally, we want a chance to talk to both the saint and the sinner. But, given a choice, we’ll take the saint every time, and never regret it.
3. Follow up? As a general rule, we do not follow up with people we meet, either Christian or non. There are two sides to the coin in our reasoning on this. First, our experience has been that the vast majority of people who say they will visit our website, come to our weekly meeting, call us, e-mail us or otherwise continue to engage with us somehow…. never do. Even if we follow up. We’ve tried following up, even had a contacts sheet where people wrote down their name and contact info for us to get in touch with them, later. Half of them put down false info, and the other half showed no interest when we reached them.
The truth is that if a
person really is interested, they
will follow up with us. If they really
are interested, we won’t have to follow up.
If they really want to see what our meetings are about, they’ll e-mail
us, call us, or just show up. And there
are indeed such individuals, both believers and non. I recall a member of the Falun Gong who we
met on a campus here in
In regards to brand new believers specifically, we will try to point them to resources we know they’ll need, including possibilities for a church. That happens while they’re still in front of us. But again, if they don’t care, don’t want information, don’t follow up themselves… then any follow-up on our end will be a waste of our time and theirs. If they are genuine, will there not be fruit of such Spirit?
But more importantly, our reason for this policy is that we are an extremely dynamic ministry. By that, I mean we are constantly changing to fit the situation. At any given time, the most important person in the world to us is the one right in front of us. Once you walk out of our tent, our focus goes to the next person in front of us, and suddenly they become the most important. Even in our internal biblical studies, we are extremely dynamic. We always approach things topically – what is the issue currently in front of us? If we just ran into a member of the Falun Gong, guess what we’ll study next? Catholicism, the Landmark/Forum cult, Islam, or one doctrinal issue or another… The issue of the day is the one that’s most important. Unfortunately, this dynamic quality also means we tend to be less organized and structured than many ministries, but as you already know, we’re not your typical ministry.
4. Time to leave? We may tell an unbeliever to leave our tent. Sure, this sometimes happens when a person becomes abusive, rowdy, even a physical threat to others. But this isn’t what I mean. Sometimes, a sinner has heard what they needed to hear, and they need to think about it. Occasionally, we’ll tell someone that “We’re done,” and we’d hope they will think about what we’ve said, perhaps even come back in two or three hours if they want to talk some more or if they have any questions.
Some Christians find this strange, to send a captive audience away. But we aren’t interested in being the center of this person’s attention. Let’s be honest; the priority is this person’s relationship with God, not their relationship with us. We don’t matter. We want them to consider the possibility that they have a problem with God, and that they need to do something about that. It’s between them and Him. And they may need to actually get away from us a while to start hearing His voice in their hearts, or start to see His handiwork around them. Some quiet time can sometimes do wonders for a person.
5. We don’t do Christian events anymore. Why? We’re a Christian ministry, after all. Well, honestly it’s because we get a much better reaction at secular events than we do at Christian ones. And by that, I don’t mean that we get a more positive reception. Rather, we get more response, both positive and negative, and that’s exactly what we’re aiming for. We’ve done Christian music festivals and similar events, and sadly we must report that the vast majority of believers at those events simply don’t care. The apathy is sometimes astounding, and is certainly heartbreaking
Heck, we’ve even had fellow Christians pray over us, that we might be loosed from Satan’s influence. Of course, a few hours later, they came back and asked our help in witnessing to some Mormons… so I can’t say they’re very consistent in their response, either. Another unfortunately common response from fellow saints is that they judge us… for being judgmental. They explain to us how wrong we are to tell people that what they believe isn’t true, that there’s only one way to heaven, or to be arrogant enough to claim that we know absolute truth. We’ve even been called heretics on rare occasion.
But frankly, it’s mostly the apathy. We’re there to talk, to challenge people, to discuss and debate. We went to one Christian concert, set up our tent and spent the next 6 hours with absolutely nothing to do, with the exception of a few minutes when just a couple people came over to see what we were about. We had a good conversation, that day. But for the rest of that five or six hours, hundreds of Christians walked around us, seeing our seemingly atheistic name (God Is Nowhere) and just not caring at all to approach us. Not caring enough to come tell us “atheists” about the truth of Jesus Christ.
6. Unbeliever in church? We don’t believe in bringing unbelievers to church. Now, there’s one that upsets some people. Why in the world would we want to keep people away from church? The truth is, we don’t. We want people to come to Christ and then go to church.
What is church for? Three things – to worship and praise God, to fellowship (i.e. to share with fellow believers our mutual relationship with God), and for the saints to be equipped with the divinely inspired truth of God. Where does an unbeliever fit into that? They don’t. They can’t worship God, they can’t share a relationship with God that they don’t have, and they are blinded to the divine truth of His word.
Every Christian is called to share the truth of the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ with the lost around them in their lives. With family, friends, co-workers, strangers, even enemies. You are the one. Don’t pawn this unbeliever onto your church. That’s not where they belong. Will you deny this person the truth that you have? How can you, and still say you love this person or care about them in any way? Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by someone speaking the truth. Most people aren’t called to preach on a street corner like we do, but every Christian is called to share the gospel with the lost around them. Let Him guide you to help bring this person to Christ, and then bring them to church.
Bringing the lost to church actually poses a potential danger. Some people learn how to act like a Christian in church. A sinner can actually convince himself that he’s saved, when he isn’t… thereby gaining a whole new stumbling block to finding salvation in Christ. “I go to church, and nod and say ‘yeah, that sounds about right,’ so I must be a Christian, right?” If he thinks he’s already saved, he has no reason to actually repent and turn to Christ for real. There is no biblical basis whatsoever for bringing unbelievers to church in order to try to bring them to Christ. That said, we’d never turn away a sinner, if they did come to church.
7. The dispensation of God’s grace. The ministry is very dispensational in our doctrine. While we aren’t a “doctrinal ministry” per se, this certainly does affect how we preach the gospel, because this goes directly to the questions of “What is the gospel?” and “How do we know this is the gospel?” and “Where do you find the gospel in the Bible?” In fact, we focus a great deal on Paul as God’s emissary to the Body of Christ.
It’s true, we do not
believe that the Body of Christ is “spiritual
Like most Christians, we understand that not every command or statute in the Bible applies directly to us, today. It is not wrong for you to wear clothing made from more than one fabric – cotton-polyester is not a sin! God doesn’t expect us to circumcise or eat kosher. God has different administrative rules for different groups of people at different times in history. And therefore, it is exceedingly important to understand your place in God’s long-term plan, so that you don’t take someone else’s “house rules” and wrongly apply them to yourself. Paul admonishes us to “present yourself approved to God, a workman who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” To “divide” means to discern between things, to know the difference rather than lumping everything into one homogenous glob. Too many Christians don’t know how to divide God’s word, and the result is often a perversion of the gospel message. They take something written to someone else in the Bible and try to apply it to themselves.
Where do we get the gospel in the Bible? Quite simply, from Paul. No one else gives us the full account of the good news of salvation by faith apart from works. Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles, to you and me. You can’t say the same of Peter and the Twelve. All scripture is divinely inspired and useful for instruction, correction, for understanding the history of God’s relationship with mankind. But Paul is the apostle to the Body of Christ, and is the only person in the entire Bible to even refer to the Body of Christ. Know who your apostle is, and know how to rightly divide God’s word.
8. New believers – what to read first?
Nope, we don't send new believers to the Gospels first, and the reason is
fairly simple. What person in
What few believers know, however, is what the message of salvation by grace actually is. What is the good news? How do you know? Why is it that way? Was it always that way? Can we lose our salvation? Where do we find the gospel message in the Bible? The best place to look for those things is the letters of Paul.
G.E.A.R. It stands for Galatians, Ephesians, Acts and Romans. This is where we always send a new believer, in the Bible. The four chambers of the heart of the gospel of grace. Galatians gives a concise but clear summary of what the good news is, and how we can know what it is and who supplies that truth to us. Ephesians expands on that, talks further about this “mystery” that had never before been revealed, and acts somewhat as a sequel to Galatians. The Acts of the Apostles provides the historical context for the important events that are wrapped up in a lot of the other three books, including Paul’s special purpose in God’s plan. And finally, Romans is the comprehensive exposition on the gospel of grace, of salvation through faith apart from works, including many underlying and related doctrinal issues.
After a new believer reads these four books (which should easily take only a few days for most people), then perhaps they might read the gospel of Luke or John, before continuing on. But for a member of the Body of Christ today, the most important author in the Bible is unequivocally Paul.
9. The success rate. We've had maybe six conversions in nine years. Impressive, eh? Not by the standards of most. So, why is this? Because we’re interested in the real thing, not the appearance of it. We know that Christian statistician George Barna has shown very conclusively that alleged “conversions” at some major event or a chance encounter turn out to be real only about 15% of the time, at best. On the other hand, people who appear to accept Christ after being witnessed to in an ongoing personal relationship… is 85%, the exact opposite. Where do we fit in? One of the first two groups. We know that if we have “altar calls” and put people on the spot to do it now, now, now… that the vast majority of conversions wouldn’t really be authentic at all.
The last thing we want is to convince someone they’re saved when they’re not. Just as in #5 above, this can become a huge stumbling block to a sinner. Yes, indeed, today is the day of salvation. But if you pressure someone by putting them on the spot, they’ll frequently just give you whatever you want to hear.
We like to say that we are the annoying pebble in your shoe as you walk away… nagging at you, poking you, not giving you any rest. One should never underestimate the importance of planting seeds. We not only plant, but we water, fertilize, weed and even do a little pruning, from time to time. And when we’re most blessed, we see a harvest. But there’s no way of knowing how many harvests are out there in the world that we were fortunate enough to be involved in at some earlier stage.
Ultimately, it’s about God drawing people to Him. We’re just tools. Is the hammer proud of the house that’s built? No; it is only fortunate and honored to be used by the Master Builder.
We can’t say that we know we’re 100% right about all of these things. We do our best to submit ourselves to the guidance of God’s Word and the Holy Spirit in us. We don’t have these unorthodox policies and strategies in order to be better than anyone, show off how wise and knowledgeable we are, or to make life difficult for anyone. Other more familiar ways might be easier, it’s true. But as you can see, we have a reason for doing all of these things. We try to always look at the bottom line.
What works?
We want to reach the lost. We care enough about someone to tell them the truth. That is often uncomfortable or offensive to them. So be it. We are a ministry of truth and challenge. Of judgment and grace. We’ll meet you wherever you are in your walk. Just don’t expect it to be comfortable or easy. Whatever it is you believe, you better have an answer when we ask for a reason for the hope that lies within you.