When it comes to evangelism, everybody wants to know how to reach this or that group of people. How do you engage Catholics? What about Hindus? Muslims? Not just religious groups, but various other demographics, whether it is class based, sub-cultures or whatever. If we’re not from the particular group we want to reach, we very often want to know how to reach this group of people who don’t necessarily look, speak or reason like I do.
There are lots of things we could say about that. But I suspect we would be helped in all these cases by two simple and related things. First, we have to accept that no group is a homogenous bloc. Second, to understand the views and opinions of this particular person, I am going to have to speak with them and find out.
Imagine I said, tell me what Christians think. Tell me about their core beliefs. Tell me about their main practices. What would you say? Clearly there is some link across all of them to Jesus and a recognition of the Bible as their core text. But even there, we immediately run into trouble. What do Christians think about Jesus and the Bible? Depending on how broadly you want to define that term ‘Christian’, clearly quite a lot of different things!
The formal positions of various Christian denominations differ significantly and some of those in the hierarchy of those denominations – who are now responsible for the spiritual oversight of them – sometimes don’t hold to the formal positions of their own church. Then you drill down into the rank and file only to discover a vast array of different positions, some of which stick incredibly tightly to the formularies, whilst others seems to hold all manner of positions that depart some way from these formal statements. Compare the average cradle Catholic’s Catholicism with that of some of the cardinals and you might discover some significant separation between the two positions. Many ordinary Catholics live with some sort of folk-Catholicism that bears some similarities with formal Catholic doctrine, but a lot of the time owes as much to spiritism and all manner or other influences. It’s all very well asking ‘what do Christians believe?’ but you can struggle even at the level of asking about what Catholics believe, never mind the plethora of Protestant variations!
The same, of course, is true across all the religions. There is no one form. Even in religions that are heavily law-based and leave apparently less room for deviations – say, Judaism or Islam – it soon becomes apparent that not all Jews live alike and not all Muslims the world over seem to hold to the same core beliefs, and even less so more peripheral ones. The less legalistic a religion, the more variation you get still. These things get affected by history, culture and particular scholastic interpretations as well as (to some degree) syncretistic influences. When we want to know what this or that group think, which subset are we talking about?
The same goes for more social groupings. It doesn’t matter whether you are referring to the working and middle class, or to goths and punks, these are not uniform groups either. You might be able to have a guess at what a skater is going to wear and know about one of their interests, it doesn’t tell you anything else about them. You might be able to find some shared class-based characteristics of a group, but people are ultimately individuals and knowing this one thing about them won’t necessarily tell you all that much. Treating people as homogenous blocs, with shared beliefs and characteristics, and assuming they must hold to the formal position of whatever these things may be is generally a mistake.
That being the case, to find out what this person thinks, I am just going to have to speak with them. I may know they are a Muslim and have some rough ideas in my head as to what they probably think, but unless I go and talk to them I am not going to know. And when I talk to them, I may well find out that they don’t hold to almost any of the formal positions of whatever branch of Islam they are from. Similarly, I may have some broad ideas about how middle class people think and operate, but unless I go and talk to this middle class person, my assumptions may just be wrong and they may not operate in all the ways I assume most of them do.
One of the mistakes we make when reaching out with the gospel is to make assumptions about what people think. We assume they must hold to the formal positions of whatever labels they apply to themselves and then argue with those formal positions. But if we don’t launch into our argument based on the formal teaching we associate with the label (whatever we think it to be), we may just find this person doesn’t hold to much if any of it. My experience with many Muslims is that very few hold to the formal teachings of Islam; they simply are Muslim and that means, a bit like Humpty-Dumpty, whatever they want it to mean. The same goes for all manner of others.
The solution here is relatively simple. First, we don’t treat people like homogenous bloc. Just as not all Christians think alike, so not all who own any other label think alike either. Second, without talking to people and simply asking them what they think, we’re likely to make wrong assumptions about what they believe based on formal positions we’ve been taught rather than the actual position of the person in front of us. In the end, all we have to do is ask and not assume. Then we might know what this person thinks and address what they actually believe rather than what we assume they probably do.