The Key to Sharing Your Faith in a Post-Christian Culture

Stuff You Enjoy

A great way to build friendships with people far from God is simply doing stuff you enjoy with people outside your church. I love soccer. I’ve played my whole life, and so when I started thinking about how to serve people around me and build relationships, I decided to coach my son’s soccer team with my wife’s help. One of our neighbor’s kids joined our team, and we got to be friends with Cindy and Jeff and their family. This led to a lot more time together on and off the field and around the neighborhood. After months of relationship building, Cindy and Jeff and their family started attending our church, then got in a small group, then found faith.

Cindy enthusiastically shared with the other parents at practices about our church, especially encouraging Kathy to come. Kathy started listening to messages on the Internet because she struggled with alcohol and impatience and wanted help. Over the next few years, Kathy and Alejandro and their whole family found faith. Cindy also introduced us to Sandra and Grey down the street. Having grown up in England, they wanted their son to play soccer, so he too joined our team. As we became friends, both Sandra and Grey had resistance at first to the message of Jesus, but when they hit some struggles the next year, they reached out to us for help. As a result, Sandra came to faith, and Grey and I had some great talks about Jesus before they moved back overseas.

David and Trina were the parents of Ryan, a boy I ended up coaching from age eight to twelve. David was easy to get to know. He loved to joke around and was a life-of-the-party kind of guy, crude and rude but totally funny, and super successful managing a global high-tech sales force. Kathy and Alejandro, Cindy and Jeff, and another couple who started coming to our church all got to be friends with David and Trina.

One day I asked David, “What’s your spiritual background?” He gladly told me about his horrible experiences with organized religion from a young age as he grew up in Europe. David felt it horribly wrong that beggars could go hungry right across the street from a huge, ornate cathedral, and decided it was all hypocrisy. I agreed with him that God cares about the plight of the poor and wants all people to love him by serving others.

John Burke
John BurkeGatewaychurch.com

John Burke is the founding and lead pastor of Gateway Church in Austin, Texas; the president of the Emerging Leadership Initiative; and the author of multiple books, including “No Perfect People Allowed,” “Soul Revolution” and “Mud and the Masterpiece.”

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