Remember, as we said before, “One Good Reason” is meant to go together with authentic conversational evangelization. It fits in with our four-step method: Listen, Befriend, Proclaim, and Invite.
So what does the “One Good Reason” method look like in the context of a conversation?
Let’s presume that you’ve just begun a conversation with someone. Your goal at this stage is to listen and befriend. You want to learn about the person, make a connection with them, and gain their trust. And you want to do so in authentic ways. You need to have a real interest in them, an interest which grows out of real Christian love. This is the time when you ask them questions, listen to the answers, ask follow up questions, listen more, and begin to find areas of common ground.
After this, you will need to make the transition to proclaiming the gospel or some religious truth; and so your secondary goals, during this time, have to do with figuring out where they are in their faith life. Whether they realize it or not, everyone is on a spiritual journey. Some of us may be stuck in the starting blocks, and others may be stuck after tripping over an obstacle in the way. Still others might be moving along well enough, but like all of us, they need help along the way.
In all this, we need to avoid any artificial rushing from listening to befriending, and befriending to proclaiming. Feel free to spend some time getting to know them, and then making connections, and then moving on to topics of religion. On the other hand, don’t underestimate the interest that people have in religious topics, and artificially drag the conversation out. A lot of this will have to do with the context of the conversation, the relationship with the person, and your own individual gifts and personality.
And if you’re doing street evangelization, the person would already know you want to talk about religion, and the fact that they’ve stopped to talk to you means that on some level, they’re interested in hearing what you have to say. In that case, you can move along a little more quickly to topics of religion — you might even start with them! As long as you still ask questions and listen to their answers, and build common ground, you can still have a great conversation.
So you’re having a conversation; and you’ve listened, and befriended. Now it’s time to find out where the person is in matters of faith and religion. At this point, you need to start asking them questions in those areas — such as “Do you believe in God?” or “Are you a Christian?” Hopefully, the questions will build off naturally from the conversation you’ve been having.
In the process of asking questions, it’s important that we don’t accept a label for a story. What you think someone means by a particular label, and what they actually mean by that label, may be two different things. For example, during the course of a conversation, someone might tell me that they’re Protestant, and I might think to myself, ‘oh, okay, this guy’s a Protestant. That means he believes that the Bible alone is all we use to determine what’s true, or that we can’t ever lose our salvation by sin … But that might not be what he means at all. Maybe he just calls himself a Protestant because he isn’t Catholic, or maybe he heard his parents identify as a Protestant, so he identifies that way too. Maybe he is a Protestant, but doesn’t fall in line with all the common Protestant theology.
So anyway, we need to ask questions. We need to get them to think about what they believe. This could take a few minutes. As they answer our questions, we should ask follow-up questions, getting clarification. We want to make sure we’re understanding them.
After we learn more about what they believe, it’s a good idea to build bonds with them in these areas as well, with them by establishing common ground. That is, we can bring out things that we can both agree upon and appreciate.
So why don’t we look at an example of these stages of conversation?
[Example of “listen & befriend” part of a conversation]