#41 | Are There Different Christianities In The World? Pt. 1 | Craig Ott

It's watering time.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today we have one of our deep conversations, a deep conversation with my friend Dr.

Craig Ott of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

What?

What?

One of my alma maters in Deerfield, Illinois. Now Craig occupies the Reach Global Missions Chair at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. What does that mean?

It means that this knows what he's talking about when it comes to how to talk to people about Jesus and the mission of God throughout different cultures, or at least knows the principles on how to share the gospel with people from different cultures all around the world. And this guy knows what he is talking about. He has written books on the theology of mission contextualization.

He's done church planning and knows how to teach across cultures. And he is a person that we need to be listening to. As a matter of fact, this is the guy that really turned my head when I asked him a question.

Is there such a thing called naked Christianity? That's what you're going to hear us talk about today.

So I would encourage you to listen in, get to hear his story, how he came to be a follower of Jesus, and then how God has led him to reach out to different cultures all over the world so that they, too might know who Jesus is and how we might get our faith watered in that process, as well as so that we can water the faith of other people around the world.

So I would encourage you to listen in as we talk about a lot of different things, but we really hone in on the question, is there such a thing as naked Christianity? Happy listening.

Craig.

Welcome to Apollos Watered.

Good to be with you.

All right, just to start off, we have our fast five. Are you ready?

I am really ready. I was born ready.

Here we go.

Here we go. First of all, this is an easy one. Easy one. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner?

My favorite meal.

Yeah. Or which one? Meal of the day.

Which was your favorite? I like breakfast.

Okay, favorite breakfast food. What's that?

Oh, I like good bagel. Good toasted bagel, maybe.

When we lived in Germany, I just loved the German breads and German rolls with sort of this cheese type food they call quark. We don't really have it much in the United States, but there's some foods there that I really miss, actually, which are good breakfast foods.

Are there any good German places in Chicagoland, where you can get German bread. Because I've not really heard of German bread.

You know, in Lincoln Park, I think there's sort of a little German deli specialties type store that's pretty amazing. I mean, you thought you just crossed the Atlantic when you walk into that place with all the specialty items.

They have, you know, different sausages and cheeses and even prepared foods and so on. I think they have German bread in there. Yeah, they have German bread. Has a crispy crust. You don't have soft crust. It's crispy and it's just.

It's awesome.

I had no idea that Germans were, like, into bread. I mean, French bread again, Italian, Germans.

You know, people who binge eat, like, you know, it's usually chocolate or junk food or something. Germans binge eat bread. So at least it's a little bit healthy.

Okay, okay. All right, next one. Here we go. One place you would like to visit before you depart from this earth.

Wow. Well, I've visited a lot of places. You know, kind of. My bucket list is checked off a lot. Where would I like to go?

Goodness, you know, I think I'd like to go snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, something like that.

Ah, okay. How many. About how many countries have you been to?

Well, that I've actually stayed in and not just been in the airport.

Right.

It's over 40. I counted at one point, but I don't know anymore. So it's a little bit over 40, probably.

Okay. All right, now, we're going to hear your testimony in a bit, but I know you used to play music, so here we go.

Favorite era of music, the 60s or the 70s?

60S, absolutely.

Why?

The 60s was kind of a breakthrough era.

Of course, I was a teenager in the 60s, so of course that always has the nostalgia effect, but it really was a very pioneering era of pop music and rock music and that sort of thing. So you had all these groups that were just doing amazing new things nobody had ever done before. So the creativity level just huge.

We've obviously had other creative eras in popular music, but it really was, I think, in all objectivity, you'd have to say it was a very pioneering era of. Of popular music.

Agreed, agreed. Now, I also know that you've traveled a lot, so what is the most odd cultural food you have ever eaten?

Oh, goodness. When I was in China, you know, roasted grasshoppers, which were actually not too bad, but they were really teeny little grasshoppers.

You could hardly, you know, taste anything. I'm pretty Adventuresome. Also in China, this was in Hong Kong, had jellyfish. That's kind of interesting.

Those would probably be at the top of the list of my unusual foods.

What does jellyfish taste like?

Honestly? Not much. You know, it's kind of slithery and, you know, it's more like the tentacle part, as I recall. No, not much taste to it.

It's whatever the sauce is.

Okay. All right. Jellyfish. That's a new one for me. I know.

We had Jason Georges on the show and he mentioned that he'd had octopus and he had it, and the tentacle was still moving in his mouth.

Still moving. Yeah, I've had octopus before. The Italians eat a lot of that kind of seafood, squid and octopus and so on.

But I'm not real big on food that has suction cups on it.

Neither am I.

Neither am I. Okay, here's an unusual one. You've traveled a lot. But here's one that's kind of a different question.

But if you were a mode of transportation, what would you be and why? Like, you can pick a car, a truck, a plane, but even then you can even get real specific. So if you were a car, what kind of car would you.

Well, I mean, if it's any kind of transportation, you know what I think would be really great and fun would be to be in a glider. I've never done it, but, you know, because the thing with a glider, you don't. There's no motor. It's quiet. You're just kind of floating along.

And the wind, you know, I've seen the videos of it. I think that'd be extremely cool to do that.

That's so peaceful. But I have a feeling that it wouldn't be very peaceful for me because my heart would be beating so fast.

I mean, I want to meet Jesus, just not that quickly.

I've been in a few airplanes, whether they were small sort of missionary aviation aircraft or some of these airlines from some of these developing world countries that were pretty hair raising. We were getting on the airplane after several hours of delay in one African country. The cowlings on the motors were still up.

The mechanics were still scratching their head, but they said, oh, just get on the airplane. We're just going to fly it anyway. I'm not kidding. Yeah, yeah. And the plane was unmarked.

There was no marking on it, and there was no overhead bin covers. So if they hit a bump, your suitcase would fall on your head. I mean, it was. And that was a commercial airline, believe it or not.

What year was this about, oh, that.

Was probably 15 years ago.

Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Wow. This is going to be cool that, you know, you're talking about a lot.

You traveled a lot, you've ministered in a lot of places, you've had a lot of different crosses, cross cultural experiences. But we're seeing our world become more of a global village, and yet we're seeing secularization grow at a rapid rate.

And I know you've written a lot about that recently. Tell us just a bit about secularization.

And I mean, we know kind of what it is, but talk about it from a theological standpoint and how do we try to combat that or find our way within this secularized world that seems to be coming at us every which way?

Well, there's a lot of ways you can kind of look at secularization. The simplest way is to say religion is having less and less a role in public life.

And it was sort of the theory that, well, as people get educated, we're not going to need religion anymore because religion's superstitious and modern science will get rid of religion. It will go away. Well, we know obviously that has not happened. Religion has not gone away.

What has happened is the kind of way that people are religious has changed. People still claim to be religious, but they say it in terms like this. I'm a very spiritual person, but I don't go to church.

I don't like formal religion, but I'm a very spiritual person.

So you've got this kind of very different kind of religiosity that's very vague and nebulous, is not always affiliated with any kind of formal religion.

So this is a little bit of what we see today, at least in Western culture, people who do not affiliate with major religions or churches or any of that, but would somehow consider themselves spiritual in some way. But they keep it very vague, of course.

So how do you. How do you respond to that?

I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how to wrap my head around it, because we hear that people say that all the time, I'm spiritually but not religious, or I'm spiritual but not religious. And it seems like they want this idea of spirituality, but it is nebulous. So how do we counteract that? How do we talk to people about that?

I mean, how do we engage those kind of conversations?

It's a great question. And I think one of the best ways is to just ask people what they mean by that and say, well, tell me more.

What do you really mean by that when you say you're a very spiritual person and you know, they might see something?

Well, you know, I like to be peaceful and meditate or something and then to really just probing, really, and getting them to maybe question in their own minds what that really means and what that amounts to and if it's truly giving them any kind of orientation in life, you know. But it is a challenge. It is a very big challenge.

And you know, a lot of what's going on in the church today, and not just Christians, but other world religions, we see a lot of very negative things.

And so we have to probably keep the conversation away from institutional forms of Christianity and talk about more what it means to be in community, talk more directly about who God is and if there's truly a God, what would that mean? And so on in that direction.

It seems like secularization. You said there's many different ways to look at it.

And I remember reading an article recently where one author, he was in California, he said that just the religiosity of our world is changing. He said if you're on the east coast, you'll hear more about atheism and being agnostic.

But yet he said, if you come to California, where I live, we have houses of worship everywhere of every different kind. It seems like it's taking on a new, a new way of looking at it because like you said, it has less effect. But yet it still does have a huge effect.

I mean, on one level it does, and another level it doesn't. How do we, how do we walk through that? How do we navigate those waters?

Well, one of, one of the problems is that social scientists, the secular media have tended to kind of ignore religion. Now with 9, 11, everybody kind of realized we can't ignore religion anymore. But that's somebody else's religion, that's exotic religion.

So it's easy to sort of distance ourselves from it.

But the reality is there's still a fairly large portion of America that are people who are church going people or synagogue going people or, or mosque going people who take religion, spirituality in that form very, very seriously. Now what has happened though in the public discourse is it's harder. See, here's one contrast that is often made.

It used to Be if you believed in God, you were the norm. And if you spoke about spiritual things or even the Bible in public, that was okay. Now you're on the defensive.

Now you have to actually give a reason. Well, why would you even believe in God? Why would you go to a church? That's the standard orientation.

Now in a secular society, we are put into a position where we have to justify why it would be reasonable to believe in God or be involved in a church or something like that. And that's a major shift. So we're sort of on the defensive in the public sphere.

And so what has happened is a lot of Christians have just sort of retreated and say, well, you know, the society doesn't like us anymore, and so we're going to, you know, hunker down until Jesus returns. Others have said we're going to fight back.

And so we're going to try and get political power and we're going to try, and we're not going to let the world push us around like that anymore. And this has put the church into a bit of a pickle on how we respond to the society that we're.

Living in, talking about this community and how we are. People are trying to find their. Their navigate their way. As you said, some are going for political power, some have kind of hunkered down.

And we have these different, almost polar extremes.

I mean, what is the way that you're seeing people navigate this as a way forward in the midst of our society that seems to be so rapidly changing that the ministry methods of years ago have fallen by the wayside, but people almost have had, like, broken necks. They've had to turn so quickly and they don't know what to do. What's the way forward that you're seeing different people navigate?

What are they doing in order to kind of bridge that gap?

That's a really great question. And I think there's going to be a lot of different answers depending on what part of the country you're working in.

If we're talking United States or what part of the world you're working in, those answers are going to look pretty different.

But just to give you an example, one of our doctoral students at Trinity did her dissertation on churches in America that were succeeding in reaching what she called the duns and nuns, in other words, young adults who were either done with church, they went when they were a child and then left the church, or they were nuns, they never went to church. That's Beth Severson, and she's published it now on InterVarsity Press her findings.

And one of the things she was finding is that if you want to reach these young adults who are very skeptical about formal religion and, you know, Christianity is a very negative thing to them, you know, Christians are bigoted, Christians are homophobic, and so on and so forth, how do you overcome that? And what she was finding out is community acceptance.

Let some of these skeptical folks that have legitimate questions, just let them experience what it's like to be around Christians to help out maybe with a project or something and just drop the argumentative piece of it and just say, look at what it looks like where Christians live together and they care about one another, they love one another, and then they love God and this Jesus who seems to be in the middle of it all. And a lot of those critical issues begin to fall away because they start seeing the difference that Christ can make in a person's life.

And so just being exposed to genuine Christian community I think is so important. And it's one of the things that perhaps in our Western approaches to evangelism that has been dramatically overlooked.

We've tended to so emphasize how to explain the gospel, which is obviously very important.

We haven't emphasized quite enough the role of Christian community and being a collective witness to how lives can be changed, how people can be reconciled, how they can deal with their differences. This is an extremely powerful testimony in the midst of so much critique of the church today.

Now you're talking about community. And I know that plays a part in your own story, isn't that correct? How did you come to Christ?

And how did community play a part for you to learn about who Jesus is?

So I grew up as an atheist. My family had never ever gone to church. My father told me, just foolish people believe in God. That's what I grew up with.

He passed away when I was young. And that's a very traumatic sort of thing for a child. And if you don't know God, you have no answers.

You are just a ship at sea without a rudder and in a storm. No orientation. What life really means. When I went to the University, State University, I began to see some Christians.

I met Christians whose who had a deep sense of joy. And I saw how Christians were experiencing what I later came to call fellowship.

And I said, wow, there's something going on in their lives that I can't entirely explain.

I mean, I could get into a philosophical argument with you if I wanted to, but something about their lifestyle and their sense of joy and sense of purpose that kind of trumped all Those philosophical arguments and just disarmed me. And I had to start taking Christianity seriously.

And then what?

So you took Christianity seriously, and then what led to you really yielding your life to Christ and then to go from that, I mean, and now you're obviously directing a PhD program at one of the most prestigious evangelical institutions in the United States. What did God start doing in you to make you want to really go forth and.

And go across the world and be a part of church planning and missions and really see others come to faith in Christ in the same or a similar manner?

I mean, it's even a surprising story to me when I think about it, because when I was in high school, I remember, you know, they'd have these career days where different people from different occupations would come to campus and tell you what it's like to be a newspaper reporter or an architect or whatever. And then there was on the list, clergy. And I remember thinking, who on earth would even show up for such a thing?

And here I am, ordained minister of the Gospel. So it is remarkable. And it was a process. As I mentioned, when I went to university, I came to Faith in Christ.

I saw what God had done in other people's lives. And then I began to hear speakers who were talking about the reliability of scripture and so on. That really then finally turned the corner for me.

I kind of, in spite of myself, my roommate and I in college started a Bible study. We didn't know at all what we were even doing. I never even read the whole Bible. But we just kind of started this Bible study.

Jesus was doing something and we wanted to be a part of it. And one thing led to the next. I was a mathematics major in college. And so.

But God kind of confirmed, you know, that he'd given me a gift that related to teaching and sharing the gospel. And so, well, I guess seminary, sort of the next step. I never thought I'd want to ever be a pastor or anything. I just wanted to be able to serve God.

And while I was in seminary then I met, started meeting international students and the vision for the world started growing and saying, wow, there's a lot more greater needs in other parts of the world than there are in the United States. And I need to be willing to consider that. I met my wife in seminary and we felt God leading us to go to be missionaries, church planters in Germany.

And our board said, now plant a church in America first. Show if you can even do this at all before we send you overseas to do it. We thought, oh, that makes sense.

So we planted a church in the Chicago area and then headed off to Germany, where we were most of our years involved in church planting and evangelism.

How many years were you in Germany?

So you were in Germany when the wall came down?

Oh, yeah. That was quite a remarkable time.

I had actually made a few visits to eastern Germany, which would be the communist part of Germany, before the wall came down. And then we experienced all of that. I was actually leading a church in Munich at that time. And yeah, it was quite amazing.

Did you speak German before you went?

We did not. In fact, those days they said, you know what, just learn when you get there, because hopefully you'll learn it better. You'll learn it right.

And so we did that. We lived with a German family for seven months. We didn't have any children at the time. We lived with a German family and totally immersed ourselves.

Had language school three hours a day. And then, you know, living with people. We were just around Germans the whole time. And so that was full immersion language school and enculturation.

So being in Europe, I mean, you're there when the wall comes down.

And we've seen such a massive shift in Europe over this past several decades, not just since the Wall came down and its religiosity and its understanding of faith. What changes have you seen occur within Europe from a religious standpoint?

So there were heavy restrictions placed on religious activities on churches.

What that did is it made many, if not most of those churches had to sort of get in a hunker down mode of let's survive, let's get through this, let's, you know, we can't do a whole lot public, we'll do what we can. And many of those churches, it was difficult to do. Evangelism became somewhat ingrown.

Everybody was married to somebody else's uncle or wife, cousin or. And so that kind of happened.

And so when, when the big great freedom came, when the walls went down, when the governments gave religious freedom, that was a huge shift. So. So. And they were beginning to reach new people who had not been enculturated in this sort of Christian subculture.

They're coming out of the secular world and that Created a lot of conflict in the churches. But God, God was at work.

And so new churches had to be started in many cases that were much more in a position to reach out to the people and communicate the gospel in a way that would make sense. Now in Western Europe you had the secularization we were just talking about that was very, very big in the 60s.

The poverty of liberal theology was emptying the churches, but it wasn't just emptying the churches, it was emptying people's hearts. It became a spiritual vacuum for many people. Church attendance way down, many people just leaving their formal membership of the church.

And what sort of happened is secularization created this vacuum. And as a result, sort of these alternative spiritualities became very big.

What was happening is that those Christian communities, those churches that had a genuine relationship with Jesus and really took the Bible seriously, they presented a genuine alternative. Unfortunately, many of the established churches were very formal, they were very cold, they were hierarchical.

There was not a lot of spiritual life or relationship there. But those churches where Jesus was in the center became this sort of alternative.

The people who really took God seriously took spirituality seriously.

And there's been significant growth, not dramatic, but significant growth among those Christian groups that experience genuine life with Jesus, a joyful proclamation of the gospel. And that's been encouraging.

Now one of the things that I've often heard is what's happening in Europe trickles over to the United States within a so many year period. Some people say it's five years, seven years, 10 years. I've heard people say different things.

Do you see some of that similar philosophy permeating here now too?

Well, first of all, there's a two way influence going on.

If you want to talk about sort of more theological influences, I think that that was earlier the case where there was a lot of theology that came from Europe and came to America. Most of it, quite frankly, was, was not very helpful.

But that influence from Europe to America is probably in, at least in the church today is not what it used to be because the church is struggling so much in Europe. But the influence in the other direction from say America to Europe is pretty significant.

Also those secularization influences, they came from Europe, but and some of the more encouraging science have actually had some influence from America. So we might think of big conferences that are put on by groups from the US that have brought some fresh ideas into the European scene.

So there's influence going both ways. There's a lot of books that are written in America that get translated or printed in the uk, so there is actually a back and forth.

Now you mentioned something that I found very fascinating before because we were talking before the show about multi site churches and you said that there are some practices going on in the United States and in Europe, where there are churches in the United States that have campuses in Europe. I mean, what are you seeing? What is that even like?

Yeah, well, it is really one of these remarkable developments in the church over the last 20, 25 years in the United States and elsewhere now of the so called multi site church, this is a little different than an established church just starting another church that would become an independent, autonomous church.

But rather they will start other venues where there's worship and ministry, but it's still under the leadership, usually common budget, common vision and so on with the host or the original church. And so a church may consist of multiple campuses and locations where worship and ministry takes place. That's all centralized.

So that's a multi site concept. Now typically those multi site churches are within a geographical radius of sort of the main mother or host church.

But what has started happening is some of these multi site churches are now going international. Some of them have gone across state lines. So a church in Texas has a site in Florida, but now they're actually going international.

So a church in Tennessee might have a site in Europe or a church in Europe might have a site in Southeast Asia and so on.

And that raises a lot of questions because typically the multi side idea is a church has its ethos, what we call a brand, its style, that they want to kind of reproduce and, and that works for them. It's their secret sauce. Well, will that, does that work?

When you go international into a totally different culture, you will probably attract some people who just like things American or things international. But will you reach the local people? Will you only reach a little niche of the population there who happen to like that kind of thing?

Or can you launch something that will actually be able to reproduce and take root and the local people embrace it and so on? And that's kind of a question that needs to be answered with the international or global multisite idea.

I Know, we've talked about this in the past because whenever you talk about contextualization and moving the gospel from, or contextualizing the gospel from one culture to another, and you just referred to that in this multi side idea. Is there such a thing? Because we've had this conversation before, but I think our listeners are going to find this very interesting.

Is there such a thing as naked Christianity?

No, not really. Now this is what people think. They think there's sort of normal Christianity, vanilla Christianity, if you will. And that's my church.

And it doesn't matter if your church is in Chicago or my church is in Calcutta. My church is normal. My church is vanilla. And everybody else is flavored. Everybody else is exotic.

Everybody else is a tick off from the normal, which is me. But the reality is there's hardly anything you can talk about the church that is not somehow culturally influenced. The very language we're speaking.

We're speaking English right now. So already that's cultural. We think most obviously of musical styles and musical instruments. That's cultural.

How long a person preaches, how are leaders selected, how are decisions made? And the Bible doesn't spell out in detail all these things. There's a lot of freedom.

But probably where people get most concerned is when it comes to theological questions. Is there a naked gospel? Is there just sort of like a gospel pure and then sort of gospel with various adaptations to reach different people?

That's a little harder question to answer.

We know that Paul talked about a gospel once delivered, which is rooted in the Old Testament promises and history of Israel and fulfilled in Jesus who died and rose again for our sins and so on, and who's coming back. So there are these basic contours, obviously that we all share that are spelled out for us in scripture.

But the way in which we communicate that, the way. And the gospel, so multifaceted, when it talks about forgiveness of our transgression, it talks about reconciliation of our relationship with God.

It talks about being delivered from the power of sin or the power of darkness. Talks about being part of a new kingdom, a new. Where there's really justice and goodness and not like the world we live in.

So there's many, many dimensions to the gospel. And different cultures, different preachers, churches will emphasize different aspects that really resonate with them.

So I think we have to realize, yes, there is a consistent message that would bridge all cultures, but we do express it and we do emphasize different things, different aspects of that message in.

Local cultures, which is why we have four gospels.

Yeah, funny thing, wouldn't one have been enough, Right?

Yeah, right, right.

But God saw fit to tell that story in four different ways, just the story of Jesus. Why? Because there's four different audiences.

And those different audiences have different questions and different information they need to hear because they didn't grow up Jewish or whatever. So, yes, there's many different ways to tell that story of Jes. And the four gospels are the most obvious example of that.

I think that is the encouragement for me.

But at the same time, I get a bit discouraged because you see the different gospel presentations that people have developed over time in order to really capture the essence of it.

And sometimes when I hear some of the conversations that there are four gospels, there are these different aspects of the gospel you can simply drown because you don't know what to emphasize when you're talking to someone. Because there's really not just this one four points that I always give every single time. And I know some people do that.

Some people are good at that is there.

How do you approach knowing that there are all these different facets, but if you're talking to someone about Jesus in the gospel, how do you determine on how to direct that conversation? And it usually, in my experience. And maybe you're different. I don't always get that in one shot. I see that over time.

I see that in conversations that I have over time. But what do you do in your personal approach to have those kind of conversations when you get that opportunity?

Yeah, I think one of the things you want to do is be a good listener. Now, as an academic, I'd say do research, but I'm going to put it in the simplest possible terms.

The average person can be a good listener and listen to the heart of the person you're talking to. What are their dreams? What drives them? What are their fears? What do they already believe? What are their questions? Just being a good listener.

You know, a lot of people just feel Christians are trying to sell them something. They're trying to twist their arm and just showing a genuine interest in people and then beginning to see how the gospel can connect.

Now, that's only a starting point. There's a lot in the gospel that your partner that you're talking to may not want to hear.

But you need to find a starting point where you can show genuine concern and begin to go step by step more into the core message of the gospel. But being good listener is a really important place to begin.

I think you're right. Especially when our culture has had in years past those evangelistic approaches that are like the used car salesman approach.

And I know that Rick Richardson has indicated or talked about the model of being more of a tour guide, inviting people on a journey to talk with them, to show them this life that we're living, to show who Christ is, rather than just get the four points out in a bullet and get him to mentally agree or not agree. Would you think that that's a better approach?

I think it's better. For a lot of people in America today, that's probably the better approach.

This is one of the reasons why the alpha course approach has been around quite a while now. But the idea that it's a little more dialogical. You present a concept, you discuss it, you meet around a meal.

You're not sort of rushing anybody into some kind of a decision. But people can think about it, they can ask questions, they can process it. That's a very dialogical way to present the message of the gospel.

And I think he's right, but that's not the way it is. Everywhere in the world, there are places where people respond very well to a more direct, bold sort of presentation of the gospel.

And we've seen that. I mean, even in Germany, where they're very skeptical and very dialogical, they want to process everything. We've seen this.

That sort of a very Billy Graham style preaching the gospel can. Can still change lives. So I'd be reluctant to want to say that's the golden key for the future everywhere.

But certainly I think that's something that is important in the U.S.

one thing that we're finding out almost everywhere is that telling the story is usually a better way to go than to have a more abstracted kind of conceptual explanation of the gospel. And God has certainly used those different four steps or bridges and different things like that. God's used those.

But most people today, in most parts of the world, they love a story. Why do people go to the movies? Why do people buy novels? People love a story. And a story touches the heart. A story stimulates the imagination.

What greater story is there than this story about God, who creates people for his love and his fellowship? And those people turn from him. But God doesn't give up. God keeps pursuing them and he keeps creating all these different ways to connect with people.

And they keep turning him away. And God finally says, I'm coming. I'm going to go myself.

I'm going to enter in that world and do what needs to be done to bring people, people back into fellowship with me. I tell you, that's a story, an amazing story that can touch people's lives.

Let's not so abstract that it becomes a philosophy, but it just becomes a beautiful love story of a God who pursues lost people because he loves them.

That's awesome.

Let me ask you this, because you're talking about this story, and I've always been a big believer in start the conversation or play your part in this conversation of sharing that story. You may not be able to give all aspects of that story, but you can give a part of that story to someone or share that or live it out.

And I see, though, that sometimes the lines between evangelism and discipleship are blurred. I wondered, am I discipling or am I evangelizing? And is there a difference in your mind between the two?

Well, in the New Testament sense, to be a disciple is to be a learner. And actually, in the Jewish world, it was sort of like being an apprentice.

So not just like reading a book, being a learner, but usually more of a life on life, learner, rabbi and disciple. And Jesus did that with his disciples. Now I think we can kind of get into a theological discussion.

Is a person being discipled before they really believe in Jesus? Well, you know, if you're teaching them the Bible and they're learning Bible stories, in a certain sense, yes.

But to ultimately belong to Jesus, a person does need to make some kind of a faith commitment, repentance, baptism, saying, yes, Jesus is that Christ, that Messiah, that fulfillment of the promise of God, that one who alone can redeem us and bring us back into relationship with God. Somewhere along the line, a person's going to need to make that choice. And at that point, obviously, new spiritual life happens.

And that's different than where the spiritual life, the new birth, regeneration, has not yet taken place. And the seed then can begin to grow. And that's where most of us talk about discipleship, is that seed of new life beginning to grow in that believer.

But if you're teaching the Bible before they've actually been born again and have that new life, then you're sort of preparing the soil for the seed, as it were.

That was some really crazy stuff, talking.

About naked Christianity, pure gospel, what it means to be born again, how we're dealing with so many different factors within our culture, and yet the mission of.

Christ continues to go forth.

I want to invite you to join me next week as we continue this discussion and also want to let you know or give a big shout out to Kathy Brothers of Keller Williams Innovate. If you're looking to buy or sell a home in the Chicagoland area.

Then you need to call Kathy because she is a rocking real estate agent and she's got a fabuloso team. She comes with years of experience and loves people. She's trustworthy and cares about her clients. I know and I can say this because I am one of them.

She's my agent and as I've said before, she met with us, she sat down, she found out what we were looking for and what we were really needing as a family, then presented us with the best options and helped us find what was right for us. And she didn't only help us purchase a home but is regularly checked in to see how we are doing.

Tell her Travis sent you.

That's it for today everybody. Again, I gotta give shout out and props to all of those who make this show happen.

I want to thank Kevin O'Brien, executive editor and chief strategy office officer, our social media mavens Eliana Fleming and Rebecca Badal and then Brian Dana, our engineer who always manages to make us sound good. Water your faith, water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.