Pastor challenges Christians to speak with nonbelievers

Rather than retreating from the challenge of world religions in an increasingly pluralistic society, Christians should enter into honest dialogue with people who hold different beliefs, said Dallas pastor Jim Denison.
   
“We seek to know those we are seeking to persuade,” said Denison, pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas.
   
Denison spoke on world religions at a conference sponsored by the John Newport Foundation.
   
The foundation is committed to carrying on the legacy of John Newport, who served for more than 40 years as a philosophy of religion professor and an administrator at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
   
Newport taught a three-step approach to cross-cultural evangelism: Seek to understand different worldviews, find common ground while maintaining distinctive beliefs, and proclaim the gospel in both word and deed, said Denison, who was first a student and later a colleague of Newport’s at Southwestern Seminary.
   
That approach matched the method Jesus modeled in His encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, as recorded in John’s gospel, Denison noted. Jesus understood the woman he met at the well was a social outcast, and he understood her Samaritan belief system better than she did.
   
Similarly, Christians need to understand the other person before seeking to be understood, and they need to get to know people before they try to persuade them to consider Christ’s claims, Denison said.
   
“So how do we confront our pluralistic and relativistic age in the context of world religions? First, we seek to understand the worldview we are attempting to change. We understand the question and the person asking it. We learn why they are asking their question. We exegete the culture before we seek to address it with the gospel,” he said.
   
Next, Christians should engage in respectful dialogue with people who hold different worldviews, looking for points of commonality without surrendering distinctive beliefs.
   
Both Jesus and the Samaritan woman came to the well seeking the same thing: water. Jesus used that shared desire to point the woman to “living water.”
   
While Christians need to find common ground for dialogue, they have a responsibility to “explode the myth” that all religions teach essentially the same truth, Denison added.
   
“Various world religions are not different roads up the same mountain. They are, indeed, different mountains,” he said.
   
Finally, Christians need to “witness with works and words,” Denison said. “We must be what we ask the other person to become.”  (ABP)