This thread, with its talk about badly behaved evangelists and apologists, reminded me of an important lesson that I learned as a teenager.
When I was fourteen years old, for several weeks in church we were subjected to one sermon after another on the subject of persecution. Week after week after week, preacher after preacher after preacher would tell us all about how awful things were in society, and how if we really were walking with Christ then we should expect to be treated badly and vilified by those around us, and how if we werenât being treated badly and vilified by those around us, then we were Doing It Wrong.
It was all pretty depressing stuff, but it was pretty depressing stuff that I could relate to. At the time, I was having a rough time at school. I was struggling to fit in, to make friends and to settle down, and I was getting bullied a lot. There were various reasons for thisâamong them the double culture shock of moving from Scotland to the south of England and from an upmarket fee-paying prep school to a local comprehensive, and no doubt there was an element of the âwhy nerds are unpopularâ factor in the mix as wellâbut all these sermons on persecution provided my adolescent mind with a completely different explanation: it was because I was a Christian, taking a stand for righteousness, and the fact that I was struggling socially was evidence that I was Doing It Right.
This just ended up making the problem worse, because it left me viewing myself as somehow superior to my classmates, believing that I was the adult human being in the room while they were all acting like Neanderthals. I stopped even trying to make friends, and I even ended up viewing the other teenagers at church who were doing a better job of fitting in socially than I was as some sort of lukewarm compromisers. Try to imagine a cross between Sheldon Cooper and Ken Ham and youâll get the picture.
It was more than a year later that it started to dawn on me that maybe I wasnât Doing It Right. There was one day when I was sitting on my own at lunchtime, reading and writing, as I usually did, when a group of my classmates invited me to come and join in their conversation. They werenât being nasty, they really were trying to be friendly. They said to me that they thought I should join in with their lunchtime conversations on a regular basis because they were interested in hearing what I had to say and just sitting on my own wasnât doing me any favours in that respect.
So I didâand I really enjoyed it. That lunchtime conversation was the turning point at which I started to make friends, fit in socially, be taken seriouslyâand have some really great and fruitful conversations about Jesus. It wasnât all plain sailing of courseâthe sermons on persecution did have some valid points to makeâbut it made me realise that much of the flak that Iâd been getting had not been on account of my faith, but on account of some really bad attitudes that Iâd ended up cultivating.
The problem with all those sermons about persecution wasnât with what they said, but with what they didnât say. There is one particular point that every pastor needs to hammer home to their congregations whenever they teach about persecution, and it is this.
There is a difference between being persecuted for being a Christian and being âpersecutedâ for being a jerk.
I learned the lesson, but it seems that there are a lot of other Christians out there who havenât. There are a lot of other Sheldon Cooper/Ken Ham hybrids who believe that theyâre being persecuted for being a Christian when in actual fact they are only getting flak for things that really are a problem and that they really do need to stop doingâsuch as aloofness, condescension or dishonesty.
