A couple visited our service one Sunday when I was a pastor in Mobile, Alabama. They were members of another church in town that had a reputation for being very evangelistic. I went to see them in their home the next night, because that’s the way things were done twenty years ago in Mobile. They told me they liked the church okay but that they didn’t like the sermon. (It was not the first or the last time I’ve heard that, don’t you know?!) They thought it wasn’t evangelistic enough. I didn’t present the plan of salvation clearly and plainly so that some lost person who might be there that day might be saved.

I have taken this critique from time to time in my ministry, but I have not taken it to heart because I think it is wrongheaded. When you come to worship, you come to express your love and praise to God and to be challenged to go out into the world again to love and serve the Lord and your neighbor. And that includes being a witness to your neighbor. When those who do not believe in Jesus as the Christ come among us in worship, they should be overhearing the way those who do believe express their faith in him. Nonbelievers are not the primary audience for the preacher.

We Christians should be witnesses to others about our faith in Jesus as the Christ in our everyday lives during the week. But how we do that is as important as that we do that.

Too often Christians witness in ways that make themselves feel good for their efforts and everyone else feel bad for them. We have sometimes elevated rudeness to a virtue. St. Peter tells us that we should always be ready to make a defense to others about our faith; and yet, he says, do it with gentleness and reverence. Give defense, in other words, without giving offense.

We have a good example of this in the Book of Acts with the Apostle Paul witnessing to the learned elite of Athens on the Areogapus, also known as Mars Hill. First, please note that the evangelism being done by Paul and being taught by Peter is an invited conversation from others about what you believe. It is a defense, so to speak, of what you believe and why. It is not a strategic offensive in which you marshal your arguments and target the so-called lost for conversion. People know when you care about them as human beings and when they are being treated as prospects for a sales pitch.

Some years ago a young couple came to visit Kim and me in our home. They were fellow seminarians, and they said they wanted to talk with us about an exciting new ministry. I asked what it was about, and the man wouldn’t tell me. His elusiveness made me wonder if he were selling Amway under a new marketing ploy for ministers. I asked him point blank if that’s what he was doing; he said no. So we had him over, and he began his pitch, showing us pictures of luxury cars and vacations and asking us if we would like to have these. When I told him no, that that wasn’t what our lives were about, he didn’t know what to do next because everyone always says yes to those things. Go figure. I finally got it out of him that he was trying to enlist us as—yes, I had guessed it—Amway agents. He said we could help minister to people by offering them financial freedom. I threw them out of the house and have been instructed by the evening ever since.

A lot of people who are witnessed to feel more like targets than people. Christians think of them as the lost that need to be saved, not as John or Mary or Joe or Nancy. We have the whole plan-of-salvation thing rehearsed in the sweet marketing package of Four Spiritual Laws or Evangelism Explosion’s two diagnostic questions. But people can sniff us out just as quickly as I did the Amway salesman.

The good news of Jesus Christ is not a commodity that needs selling. It’s not an idea that needs pitching. It’s not a plan for self-improvement that needs sharing. It’s an announcement of what God has done in Christ for the whole world free of charge, once and for all, apart from our efforts. In sharing our faith with people, we are not responsible for finishing a job Christ has left half done—as if the gift of God to the world is really only an offer that some will receive because they get the word and others won’t because the sales and marketing department has not done its part.

I grew up thinking that everyone around me was going to hell unless I or someone else could convince them otherwise. They would be saved if I could find a way to get through to them to pray the sinner’s prayer and receive Jesus into their hearts. Jesus was in my heart, and he wanted to be in their hearts, but he could reach them only if I reached out to them first.

There is no such assumption in these Bible texts, even if the role of being witnesses for Christ is important and biblical. When we tell people about what we believe, we are trying to say that what we believe is true about the way things really are with God and the world that doesn’t depend upon someone believing the same way in order to make those things true. For instance, Jesus is Lord of all, including Lord of those who do not believe in him. We do not make him Lord by believing in him. If I tell you that gravity exists, I don’t mean that I think it exists for me and could exist for you if you would only believe in it. It is what it is: it doesn’t need our spin to make it so.

And so when we tell someone, as Paul did, that we believe in a God that is over all things and all people and is not a tribal god to be kept on a shelf or to be worshiped only by white people in the West or rich people in the South, we are just giving a defense of what we believe is so. God is near to everyone. So near, in fact, that we don’t have to give God to anyone or send them searching. God is so near that it is God who sends us all searching. And it is the living Christ at work in everyone’s life that—believers and unbelievers alike—keeps them searching.

There’s an Eastern parable of a young fish that swims up to an older fish and asks: I have heard about something called the ocean. Where is this ocean? The older fish responds that the younger fish is swimming in it and drawing life from it at all times. It’s not something to be looked for; it is something to be grateful for.

Likewise, Paul quotes certain Greek poets with respect when they said, In God we live and move and have our being, and We are all God’s offspring. Paul did not look only for things that were wrong in the world that needed to be righted by his superior insights and knowledge; he looked for points of contact with people in their deepest yearnings. He looked for ways to affirm their spiritual impulses and to point them to a deeper understanding of how near God was to them.

This is a key to being an effective witness. Assume that God is already at work in the world and in people’s lives. Listen to what people are saying. Look for signs of how Christ is making himself known to people. And then enter into those moments with people graciously and respectfully—or, as Peter puts it, gently and reverently.

Paul must have been thinking this way as he walked up Mars Hill. He praised their religious impulses and thought about the altar to the so-called “unknown god” that he had seen earlier. Paul took no formulas with him, no rehearsed script. He was looking for ways to connect with people’s best impulses rather than trying to convince them of their sin in order to convert them to Christ.

If anyone comes to believe, it will be God’s doing and theirs. In the verses following Paul’s address in Athens, we find out that some people wanted to talk more, some rejected his ideas, and a few joined him, only two of whom are mentioned by name—one being a woman. Not a great haul for the great apostle. But that wasn’t the point, and shouldn’t be.

Count conversations, not conversions. Be yourself. Care about people and pray for them to be drawn closer to Jesus. But don’t turn your contact with them into a moral crusade to get them to do what you want them to do to be just like you.

Also note that Paul was uniquely qualified to speak on Mars Hill because he was bilingual, so to speak. He was learned in the Jewish law and in Greek philosophy. Not everyone is equally qualified to witness well to everyone. The Great Fisherman, Simon Peter, would have probably been far clumsier than Paul in that moment. Most of us should stay with what we know best in our witness. We should find our sweet spot and speak from there.

Some people are uniquely gifted at cross-cultural relationships. Missionary types like Julia Graham, and Diana Early. Others are so outgoing that they never meet a stranger—like Mike Bateman and Yvette Patton. They even go into prisons to share their faith with inmates who are desperate for freedom from spiritual bondage. But most of us are at our best in the world we know best. We share the gospel best in that world because we know that language.

My friend Dan Foster is a world-renowned scientist and medical doctor at UT Southwestern and a Sunday school teacher at First Presbyterian downtown. He will always do a better job talking about his Christian faith with skeptical scientific colleagues than I will. And he does. But he doesn’t try to convince them to believe in creation rather than evolution; he talks about the meaning of life that only faith in Christ provides him. My wife, Kim, is right at home talking with young mothers, offering her insights and experiences of faith. Her witness is best done in the language of God’s paternal love and care. Margaret Davis is a school principal who appropriately makes her faith known to educators without trying to force teachers to disregard religious diversity in the classroom in order to press a Christian agenda. Those who have been through recovery from substance abuse are probably the best witnesses to those who are just so troubled. Most of the time most of us are at our best simply living the faith faithfully, praying for people we know, and answering the call of the moment when God seems to put you in the right place at the right time to lead people to consider Christ.

You’ve heard from Peter, Paul, and George so far; but now I will give my daughter Jillian the last word. Yesterday, she and a college classmate were at the farmers’ market in Union Square in New York. They heard a commotion and went to see what was happening. Seems a girl was screaming to anyone who would hear that they ought to repent and accept Jesus as their Savior because you never know when you are going to die, and you want to make sure you’re going to heaven and not to hell. Because she was out there evangelizing in such an inelegant and ineloquent way.

An older man decided it was his duty to match her decibel for decibel. He was telling people not to listen to the sicko Jesus freak kid and to think for themselves. Jillian couldn’t take it any longer, so she went up to the girl and tapped her on the shoulder to say that she didn’t think she was doing Jesus any good that way. She told her that she too is a Christian and that she is glad the girl wants to be a witness for Christ, but that this is not the way. She pointed out that there was no way of seeing any difference between her and the man who was shouting just the opposite things to her message. The girl replied that she was on a mission trip with her church high school group and that they had told her she had to go out and witness like this. She said she kind of knew Jillian was right, but she felt like she should do what her youth minister had told her.

Gently and reverently, people; gently and reverently.