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Videos That Make Us Laugh and Think- Pt 10- Sharing Faith- Pt 1

By Dan | July 16, 2008

This video on sharing faith really struck me as funny, but also as sadly true. Many of us fall into a couple of traps in terms of sharing faith. In the first camp, people try valiantly to talk about faith, but fall into traps like using Christianese terms, words that you’ve heard in church, but can’t really explain to someone from a nonchurched background, or get upset and frustrated when people don’t agree with you.

In the other camp, and this is by far the larger of the two, you simply don’t talk about faith at all. Generally the reasons for not sharing fall somewhere into the categories suggested by this very entertaining video which I referenced in a sermon I did last year.

Both of these are problems and sometimes they’re even related. We get over our fear and share our faith and then the experience is awkward or we find ourselves using Christianese or getting frustrated. Or maybe the person we talk to was burned by someone who previously shared the faith, but did so in a really forceful or condemning way.

This week, I present some of the problems. This is an issue that I think deserves a little more discussion, so this post will actually transition us into a series focusing on witnessing and hopefully we can present some answers in addition to the problems.

For this week, what’s your reaction? What most frightens you about witnessing? What do you think has contributed to your fears or any bad experiences in the past? Have you ever started talking to someone and had the experience go really well? Maybe more than you expected?