The son of a dear friend went with his church youth group some years ago on a mission trip to another city.  Every student was required to spend a certain amount of time each day involved in street witnessing.  They were given pre-written scripts with stock questions and answers they were to use in each conversation with a potential convert.  In one of those encounters, Keith approached a young woman and, reading from the script in the palm of his hand, asked her, “May I tell you about the most important thing in my life?”  She reached across, took the script from his hand, looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Yes, go right ahead.” 

Certain things just can’t be scripted.  Take a bride and groom at the altar.  The preacher asks him, “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love, respect, comfort, honor and keep her in sickness and health and, forsaking all others, to cleave unto her only so long as you both shall live?”  What do you think would happen if he read from a cheat sheet or asked to phone a friend?  In that sacred moment, if ever, there is at least one other person who needs to know and hear the unscripted truth. 

Jesus left his disciples with what has become known as the Great Commission.  From that day forward, they were to lead others to be his followers.  This text has historically been interpreted to be Jesus’ commission, not only to those eleven disciples, but also to his church until he returns.  Jesus is concerned with the spiritual regeneration of every soul; he has commanded us to serve as his change agents in this world by calling people to be his followers.  Our methodology is to include teaching others what he taught us and baptizing them when they respond obediently to his call.  But, very little else causes most Christians and churches with which I have been involved more grief, in one way or another, than struggling with how to actually go about doing just that.  Partly because we haven’t learned the difference between reading a script someone else wrote for us and just sharing the unscripted truth as we have come to experience it. 

In Jr. High and High School drama, when we put on act plays, we were handed a script and expected to memorize it, line for line.  In seventh grade, I actually won the lead role in The Absent-Minded Professor.  We kept rehearsing and rehearsing until, on the night of the performance, we’d gotten every word perfectly right.  That works in school plays.  It doesn’t work in real life, where we should be more concerned about relating than performing.  Especially when it comes to sharing our faith, people don’t want to hear well-rehearsed church lines.  If they give us a hearing about God at all, people want to hear, need to hear, the unscripted truth as we know it.

We won’t always get it right when we live with that kind of unrehearsed freedom.  Charlotte Lambert emails from Sweden that she and Wayne still miss us terribly.  They have found a Lutheran church they enjoy though Wayne has struggled some with the liturgy.  In one service, when the congregation was to respond to the minister’s reading by saying, “Yahweh,” Wayne instead said “Yahoo.”  We won’t always get our yahoos and Yahwehs right.  But, we’re far more likely to lead people to Yahweh if we share the unscripted truth about our experience with Jesus from our hearts instead of well-rehearsed lines someone else wrote for us.  Especially ones motivated out of a sense of guilt that it is our responsibility to save the whole world.

Jesus did say, “make disciples of all nations.”  And, for years, the script too many others wrote for me using those exact words left me feeling personal responsible for saving the whole world.  Of course, no one actually wrote that.  But, it sure sounded that way.  Is that what Jesus commanded us to do?  The preacher or visiting evangelist would often make it sound as though, if I passed by even one person without sharing “the plan of salvation” that person might go to hell and it would be my fault.  Guilt!  Big time!  Everywhere I turned in church.  The world was dying and it was my fault!  In the posters on the wall, in the sermons, songs and revival-time testimonies.  Frankly, with regard to this text, I heard so much more at church about guilt for my failing at my responsibility than hope for God’s world when it came to this very text.  “Save the whole world!” they scripted Jesus’ words to say.  One question, all these years, remains unanswered.  What about the millions who are born and die and never hear about Jesus?  Are they my or your personal responsibility?  Is that what Jesus was saying when he said, “all nations”? 

In my youth, I took that sense of responsibility so seriously that I even challenged the unbelief of others to the point of coercion.  I have some painfully sad memories.  In particular, I will never forget Bobby Herring.  We grew up in the same neighborhood.  From our elementary years until high school, we hung out together.  One major difference.  My family went to church every Sunday.  His rarely did, if ever.  One summer, I drug Bobby with me to the stadium crusade.  During the invitation, as the verses of the hymn were strung together over and over, I begged and pleaded with Bobby to “go forward.”  Finally, he gave up and did just that.  He was an extremely shy person.  Standing there in front of all those people must have overwhelmed him.  He went forward alright.  But, only to get me off his back, I’m sure.  After that, to my knowledge, he never darkened the door of a church, was never baptized and our relationship was destroyed.  I never got another hearing with Bobby.

Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if I was motivated by genuine concern for Bobby’s soul or, more, by the fear that if I didn’t at least try to get him down front during the invitation he might go to hell and his blood would be on my hands.  And, it is that oversimplified way of thinking about evangelism and missions that, in my personal opinion, has done more to undermine evangelism and missions in our churches than not.  People, as a healthy rule, don’t function well for long motivated only by guilt.  Here is what I have come to learn. 

First, I don’t have to know what God is going to do with all those who are born and die never hearing the gospel of Jesus.  I do believe, as the scripture says, about Jesus, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12, NIV).”  The scriptures offer no hope for anyone who rejects Jesus outright.  I would argue that what people sometimes reject is not Jesus but guilt-laden and legalistic religion that masks the true gospel of Christ.  I met some men once in another city who had been Baptists once.  When they were teenagers, they went dancing one Friday night.  On Sunday morning, the pastor called them to the front of the church and told them that they’d be kicked out of the church if they didn’t repent.  Thirty years later, they still hadn’t gone back to church.  They weren’t rejecting Jesus, just someone’s confused idea about Jesus. 

Jesus, not obedience to someone’s culturally confused sense of morality, is God’s only provision for our eternal hope.  Part of what that means is that God has not left the salvation of even one other person in the hands of anyone but his son Jesus.  God is just as committed to the salvation of every person ever born as he is to mine (2 Peter 3:9).  How God will ultimately accomplish that is not a question he holds me responsible for answering, only whether I will be responsible for sharing what I do know of Jesus to be true, as I seek out the opportunities God has given.

When Jesus said “all nations,” what he meant, as much as anything, is that there should be no boundaries on how far we are willing to go in order to share what God is up to in saving the world.  For some of us, crossing the street to tell our neighbor will be our highest calling.  Others of us won’t reach the outer boundaries of obedience until we cross an ocean and plant our lives in another culture and continent.  For all of us, there should be no place, no relationship, in which we would not be willing to go and share the story of God’s saving hope in Christ as we have come to know it.  God does the saving.  He only asks that we do the sharing.  That’s the first thing I have come to learn.  There is one other, at least.

While the truth is not relative to our experience, we can only share what we have personally come to know.  Jesus commanded his disciples to teach “everything that I have commanded you.”  We are to point people, through and in spite of our limited knowledge and experience to Jesus.  Even in spite of our doubts.  Did you catch these words that are almost invisible because they are overshadowed.

When the disciples met Jesus that day, “they worshipped him; but some doubted.”  Some of the eleven had gone all that distance, through the miracles, the death, burial and even resurrection of Jesus, doubts still in tact.  Jesus nonetheless commanded them to go and make disciples as if to say, “faith is not found in answers to our questions as much as in answering God’s call with obedience even when we still have questions.”  We are not free today because every American patriot who ever died on some battlefield fully understood the logic of his or her commander’s orders.  We are free today because, for them, patriotism meant answering a higher calling than the need to have every question answered before marching into battle.  Faith doesn’t mean having answers to every intellectual riddle.  It means trusting God enough to walk with him knowing that, what answers we need he will supply as we go and the rest won’t ultimately matter. 

Jesus once asked his disciples, “Who do people say” I am?  And, they told him.  “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”  Then, taking away Peter’s script, Jesus asked him, “But who do you say that I am?”  This time, unscripted and from the heart, Peter confessed the most important thing he’d ever learned, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:13).”  And, Jesus promised Peter that, on that great truth, his eternal kingdom would be built, a kingdom against which even hell itself would not prevail.  That’s the unscripted truth.  That’s all we really have to know.  That’s all Jesus calls us to share.