01/05/2023
"Do you experience persecution on campus?". This is what a lot of people ask us. Whenever we speak at a church, or someone calls us, this is a pretty constant question that is asked. The answer is no, we do not experience persecution on campus (Is there persecution happening? According to our brothers and sisters in China, and other places where actual persecution is happening, they would say we are not experiencing persecution at all, so I am going to go with the ones who know and experience persecution on a daily basis). Some may say that if we are not experiencing persecution, that means that we are not preaching the gospel, or we are watering down the truth of Jesus message and what the Bible has to say.
We in the western church love to have an enemy to fight against. We have built whole systems off of it, we have devoted huge amounts of money to fight it (Think communism, homosexual agenda, atheism). Fear has kept us vigilant and has kept our guard up for so long, that this is all we know in the Western church. I acknowledge that the things listed above are scary, that they do deny scripture and go against Gods plan for the world (so you woke hunters out there can breathe a sigh of relief, we haven't had liberal drift in our theology). But this mindset is what has molded us, and often times this has been the driving force behind us studying the Bible.
Herein lies the problem. Jesus called us in Mark 12:29-30 to love God (Himself) first, and 2nd to love our neighbor as ourselves. This kind of love we see being used by Jesus to build relationships with everyone he came across (he called out sin, but his focus wasn't on sin, but the focus was on his saving power: John 3:17.). We have been doing ministry since 2009, and I have tried the sin first focus evangelism, the one that hyper focuses on pointing out peoples sins, that stays there and that isn't really effective, because building salvation on the sin, just builds it on the wrong focus. This is one of the reasons we have had so many people leave the church (over 40 million have left the church in the past 40 years in the United States). I never once saw students coming to Christ through this method (I used to be called the "truth nuke" on our campus, and I actually had a student tell me once, "I hope you get cancer and die" ). It isn't a method Jesus used at all, and that should be a warning for us. What we have seen be effective is lovingly building a relationship with non believing students, pointing out there sin within the context of a relationship, and focusing on Jesus as the main thing. For example, this semester a student asked me what I believed about his specific sin, and I responded, "The Bible is very clear that that is a sin, a sin against God, but it isn't an ultimate sin and Jesus as God died on the cross for that sin." The student told me he had never thought about it that way, because the church he grew up in just hyper focused on that sin, and fighting against it. This is a story we hear every week from students on campus all across Kansas, and have for all of our 13 years doing this. We have a focus problem in the western church, and our focus isn't on Jesus. We need to refocus and that will require us to apologize to our neighbors, whoever that may be, and admit we have not been doing what Jesus called us to do. If we are to do what Jesus called us to do in Matthew 28:18-20, if we are to be the people that Paul called for in 2 Timothy 2:2, we need to focus on Jesus.
