Evangelism in the Negative World
Personal Updates
Endorsements for “God’s Good Design”
I’m excited that my book, “God’s Good Design: A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality,” is almost ready to go to print. The only thing left to do is get the last remaining two or three endorsements to go on the back cover, which should be sent in in the next couple of days.
I reached out to a few well known and respected authors for endorsements, and was shocked when all of them agreed to read the book and consider an endorsement. I was even more shocked that almost all of them got back to me and agreed to endorse the book. One of the endorsers is C. R. Wiley. I’ve learned a lot from Wiley and his influence on my thinking is all over my book. Wiley’s endorsement says, “Michael Clary has written a profound and important book.” It’s humbling to read those words from someone I’ve come to respect so much.
Another endorser is Dr. Owen Strachan. I actually knew Owen from my days on staff with CRU in Louisville, KY. I was leading a Bible study on the book of Romans with some students that went to church with him. So he came along and joined our Bible study and we got to know each other a little bit. I’ll never forget Owen coming to my house once where I showed him my little home music studio. Since Owen likes to moonlight as a rapper, I showed him some of the beats I created on my keyboard and he started dropping rhymes on me like grenades. It was epic.
Owen went on to earn a PhD and has written a handful of books. He’s the former president of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Needless to say, it meant a lot to me to receive Owen’s endorsement. He said,
“God's design really is a beautiful design. Those given eyes to see it will come away from Michael Clary's strong book thinking just that. In these packed pages, you'll find many insights here, much pastoral wisdom, and a lot of courageous care for Christ's church. This is not a book that shames and scorches the reader; it's a book that tells the truth, but always points us to the upward call of God in Christ. We live out God's good design entirely, it turns out, by God's amazing grace.”
King’s Domain Conference on the Value of “Winsomeness”
About six months ago, I started a new ministry initiative called King’s Domain with my friend and co-worker, Wade Thomas, to provide an outlet for addressing cultural issues from a theological perspective. At present, King’s Domain has a few articles published on our website, and a podcast (The Current Reality Podcast).
We also hosted our first conference, which was amazing. We were able to connect with many like-minded Christians to talk about how Christians can faithfully navigate all the chaos of our cultural moment. The conference theme was “Clear Speech for a Confused Age.” All the conference content can be seen here.
I took the main ideas from my conference talk and had it published at American Reformer under the title, “Contextualization: A Trojan Horse for Leftist Propaganda.” The video for my talk is here.
How I Learned an Important Lesson in Evangelism
After the conference was over and I published my piece in American Reformer, I was able to interact with a few people on the topic of “contextualization.” That’s a fifty cent word that basically refers to adapting the message of the gospel to suit a particular hearer (or group of hearers).
I’m not against contextualization, because contextualization is inevitable. Everyone has a context. There’s no such thing as a “view from nowhere.” For example, I am a white, American, mid-western man who speaks English. When I’ve done missions work in Argentina, I had to understand their context and language to communicate effectively with them, which is a good and necessary thing to do. But as I argued in my talk and American Reformer piece, this can be taken too far. We can use the tool of contextualization to remove the parts of the Christian message that a hearer might find offensive. And that’s how we contextualize the truth right out of the church.
From my observation, this is a major temptation in modern times (or what has been called the “Negative World.” If you’re not familiar with that terminology, see Aaron Renn’s message from our King’s Domain Conference). As the world becomes more hostile to the Christian faith, Christians look for more ways to remove anything offensive from our message.
As I was reflecting on this, I thought about how I used to do this myself. So I wrote up this little story and posted it on Twitter, where it promptly went viral. Evidently, this story struck a nerve with a lot of people (in a good way), who have had similar observations or experiences. Here’s the story I posted:
I learned an important ministry lesson years ago from an unbeliever I was trying to evangelize.
I was on staff with CRU & he was a brilliant & thoughtful student. Over the next few years, I shared the gospel with him many times, answering objections & using all the tools.
To answer his more complicated moral, philosophical, and theological objections, I took him to meet one of my theology profs at SBTS. Despite all this, he could never commit to Christ. He was a classic "always learning but never arriving at the church" kind of guy.
Eventually, I moved away to plant a church, and I continued to pray that someday he would come to faith.
Fast forward a few years, he calls me out of nowhere to tell me he'd become a Christian. I also spoke to his new wife, who was also a solid believer.
Not only that, but he had begun taking seminary courses to explore church planting.
I was floored. What finally broke through? What book, apologist, or intellectual finally convinced him? So I asked him.
Someone invited him to a church service and the preacher preached about hell and eternal judgment. It scared the crap out of him and he surrendered to Christ at that moment.
Like, he legit got saved. Radical, immediate conversion.
Looking back, I'd spent the better part of four years appealing to his intellect, talking philosophy & theology. I wanted to prove to him how intellectually satisfying & philosophically robust Christianity is. All that is well & good, but I missed the one thing he needed most.
He needed to know what many Christians want to avoid talking about with unbelievers. He needed what I was too afraid to mention bc I was embarrassed. He needed to know about judgment & hell, the unpleasant doctrines that demonstrate, by contrast, the beauty of the cross.
God gave me a huge part to play in his conversion, for which I'm grateful, but the honor of seeing him cross the finish line went to another man who was faithful in an area where I'd failed.
I'd spent years showing him a "respectable" Christianity, which kept him comfortable in his unbelief. In scripture, however, we learn that "the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Co 1:18).
One plain spoken sermon, that clearly laid out God's wrath against sin and the grace of the cross, had more power than my years of trying to reach him by the human means of appealing to his intellect.
In other words, the foolishness of God is wiser than men.
Postscript
My publisher is hoping to get my book to market by the end of this month. I’m sure whatever shenanigans they come up with for Pride Month will serve as a reminder that we need some sanity on the topic of sexuality, which this book will provide.
I’ll keep you posted as I get more details.