I’ve known these girls for over half my life. Our friendship has persisted beyond high school, through tertiary education and into the workforce. We’ve gone on holidays together, we’ve gathered for movies and dinners (and deconstructed those movies over dinner), and the sum total of our paper and electronic correspondence could probably rival the Oxford English Dictionary.
Naturally, over the years, I’ve wanted to introduce my school friends to God. Most of them come from non-Christian backgrounds, and their understanding of Christianity is superficial.
Through a serendipitous series of events, I was given Introducing God, the evangelistic DVD course based on Two Ways to Live. My former Bible study group had tried it out a few years ago with modest success, and I was keen to do it again. I thought perhaps my school friends would be interested. So over a period of 12 months, I asked God for an opportunity to ask them, and then an opportunity presented itself. My mother’s partner purchased property on the south coast. He wasn’t adverse to me going there for holidays, so I invited my friends for a weekend away. I said to them, “I’d like to give you guys the opportunity to meet the God of the Bible. I was thinking we could watch a DVD about him, and then you could tell me what you think of it. Later, if you’re interested, I could show you the next one, and so on and so forth.”
My friends liked this suggestion, so on the Saturday night of our holiday, we sat down, watched the introductory talk and discussed it over dinner. At times, I didn’t know how to respond to what was being said, but some of my other school friends who were Christians did. And afterwards, everyone seemed keen to watch more.
I came away exultant, praising God and thinking that all our subsequent meetings would be like this. Over the course of the 11 talks, my non-Christian friends would come to know Jesus as their personal Lord and saviour, and pledge to follow, love and serve him all their days. Or so I hoped.
In the new year when the holidays were over and everyone was back at work, I contacted all my school friends to arrange a time when they could come over and watch the next talk. Then one friend who had seemed positive at the weekend away bowed out, saying that she had felt pressured to convert and was not comfortable. In addition, most of my Christian school friends couldn’t make it. So in the end, there was just four of us—two Christians and two non-Christians. And, despite our reduced numbers, our second meeting was also fruitful: we met, we ate, we talked, and I came away encouraged.
Then we started having problems.
Firstly, there was the endless tyranny of the calendar. Trying to coordinate four diaries was near impossible at times. Weekdays were out because two of us worked in extremely demanding jobs. Weekends were also in limited supply, and sometimes important events like family gatherings and weddings would crop up. This meant that subsequent meetings became haphazard. Often a month or two would pass between sessions, and this made continuity and remembering previous talks difficult.
Secondly, during one of the most crucial sessions (‘The death that changes everything’), my DVD player started acting up, skipping ahead every four seconds. It was too late to do anything about it, so we put up with it for the entire talk. I’m sure none of us took anything in.
Thirdly, as time went on, I started to feel like my two non-Christian friends weren’t as interested in discussing the things of God as I was, and that they were only doing it to humour me. They enjoyed the social aspect, but not so much the spiritual aspect. Furthermore, they were just too nice: they were so keen to keep the peace, they wouldn’t say what they really thought. I started to get discouraged.
At the end of 15 months, we finally finished the course. I asked my friends to explain what Christianity is about based on what they’d learned. One floundered and was unable to articulate the gospel at all. The other could, but recited it as if it were a fairy story.
Even so, I praise God—praise him for the time we were able to spend talking about the gospel, the things that were said and the opportunities he gave us to challenge our two non-Christian friends. But I am sad that the people I love so much are still travelling on the road to hell.
Since then, I’ve suggested that we study the Bible together—perhaps working through Tough Questions or some such thing—but nothing has come of it. We’ve continued to meet socially for dinners and movies, the emails continue to fly, and occasionally I’ll invite them to some evangelistic event (and sometimes they’ll even come). But things have stayed much the same; the gospel has not yet penetrated their hearts.
Maybe one day God will have mercy on them. Until then, I keep them in my prayers.
