3. Stepping Out - Making Friends
So let us be a people who, knowing the love of God, choose to recognise our circle of comfort, choose to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit and choose to obey and STEP OUT and away and across the room and reach out a hand, “Hullo, my name is David.”
At that moment we enter what Bill Hybels calls “The Zone of the Unknown”. We don’t know what is going to happen next. Sometimes we will never know.
What is happening is the beginnings of friendship. When, like Jesus, we STEP OUT we are being kind, tolerant, patient. We are being friendly. Making friends, Why?
Well even Vladimir Putin, at his last Head of State meeting with George Bush suggested, "Let's be friends". But out reasons for friendship are different:
- Inspired by the Holy Spirit we see the other person as valuable, a wonderful creation of God, someone he loves dearly. In every way equal in value to us.
- We also take the view that that person would be in a much better place in their life if they knew the love and grace of Jesus as we do. Do you believe this?
- And we understand that somehow, mysteriously, God chooses to use our attempts at friendliness to draw someone into a new, rescued, free, forever with him.
Erik is going to talk for a while about an example of Jesus extending friendship and his own experience of making friends. Then I am going to come back and discuss some practicals about being friendly. How to make a habit out of being a friend.
ERIK
So, we have moved from the circle of comfort into the zone of the unknown. We have walked across a room, we have extended our hand to someone, and said hello. What happens next? What do we do next?
Birgit, my wife, and I have, by accident, become quite good at reaching out, not because we wanted to but because we had to. As many of you will remember, we came to the UK about six years ago from South Africa. Shortly after we arrived, I got a job in Leeds and we moved up here. We knew absolutely no-one around here. On top of that, the people here seemed extremely strange to us.
My first day in Leeds, I got a burger from a van down by Leeds Market. A teenage girl was serving me and after handing me the burger she says, “That’ll be 2 pound, love.” I thought, “Oh, no! She’s coming on to me.” I didn’t know any better. I thought, “I know English girls are supposed to be easy, but surely they can’t be that easy. What do I do?” If that sounds odd, you can imagine my shock when the captain of my football team, this wrinkled 50 year old bloke who chain-smokes cigars, says to me, “You all right, love.”
But we also knew that we had to build up relationships with people if we wanted to survive. Back in Pretoria, we had quite a large circle of friends, people pretty much like us. We spoke the same language, we shared the same interests, we did the same things. Over here, there wasn’t anyone like that, at least no-one we could immediately see.
So, we had to set out deliberately to make friends. We started calling people up and inviting them round. Or invited ourselves round to them. To be fair, most people re-acted surprisingly positively to that.
And every time we invited someone new we went through our story again, about who we were and why we’d come over and when we were going back, and yes, we spoke German at home, isn’t that weird etc, etc. And we’d ask about them, why they were here, what they did, how they ended up together if they were a couple, what they were interested in.
For a long time, it was really hard work. Everybody we met was very different from us. There were plenty of people we liked, but few people where we could say immediately that they fit, you know, that they shared our interests or views. It probably took about a year before someone phoned us up to invite us round to theirs. Plenty of people had done that very English thing, you know. They say “We must have you round some time”, and then they never talk to you again? But we kept going because there really wasn’t any other choice.
It turns out that what we were doing is very biblical. It’s what Jesus did all the time. We mentioned last week the very long walk across a very large room that Jesus took. He left the comfort of being at one with God, stepped across the entire universe and entered our reality, becoming a human being just like us.
But Jesus did not stop there. Once on earth, he continuously stepped outside the comfort of his companionship with the disciples to reach out to other people, people who needed a touch of grace.
One such person was the tax-collector Zacchaeus. His story is told at the beginning of Luke 19: 1 – 10. Jesus is travelling along the road with his disciples. They’re probably chatting away, telling some in-joke about Peter getting himself all wet trying to walk on water. Suddenly Jesus stops and looks up at this short, slightly elderly chap sitting a bit precariously on a branch in a tree by the side of the road. And he says, “Come on down, I must stay at your house.”
You can imagine what the disciples are thinking at that point, can’t you? They’re probably thinking, “Oh, no. Not another tax collector. Can’t we stay with someone normal for change?”
Nevertheless they troop along to have dinner at this man’s house. And suddenly in the middle of the meal, Zacchaeus jumps up, admits he has been cheating people and begins to set things right. The astonishing thing is, Jesus hadn’t said anything, no profound insight into Zacchaeus’ sinfulness or how he needed to repent, or anything like that. Jesus just sat down and shared a meal with him. He spent time and built relationship with him. And that act completely changed Zacchaeus’ life.
Paul picks up on what Jesus did in his letter to the Romans.
Romans 2:4
Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realising that God's kindness leads you towards repentance?
The verse fits into a passage where Paul is really telling the Roman church off for straying from God, but it also reveals something telling about how God works. It is God’s kindness and patience and tolerance, in other words, it is God’s friendship that turns people to salvation.
The same counts for our friendships. If we build relationships with people based on kindness and tolerance and patience, irrespective of who they are, then God can reach into those relationships. He can use our relationships to turn people towards salvation.
DAVID
Are we saying that all those people whom you could possibly befriend are “targets”? Unknown to them you are learning strategic friendship techniques so as to, undetected, creep under their anti-religious radar and get them converted?
Definitely not. Yes, do be deliberately friendly, as Erik quoted from Romans 2, be kind, patient and tolerant, but not in order to score a friendship hit. Do it because of what I said at the beginning: because God loves every person, they are as valuable as you and me, and because they would be infinitely better off if they too knew the Jesus who loved and died for them.
Ask yourself this question, “Would I still be a friend to this person if I knew now that they would never make a decision to follow Jesus?” If your answer is “No” then you are pursuing friendship for the wrong reasons.
The reason we pursue friendship, the reason we try to be kind, patient and tolerant, is because that is how Jesus would treat them and it is through our friendship that he can touch their lives – whether or not they ever respond.
Now this next bit may be really obvious to some of you. If so please bear with me. But I want to offer some tips about how to go about stretching out your hand into the Zone of the Unknown and saying, “Hullo”. Jesus of course offers us the best example.
In 1936 Dale Carnegie wrote what became a famous book, How to make friends and influence people. He summarised part of it as follows:
Six ways to make people like you:
1. Become genuinely interested in other people
It is key that this is genuine. You can’t fake kindness, tolerance and patience for long. If you are not in that place maybe you need to go back to the Lord and ask him to give you a heart for the lost and eyes to see the value in other people.
It means taking a long term interest and being there for them in a consistent way. Create relationship over time.
Keep communicating
2. Smile
Laugh with them. Make your body language positive, welcoming. Make eye contact. Touch – appropriately. Be kind, courteous, polite. Persist in pleasantness with the difficult people
3. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language
Learn their name and try and remember it. Say it back to them
Name diaries – keep a record of names and conversations
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
- ”What is your story”. Tell me about your family
- Don’t get offended. Don't be someone around whom people walk on eggshells
- Talk in terms of the other person's interests
- Show an interest in them. Remember what your last conversation was about and pick up on it next time
- Be aware of their issues
- Be aware of social conventions – bad breath, use of money, dress sense
5. Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely
Well if what I have said about them being equally valuable is true then they are important, just as important as you or as anyone else.
Try and escape from your own bubble of self-consciousness.
Follow up with them – to show you do value them.
Bill Hybels book discusses some other ways of befriending people:
1. Proximity
When you have a choice about where to go try and choose places where you are more likely to meet people who need to meet Jesus. So if you are meeting a friend for coffee go to Café Nero, don’t come to the Vineyard Centre (although you are welcome at anytime). Don’t drop the kids off at school yards away from the gate but park up and go and stand where the other parents are. Hang out in the pubs and clubs and cafes and work places and sport venues where you can meet people. Don’t just retreat to the corner or the Vineyard meeting or home all the time.
Steve Barber, pastor of Leicester Vineyard has a novel way of meeting people like him. He was driving down the road on his hands-free phone when he missed the bleep warning him about the speed camera.
Instead of points he was offered a “Speed Awareness Course”. He said it was a 3 hour workshop which offered him a great opportunity to meet some other people who drift over the speed limit just like him!
The reason I don’t like calling this, what we are doing here, "church", is because when you are standing at the bar of the pub engaging in conversation with someone or when you are serving in a game of tennis or when you are debating a programming glitch in the IT department, you are just as much doing church as you are sitting here.
Start with the easy ones – who do I like, enjoy the company?
Invite them to take part in your life, help them, serve them.
2. Keep in Style
We all have different styles. Alison is gentle and relational, I am more confrontational and challenging, David Wallace is exploratory and finding out about you, Sally is a server and helper, Ben invites you into having a good time, Kate is an enthusiast and inviter.
Don’t try and be like me or any of them, be who you are – but be kind, tolerant and patient too.
3. Commonality
Like Dale Carnegie says, find out something they are really interested in and with which you have something in common and then give them a chance to talk about it.
1 Corinthians 9:19-23
I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I may save some.
If you are a ruby league fan and want to get into a conversation with the Mitie manager on duty today, Brian, just ask him to tell you about Leeds Rhinos. Go with him to watch them!
When I was sitting round a table with a group of Nurse Practitioners the other night (it's a long story), I asked them about how they handled the challenge of the immigrant and asylum seeker population. I have a political and pastoral interest – they have a professional interest. That got them into conversation.
Reveal something of yourself – vulnerability, failure – take the mickey out of yourself
4. Sensitivity
Be normal. Don’t for goodness sake start quoting bible verses and spiritual language. I could have said to the Nurse Practitioners, “well you have to understand that the Old Testament prophets were quite definite in their injunction to provide from temple sacrificial resources for the stranger and the alien in your midst.”
They would just think I am weird. Be normal. The chance to explain spiritual things will come, but wait until they really, really want to know and can negotiate the strange language. Someone who has never been to a church event before may be best going to a Reach Out activity first or the summer BBQ in Meanwood Park.
Environment leap: be aware of the move from an environment where you are both at home and comfortable to one where you know what is going on but they don't; where their touch points, anchors, have gone.
Avoid negative language, gossip, murmuring, complaint
STEPPING OUT
I have been trying to encourage you to be kind, tolerant and patient people, to be friendly. Because this is what provides Jesus with the way to bring people to repentance. This is because being friendly is what you need when you have walked all the way across the room to say, “Hullo”.
If you become aware of your circle of comfort and hear the voice of the Holy Spirit nudging you to walk across the room. And if you overcome the passivity and fear and STEP OUT. But if when you get there you avoid eye contact, don’t shake hands, never let them get a word in edgeways, whinge and complain about the food, get their name wrong and, to top it all, release stale, coffee flavoured breath up their nostrils … you may find that the Zone of the Unknown becomes the Zone of the Alone.
Let us be kind, tolerant, patient people who are good at being friendly and indeed at making friends. Let us be people whose kindness leads the lost to repentance and rescue from a life without God; to a forever in the presence of his grace and mercy and love.
David Flowers and Erik Peeters, 13/04/2008