Gospel Norm

Bravery began for me in the depths of Detroit, where there are gas stations, funeral homes, and my high school all within a mile radius. Though the layout and events were abnormal, this was my norm. It was my norm for friends from middle and high school to pass away and for daily shootings and theft to occur.

When this is your norm, you yearn for good news.

I was at the tender age of seventeen when I became a Christian, and I felt compelled to tell everyone what Jesus did. My presentation wasn’t perfect, but my heart longed to point people to Jesus—sometimes through prayer, buying them a meal, or verbally sharing the gospel.

Detroit, on the daily, has its fair share of bad news; even if you turn the TV off you can’t channel out the bad news and brokenness that seems to be around the corner. People turned to robberies and raids because they did not have enough money to make ends meet. I remember the countless times of gathering families together in a circular style, hand in hand as we prayed for them as they lost a son to a shootout. My goal became to meet the brokenness with the beauty of the gospel. At seventeen, I didn’t have silver or gold to offer—even if I wanted to—yet I had Jesus, and he’s better than all the fool’s gold of this world.

I decided that whoever walked by, I would talk to them about Jesus. I’m aware that this is an introvert’s nightmare. This meant I crossed paths with many different types of people, more than I can remember. Some mumbled as they kept moving, and some cursed at me and cursed God. I heard the arguments from every party: atheist, agnostic, spiritualist, and so forth.

One young girl stands out to me. She lived on the opposite corner of my childhood home. I took the relational approach of complimenting her and making jokes before getting deeper.

As I asked her about her walk with God, her eye contact disconnected, and she began to tell me she was pregnant and hadn’t finished high school. After getting it off of her chest about the baby that was in her belly, she looked me in the eyes for a religious reaction—you know that one where your eyebrows raise into your hairline and your mouth goes so sideways it almost reaches your ear. Not for a moment did I give that Pharisee-like facial reaction; instead, I attempted to encourage her to choose life and Jesus, who had already chosen her and loved her beyond her circumstances. I asked how I could help her, so we prayed and exchanged names and numbers. After that, nothing much came of it. I don’t know if she made the right choice or not; all I had was that moment.

Moments like this are made to remind me of the severity and seriousness of the gospel. This may be the last time I grab their hands and have access to preach the gospel to someone’s heart. Life and death hang in the balance.

Yet stories like the one mentioned became redundant, as normal and common as I conversed with young ladies in Detroit. From these conversations, some people pondered what I would present about the brokenness of the sin-infused world: some repented from unforgiveness and anger towards God; some rededicated their lives back to Jesus, meeting me at church on Sunday where we would pray on the altar; some were saved. Other times seeds were planted that seem now unseen.

I didn’t offer a bigger house or more money. I didn’t water down sin or how violent those acts are before God because there’s nothing good about a watered-down drink. And the gospel is the fountain that leads to life; if we water it down, we will run the risk of quenching our thirst on what does not satisfy.

As I continued to do this for three years, I began to develop a more mature method of sharing the message, which I called intentional discipleship. Instead of just praying for people or preaching to them, I saw that a short bit of time (whether ten minutes or three hours) wasn’t enough for transformation. As I reflected on Acts 2 and encouraged people to join me from my church, I felt led to be involved in people’s everyday lives and invite them into something similar. Even though I could herald the good news all day, I was convinced of the fact that there needed to be a hands-on experience with people in their daily lives.

Evangelism is a visual and verbal presentation, and discipleship is hands-on. People need practicality to their pain, they need both evangelism and discipleship, and they need the good news to counteract their bad news and broken lives. People need the norm to become the gospel preached daily.

For some, it was their first introduction to the faith as I evangelized. Many times I would hear things like, “I never knew Jesus had the option to get off the cross but stayed for us to have a relationship with the Father.” I’d see their reactions when they realized that God doesn’t like what their abuser and accuser did to them.

In Detroit, this was a rare thing to see happening, and people would frequently testify that the prayers we prayed or the Scripture we studied were timely and eye-opening. The gospel shouldn’t be a rarity; it should be a normality, and when shared frequently with and to others, good news can become normal—in the best sense. While Christ alone does the work in human hearts, he wants them to hear the message from our mouths.

Ultimately, the gospel is simple, and so can our evangelism be. Even if you don’t know what to say, God will give you the right words. Evangelism and discipleship are the workings of the Spirit, so we need to rely on the Holy Spirit for it to work. May we do the work of an evangelist, as Paul puts it, in a gospel-needy world.