Today's Golf Course

I noticed that it has been over a week since I updated my blog and there is so much to tell. I guess I will start with the beginning of the week. I have been going to a church called Ekklesia for the past few weeks. From the time being there, the impression that I have gotten from the church is a church that really preaches the gospel and seeks to share the word to the city of Eugene. But what really stood out to me was that the people there were really inviting as it was impossible for me to walk into the church without being welcomed by someone.

Apparently a lot of the Epic students still have to yet to find a church that they can call it their church while attending college. So to my surprise when I openly invited students during the weekly Epic meeting, the majority expressed interest in going with me.

Speaking of the Epic meeting, it was an intriguing meeting. While I had planned all week for a leadership dinner where we could as a group talk about the vision for the ministry, the goals for the year, and how students can be get their feet wet, the students spent an hour during the meeting discussing their desire to start seeing things happen on this campus. So I'm hoping the momentum from their passion continues into this leadership dinner Sunday evening and into the rest of the school year.

On Thursday we had a guest speaker by the name of Doug Polluck. He came to the campus with a message to the staff and students of our ministry by bringing to our attention the current situation of many ministries, not just Campus Crusade for Christ. It is something that I have been contemplating in my mind for awhile, but have yet been able to illustrate it into words. I felt for awhile that the way that we (as in the general body of Christ), lately have not been effectively reaching out to the non-believers. All I was able to put together in my head was that it was simply the tools/methods that we were using doesn't work.

Doug took that thought and put it into an illustration that is fairly easy to understand. He used an illustration of a golf course. The golf course represented where people were at in their spiritual lives, the golf balls are the people, the hole is where people are saved, and the golf club as the tools/method/approaches that we use to reach the lost.

The thing is that we have been using the same tool (golf club), to reach the lost for the past few decades. In the past it has worked pretty effectively, but in today's world we have seen a significant decline of reaching the lost. That brings us to wonder why aren't we reaching people like we have in the past? Is it that our approach simply doesn't work anymore?

The answer is both "yes" and "no". "How can that be?" you might ask? It's simple. In the past decades Christianity has been very favorable amongst your general Americans. Whether people were believers or not, they most likely were from a time where exposure to God was high. Talking about God in the schools, work, media, government, and even sports team was commonly acceptable by the general public. Because of that you could imagine that with the right tool, we could easily back in the day reach out to people and bring the ball home to the hole. Once again try to imagine a golf course, and you have hundreds, thousands, millions of golf balls all sitting on the green and not too far from the hole. All you need is to pull out your putter and putt people home.

However, today is a different story. Nowadays you will find people scattered across the golf course. While we do have people on the green near the hole, we have a much larger number of people in many different locations such as the rough, the bunkers, the fairway, the water hazard, and the tee ground (click here to see for definition of parts of the golf course). Here is the problem.

Back in the day everyone wasn't that far away from the hole, most of them sat somewhere on or near the green. The problem of today is that we are still trying to use the same golf club (the putter) that has been used for the past few decades to reach people. It's not that the putter is no longer effective, but could you imagine bringing someone to Christ by using a putter if you were in the fairway, tee ground, or other places on the golf course?

We live in a different culture now, and we must use the appropriate approaches to reach the lost. That doesn't mean that we should throw away our putters, as there are still uses for it for people who are lingering around the hole, but consider pulling out other clubs to swing at the balls.