How to Start Natural Conversations to Share Your Faith

Update: 2025-09-04

Description

Episode Summary:

Jesus told us to go into all the world and share the gospel. Yet many Christians admit they struggle with the confidence to do so. In this episode, my son, Blake, joins me to talk about how to start natural conversations that open the door to sharing your faith with others. Together we share practical ways to make those conversations genuine and meaningful.

Quotables from the episode:

God tells us to go to all the ends of the earth. And he says that it's his desire that none would perish, not even one. So we have a responsibility to share our Christian faith with others while we still have the time.
My faith really became my own when I went off to college. One of the big focuses of our church’s college ministry was evangelism.
We were practicing evangelizing towards students who maybe didn't have a worldview set in stone yet. Lots of students who were leaving the home and flying the nest for the first time and looking for an explanation for the world around them. Something to cling to as they looked for hope and as they looked for something to identify themselves with. Since graduating college, handful of years ago, I have moved into a job in the professional workforce where I am around adults who now have a set worldview. And my practice of evangelism has had to change from inviting people who are seeking a worldview to adopt the worldview of Christianity and pursue our loving God and Savior, while they were just looking for a way to identify themselves. And that was an easy invitation to now discussing with strangers and coworkers who have set worldview and who have set opinions on Christianity, which has definitely been a shift.
It is important to ask people about themselves and to ask people about their beliefs and even when people aren’t comfortable talking about themselves, people are generally willing to talk about their hobbies and their beliefs about the world and how the world operates and how the world should operate.
Efforts to evangelize with people can be difficult because even if it’s true that you were sinful and there’s a solution to sin and we can be forgiven for it, people don’t care about the sin if they don’t think that the God that says these things are sin exists or they don’t think that God has any impact over their life or over what happens after their life and so it’s not until you get people to a place where they recognize this God is real and he does have an impact on our life and what happens after our life that they care about what he says is sin and what he says is wrong.
We all start with questions of “who am I?” “Where did I come from?” “Why and I here?” “How am I supposed to treat other people while I’m here?” and “Where am I going?”
Two important questions are “what do you mean by that? Why do you believe that?”
People don’t care what you have to say, until they know you care. even just asking the question, what do you mean by that, it shows that you have interest, you care about their beliefs and where they came from. Right. And I think that that question is powerful and it serves multiple purposes because when people have legitimate hurts, you don't want to just immediately jump to the Bible and go, well, you shouldn't have been hurt by that because that's not how God is. - Or God works all things together for good. Right, which is true. And that's a helpful response for Christians who you're close to and you know that that will hold some value to them. But for someone who's not a Christian, that response will necessarily feel insensitive. - Yes. - And so to ask, what do you mean by that when you're discussing with someone who has legitimate hurts from the church or legitimate hurts from people who are Christians, further clarifies what their beliefs are, which is helpful for you because you get an understanding of what you're actually responding to.

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