A guest post from Mark Surey.
Providence, like fortune, favours the prepared mind. Although my C-A-N- role is primarily to offer pastoral and professional support to Christian academics, being a compulsive evangelist I am always praying for opportunities to present my faith to unbelievers. My wallet carries both the “Knowing God Personally” booklet and my personal testimony – how I became a Christian when head of British Communist Youth whilst reading Josh McDowell’s tract “The Case of the Empty Tomb”. I’d shared this tract with an Israeli art gallery owner in New York just six days before I was asked to write this post, and I’d shared the booklet with a physics postdoc at UCL in London a couple of weeks before that. The frustration with being a lecturer every winter in order to “stay honest” as a minister to academics is that my work is generally at American seminaries where all the students are already “saved”! But effective evangelists are passionate about sharing their faith and seriously ready for any opportunity. If you have never prepared your own story (three short paragraphs on “how” you came to Jesus, “why”, and “what” the consequences are) – do it now, and God will honour you with opportunities to share it.
As someone converted outright by reasoned argument I am certainly not opposed to apologetics, and all Christians, particularly those in higher education, have a duty to be able to present a “reason for the hope inside us” (1 Peter 3:15). We should be able to demonstrate that the Gospel is both internally coherent and externally attestable. Nevertheless, I will add two caveats. Firstly, we come to faith through the revelation of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, not by argument alone. Apologetics is sometimes necessary for credibility, but not sufficient on its own. Undergird arguments to change the mind with prayers to sway the heart! The will is involved also, and most people who follow or reject Jesus do so ultimately for personal reasons, not purely on the basis of the evidence. That is why it matters how we live, to be a friend and to show grace under pressure within the ugliness of academic competition: all these can speak greater volumes than having the right line on a given scholarly question.
For example, my friend Rosario became a believer when researching “light as medicine” at Rutgers University. He became fascinated by the idea that Genesis 1 presented matter and energy as originating from light, but he was also influenced by the moral courage of a colleague – and by falling in love with a Christian girl. Then he also met someone who could empathize with his Italian Jewish heritage – me! He finally found Jesus in that divine appointment, but there were complex elements of intellectual credibility, Christian personal integrity and personal issues in the “sowing”. That’s expected.
Mark Surey is Travelling Secretary for the Christian Academic Network (C-A-N-) and also works as a dean and lecturer at a seminary in Louisiana. Eleven of the last twelve friends that Mark has led to Jesus have been faculty members, and we asked him to write about his experiences of sharing the Gospel.
