Jon at Blog One Another posted an interesting take on a recent episode of This American Life, the NPR radio show. In the segment in question, Ira Glass records a couple of phone conversations between Kris Hogan (a high school football coach who enlisted his team's fans to cheer for a team from a local juvenile hall) and a woman who was moved by the story, and wanted to talk about faith. Trisha is a lapsed Catholic trying to reconcile her desire to believe in God with the recent death of a friend from cancer.

Jon does a nice job of pointing out how stuck in Christianese Hogan is, and how unhelpful some of his apologetic arguments are. His wife adds a concluding point, blaming those who taught him this form of evangelism:

"The coach was doing his best with every tool he had been given. He was taught this stuff, just like you were taught it, and it's pure crap. The teachers are totally to blame."

Most of what you were taught about evangelism is now irrelevant. Actually, in a post-Christian society, it's worse than irrelevant — you may inadvertently be practicing "devangelism"! For your outreach to be effective, you must adopt a missionary mindset and missionary methods. If you have a teacher who is talking about evangelism without training you to be a missionary, walk away and find another teacher. With the Holy Spirit guiding you, that teacher needs to be a "native."

The whole post is worth reading, but a couple of thoughts are stirring in my mind. We may need to peel the onion back a few more layers. I'm not sure that the problem is that traditional evangelism lacks a missionary mindset -- in other words, it misjudges the distance in terms of culture, language and worldview between the evangelist and the other person. If that's the case, then the coach just needs to find a new language for expressing the old arguments.

What if we throw out the whole idea that what we're doing in evangelism is providing answers or reasons to believe? What if this is not an exchange of information between people who know about God and those who are curious or ill-informed? If the evangelist is not teaching/preaching/arguing, what are they doing? Ironically, the image that comes to mind is Hogan's profession: coaching.

What I have in mind here is spiritual direction, but you could call it coaching. Trisha calls Coach Hogan willing to reveal the tenderest part of her heart -- her grief and questions around her friend's death. Jon describes the scene well:

So they try another phone call, being clear that the purpose is to discuss Trisha's questions about why God allowed her friend to die. It's a good question. It's a tough question. And from my perspective, even a direct question like this should not have an immediate answer, but be treated as an invitation. Trisha is exposing a very sensitive part of her heart, and that calls for respect and an exchange of trust.

Again with the Christianese.

But Kris Hogan doesn't waste any time sticking his foot in his mouth: "This is the most common question that folks who are anti-God ask."

Whoa! In a single statement, he slaps Trisha as "anti-God," and dismisses the possibility that earnest followers of Jesus also wrestle with that same question.

One way to reduce the distance between Christian and non-Christian is to fess up to the fact that this is the most common question human beings faced with loss or tragedy ask. Yes, Christians may come at it from a different perspective, but anyone who says they don't ask Why? of God is either deep in denial or lying. And we don't always get neat answers, or completely satisfying ones. People of faith, by definition, are the ones who keep wrestling, keep believing despite the questions.

So what if Coach Hogan could put himself in the position of a spiritual coach and offer Trisha some resources as she wrestles -- including first of all a listening ear and a safe relationship where all questions are admitted? If might mean entering into that uncomfortable space where Sunday School platitudes and philosophical arguments get exposed for what they are, while we wait together for God to speak. The old apologetics might still be helpful to frame the questions or define new ones: What does it mean to live in a fundamentally broken world? What can we expect if God's Kingdom is here but not yet? A coach's role is to offer resources, teach some skills, but in the end the athlete is the one who who plays the game. Spiritual coaching assumes that the Holy Spirit is at work and trusts that those who seek will find.