DEFENDING A SPACE

PROMOTING conversation over controversy

By Brittany Thompson

Photo by Patrick McLendon

While many Christians spend years developing their evangelism skills, Jim Henderson has devoted himself to perfecting the art of listening. 

This practice has become the framework of a journey in which Henderson has re-examined traditional approaches to evangelism, featured non-believers at a conference for pastors, co-founded a non-profit, purchased a soul on e-bay and written two books. The nonprofit, “Off the Map,” promotes what its supporters call “doable evangelism,” urging followers of Christ to “notice and serve others in non-dramatic, ordinary ways.” For Henderson, this means communicating openly with people of other faiths or no faith at all. 

“I value the opinions of people who have no beliefs,” Henderson said, “and I embrace them to comment on the Church.” Rather than defend the Church from its harshest critics, Henderson pursues friendships with the people who disapprove, and he protects the open exchange of ideas he shares with them. This is what he calls “defending the space.” 

“When a Christian listens,” Henderson emphasized, “[others] will let down their defenses, give you the benefit of the doubt and treat you respectfully. I mean, when you sit with people and they trust themselves to you and they open up and are vulnerable, that’s a sacred moment. You don’t want to mess with that. You just sit there and try to not mess it up.” 

“Defending the space” essentially means guarding a relationship with someone of a different faith more adamantly than guarding the Church or God or the faith itself. 

Henderson’s first book, Evangelism Without Additives, explores the question, “What If Sharing Your Faith Meant Just Being Yourself?” In his second book, Jim and Casper Go to Church, Henderson calls Christians to move from “apologetics to apology, talking to listening, strength to weakness, beliefs to spirituality, debate to dialogue and manipulation to intentionality.” 

“We think we should be defending the faith because we’re in the beliefs business,” he explained, “but one of the main skills of defending the space is not to talk. The skill is learning how to say something like, ‘Tell me more.’” 

Henderson spent 25 years as a pastor drawing from the ever-changing trends in an effort to attract who he calls “outsiders,” or “the people Jesus misses most” to his Church. Feeling like a failure when seats remained vacant, he turned to marketing books to study what the business world had to say about reaching an audience. To further his research, Henderson began paying “unchurched” people $25 to come to a church service and fill out a survey. While he said he wasn’t shocked by the answers he received from his survey, he found that the participants were surprised Christians were listening to them. 

“That was sort of moving and informative,” Henderson remembered. “In warfare, they say the way you overcome enemies is by surprising and mystifying people. One of the ways you surprise people in the business we’re in is by asking their opinion.” 

Hearing from people outside the Church was an early step in the process that has solidified Henderson’s belief that Christians should spend less time and energy defending their faith. During a series of job transitions, Henderson resigned from his pastoral position to go back to contracting, but he was soon hired by a large church to direct evangelism. In this position, he continued his research, hosting a conference called “Evangelism Off the Map,” in which he paid three nonbelievers to speak candidly to 500 pastors about their true feelings toward the Church. The pastors responded with overwhelming approval, and Off the Map began.

Henderson soon heard about a graduate student, Hemant Mehta, who was selling his “atheistic attention” on e-bay in an attempt to show his willingness to go to church and hear from Christians. Off the Map won the bid at $504. Rather than use the opportunity to coerce Hemant to convert, however, Off the Map asked him to visit 12 churches and keep a blog about his experiences at each. The blog scored an astounding readership (more than 50,000) and landed a front-page article on the Wall Street Journal. 

It was this honest dialogue and Henderson’s resulting friendship with Hemant that led Off the Map to seek out an atheist to co-author a book with Henderson. This was the premise of his second book, Jim and Casper Go to Church. Though you have to read the whole book to take in the scope of its purpose, even its basic idea is entirely unlike anything recently written. In it, Henderson narrates his travels from house churches to well-known megachurches with Matt Casper, an astute atheist with a good sense of humor who gives his profound, honest and often blunt thoughts about each church they visit. 

Nearly two years after the publication of this book, Henderson and Off the Map are still examining the way the Church does evangelism, and they continue to host forums and conferences and hear from “outsiders.” 

“We don’t need consultants; we need insultants,” Henderson said. “We don’t like being insulted, yet Jesus was ridiculed, hung on a cross, and nobody really got him. We don’t want that for ourselves.” He compared this period in Church history to the shifting of tectonic plates.

“When earthquakes happen, it seems sudden, but it’s not,” he said. “There has been something building up to this.” He went on to explained that Church as people today know it has been passed down through time. 

“We’ve been handed on a style that maybe worked in the past, but it’s not workable now, and so we need to change,” he said. He added that Christianity, like other world religions, organizes itself around a set of beliefs. “This is characterized in what we think of as the sinner’s prayer, where the way you become a Christian is that you pray a prayer and then you’re going to go to Heaven and you aren’t going to go to Hell,” he said. “We’ve reduced it down to punching in a ticket punch.” To counter this clock-in, clock-out view of Church, Off the Map listens to outside opinions, sharing truth but keeping dialogue open. 

“We began practicing to notice people, putting a hand on people’s backs and asking them how they’re doing and then listening,” Henderson said. “We bring to Christians the feedback and the experience of outsiders and have them talk to us first hand.” What about those who still feel uncomfortable listening when they believe they have the truth? 

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, ‘The church is only the Church when it exists for others,’” Henderson shared. “If I were going to learn how to defend the space, the first thing I’d do is start to reread the Gospels. I would start talking to outsiders about what they think of me and my religion and my people and my beliefs and my practices. And I’d let them talk and I’d practice listening.” For more information about Off the Map or to hear podcasts, visit www.offthemap.com.

Discussion Questions:

- Why do you think Christians are afraid to simply listen? 


- Do you feel pressure to defend faith rather than have open dialogue?

- What can you do to defend the space in your own life?

- What parts of Jim Henderson's position make you uncomfortable? Why?

 

Further Reading:

Jim and Casper Go to Church by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper

Evangelism Without Additives by Jim Henderson

The Fall of the Evangelical Nation by Christine Wicker

The Myth of a Christian Nation by Gregory A. Boyd