A few months ago, I asked a question here about sharing my Christian faith.
As part of my training for Methodist ministry, I was asked to create a short video to share my faith journey. You can watch the video and read the questions I asked here
The assignment encouraged us to share our story as widely as possible: with practising Christians, former Christians, people of other faiths, and people with no faith. In the end, twelve people responded, from five continents and a range of Christian, other-faith and non-religious backgrounds, including a non-churchgoing sibling in South America, an Anglican ordinand in Australia, an African Muslim and an Asian Catholic in the UK.
I wasn’t trying to share the ‘right answers’, or convince anyone to agree with me. I was more interested in what people might hear when one person tells the story of how faith has shaped their life.
So I shared the video, and what happened surprised me.
I expected that if people responded, they might want to talk about Christianity. Perhaps they would agree or disagree with something I said, and ask questions about belief, church, or God.
Instead, people talked about belonging, identity, acceptance, community, hope, and authenticity.
They also shared their own experiences and, in doing so, they gave me an opportunity not simply to share my faith, but to listen to what happened when my story met someone else’s.
One response stood out:
‘Common ground is spiritual currency.’
It was written by someone from a Catholic background who is now a Buddhist. I was struck by the phrase because it seemed to capture something that was emerging from the responses as a whole. The most significant thing about the conversations wasn’t where people agreed with me, but where they recognised something of their own experience in my story.
A neighbour from an African Muslim background said ‘As someone who belongs to several minority groups I deeply felt your experience.’
A former colleague who is no longer Christian reflected on the expectations that can sometimes exist within communities, observing that ‘the bottom line often seemed to be that “we” expected “them” to become like us over time.’
Those responses made me think about the difference between being welcomed and belonging.
We can welcome someone into a space while still expecting them to conform to the people who are already there; to speak as we speak, and believe what we believe.
Genuine belonging asks something different of all of us. Our faith, our convictions, our experiences and our identities – they all matter. But belonging doesn’t necessarily require agreement, and relationship doesn’t require uniformity.
That was one of the things I found most encouraging about the responses. People didn’t need to share my Christian faith to recognise something in the story I had told. They could hear something about belonging, identity, hope, or community, and connect it with their own experience.
Maybe common ground gives us somewhere to begin the conversation, the relationship, the shared experience of good news.
When the question changed
There was another part of the experience that I found particularly interesting.
The first time I shared the project on social media, I framed the invitation around the question of whether this was ‘GOOD NEWS worth sharing?‘ The response was limited, though an Anglican ordinand in Australia whom I had not personally approached did respond to it.
About a week later, I shared it again, but this time I asked: ‘CAN PEOPLE who hold very different beliefs still find common ground in themes such as belonging, identity, purpose, community, or hope?‘ That produced three further unsolicited responses from people I would not have thought to approach, including the Buddhist whose insight inspired this blog.
The difference made me wonder whether people are typically reluctant to talk about faith, or whether sometimes they are reluctant to enter a conversation where they feel there is an expectation about where it is supposed to lead.
There is an important difference between asking someone to engage with what I believe and asking whether we can discover what we share. The first can feel like an invitation into someone else’s world. The second creates the possibility of meeting somewhere between our different worlds.
That doesn’t mean that the second question is better because it avoids talking about faith. Quite the opposite. For me, it created a more open space in which faith could be part of the conversation without becoming the condition of the conversation, and where people were free to bring their own experience into the conversation too.
This has made me think again about what it means to share the ‘good news’ of our faith stories.
Listening to what comes back
When I began this project, I was thinking more about what I had to say. By the time people started responding, I found myself thinking much more about what I needed to hear. That wasn’t what I had expected.
There is something vulnerable about sharing your own story. Once it has been told, you no longer have control over what another person hears in it. They may notice something you hadn’t noticed. They may connect it with an experience from their own life. They may disagree with you. They may ask a question that takes you somewhere you hadn’t intended to go. Or they may simply say, ‘I recognise that.’
That is one of the gifts of personal testimony, if we see it as more than a one-way movement: this is what happened to me; this is what I believe; this is my story. But what if testimony is an invitation? I tell you my experience, and create space for you to tell me yours. At that point, the other person is a conversation partner, not an audience, or a target for conversion.
That distinction matters to me, particularly as I continue to think about what Christian evangelism – sharing the ‘good news’ of Jesus with others – might look like in a world where people hold very different beliefs.
If I approach someone primarily as a person who needs to hear what I have to say, I risk missing the person standing in front of me. I can become so focused on the message that I forget the relationship. But if I approach them as someone with their own story, their own experience, and their own questions, I can still share what I believe, but I can also listen and learn.
This raises a more difficult question:
What does it mean to share ‘good news’ with someone for whom the Church has not been good news?
When church hasn’t been good news
Some of the responses to my story reminded me that Christianity is not simply a collection of beliefs that people may or may not accept. Some people’s understanding of Christianity has been shaped by their experience of the Church, and that experience has not always been one of welcome, acceptance, or belonging. For them, the Church may be associated with judgement, exclusion, or conditional belonging.
I have become particularly aware of this through my work with LGBTQIA+ people and through my involvement with the Open Table Network, where questions of welcome, belonging and what it means to be a genuinely inclusive Christian community are lived rather than merely discussed. Simply saying that Church is good news does not make it so.
The word ‘evangelism’ can mean different things to different people. For some it may carry positive associations of invitation and hope. For others, it may evoke memories of being preached at, judged, or made to feel that they need to become someone different before they can belong.
That tension matters. It would be easy for me to say that the good news of Jesus is about love, acceptance, hope and belonging. I believe it is. But if someone has experienced Christianity as a place where those things were withheld or even abused, simply telling them that the Church is good news doesn’t make it so.
Perhaps what matters is not only how I share good news, but how my life, my relationships and the communities I help to create might demonstrate that ‘good news’ is actually good.
That feels like a much more demanding question. It means that Christian evangelism cannot simply be about what we say. It must also be about the kind of people and community we are. If I tell someone that God’s love is unconditional, but they encounter a church where their belonging feels conditional, which message are they likely to believe? If I speak about the welcome of Jesus, but someone experiences judgement when they walk through the church door, what exactly have I shared with them?
This is where authenticity matters. Good news needs to be embodied as well as spoken.
I don’t want to pretend that the Church has always got this right. It hasn’t. Nor do I want to offer a polished version of Christianity that ignores the harm that has often been done in its name. It is more honest to acknowledge the gap between the good news we proclaim and the times when the Church has failed to live it, and then to ask what we can do about that gap.
That, for me, is part of the challenge of preparing for ministry. If I want to share good news with people for whom Church has not been good news, I need to be willing to help create communities in which the welcome, dignity, justice, and belonging we talk about are actually experienced.
Where is God already at work?
There is a theological question underneath all of this that I am still learning to live with: Where is God already at work in the person I am meeting?
One of the things I value about Methodist theology is its understanding of prevenient grace: the grace (free gift) of God’s presence and action that goes before us, drawing people towards God before they may recognise or name that movement themselves.
That changes the way we approach people who don’t share our faith. I don’t need to think of myself as the person bringing God into the conversation. God is already present. Instead of asking, ‘How can I introduce this person to God?’, perhaps I should be asking, ‘Where is God already at work, and how might I (and perhaps we) recognise it?’
I find that challenging because it requires humility. It asks me to believe that God is not limited by my understanding, my church, my theology, or my ability to explain the gospel. It also changes the way I listen.
If I believe God may already be at work in someone’s life, then I need to be curious about what I might discover there. I need to pay attention. I need to resist the temptation to assume that I am the one who has arrived with everything of value. Sometimes the person listening to my story has something to reveal to me about God. That doesn’t diminish my faith – it makes it bigger.
Difference still matters
I don’t want to suggest that finding common ground means pretending our differences don’t exist. There are things I believe as a Christian that I cannot simply translate into something with which everyone will agree. But sharing ‘good news’ doesn’t have to mean winning an argument, or even beginning with an argument.
Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet and Islamic mystic, wrote:
‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.‘
I found myself thinking about that field as I reflected on common ground. It’s not a place where our differences disappear, or where convictions no longer matter, but somewhere we can meet without first requiring the other person to agree with us.
It can begin with hospitality, curiosity, relationship – with the willingness to say, ‘This is what I believe. What do you believe?’ and then to listen to the answer.
If the Church is to be ‘good news’, perhaps we need to be better at creating spaces where questions are welcome, where doubt isn’t treated as failure, and where difference isn’t automatically seen as a threat.
Perhaps we need to become communities where someone can say, ‘I don’t believe what you believe’, and our response can genuinely be, ‘Tell me more.’ Not because we have abandoned our convictions, but because we value the person enough to listen.
So what did I learn?
I began this project thinking about sharing my faith. I finished it thinking much more about listening to the faith, hopes, and experiences of other people.
We don’t always know what another person will hear when we tell our story. We don’t know which part of it will resonate, what questions it will raise, or where the conversation might lead. Maybe we don’t need to know.
There is something liberating about recognising that my responsibility is not to control the outcome. I can tell my story honestly, with courage and generosity, and then allow another person the freedom to respond in their own way.
That feels much closer to the kind of Christian evangelism I want to practise: confident enough to speak, humble enough to listen, trusting that God’s grace is already at work in people’s lives and in the spaces between us.
It also leaves me with a challenge. If I want to tell people that the gospel is good news, I need to pay attention to whether the communities I belong to actually feel like good news to the people who encounter them. Perhaps evangelism begins not with asking people to come into our community, but with asking what kind of community they would actually experience as ‘good news’.
The most important part of the project wasn’t the video I made. It was what happened when that story met other people’s stories. When the Buddhist participant described common ground as ‘spiritual currency’, I realised how deeply that phrase resonated with my experience. Common ground is valuable because it creates trust. It gives us somewhere to begin. It opens a space where curiosity can become conversation, and conversation can become relationship.
It may create spaces for mutual encounter rather than merely a need to explain; for listening rather than judging; for welcome rather than attempts to change each other. Maybe it is also where we might discover that God has been there all along.
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