Don Everts - Breaking the Huddle: How Your Community Can Grow Its Witness

Since the early 1990s there has been an ongoing conversation about what Christian witness looks like (or needs to look like) in our new, postmodern context. This conversation has led some people to a cynical place (Postmodern folks just dont seem all that interested in Christianity!) and others to a genuinely confused place (Evangelism as I know it just doesnt seem to be working anymore!). It has led the three of us to a genuinely hopeful place. And thats why weve written this book.

Our own foray into this wonderful conversation about witness in a postmodern context began as we encountered and interacted with a set of findings called the five thresholds of postmodern conversion.

Lets go back to the early 1990s. I (Doug) loved using C. S. Lewiss Mere Christianity to engage with seekers and help them decide to follow Jesus. This approach worked for me in college (sort of), so I assumed it should keep working. Except it stopped working. So I began experimenting. I tried all manner of crazy and creative ways of doing evangelism that might possibly connect with my local context of 1990s Los Angeles. Most of these harebrained ideas bore very little fruit.

But in 1996 things hit a boiling point. I was helping lead an evangelistic small group filled with seekers. Even though the non-Christians stayed involved for a whopping thirty weeks, no one became a follower of Jesus. Not one. I was at a complete loss, and frankly I was fed up. I had no language or tools to understand what was going on with the non-Christians and what I could have done differently. I was passionate about being more seeker-sensitive in order to help lead more people toward Jesus, but my somewhat simplistic lens on evangelism and conversion didnt give me any insight on how to proceed.

This seemingly fruitless small group, along with a number of other experiences at the time, led to a significant amount of godly discontentment in my life and in my leadership. Because I like to collaborate and learn alongside others, I gathered a group of fellow leaders for a day-long retreat together and jumped into this important topic. These leaders from the trenches asked, What if the journey toward Jesus were more complex than we previously thought? What phases do non-Christians seem to go through? We then shared stories from our own local contexts of people journeying toward Jesussome who had journeyed all the way and others whose journeys had seemed to peter outto see what we could learn and try to discern any patterns.

By taking seriously the stories of these non-Christians and new Christians, my colleagues and I began to discern striking similarities. Not only were there similar thresholds that non-Christians passed through on their journeys, but (surprisingly) many passed through them in pretty much the same order. My friends and I summarized these similarities in what we called the five thresholds of postmodern conversion. And then we set about testing our tentative findings.

On college campuses throughout Southern California we tested the five thresholds, listening to more stories of new Christians, to see if there really was something to this basic contour of the path to Jesus in a postmodern context. We invited other partners in the gospel to look at the five thresholds in light of conversions they were seeing in their local contextsto mess with the five thresholds, take away a threshold, add a threshold. We werent interested in the five thresholds per se, but we were interested in better understanding how people were becoming Christians in our postmodern context. Surprisingly, five years later the five thresholds were still standing!

We began to realize that all these new Christians (over two thousand of them) and non-Christians we were talking with had given us a real gift with their honest stories: they had described, it seemed, something real and solid about how people journey to faith these days. Additionally, we were beginning to experience significant fruit from putting the insights of the five thresholds to use. Better understanding our non-Christian friends helped us empathize and better serve our friends right where they were in their journeys. It seemed that more people were becoming Christians. At that point my colleagues and I began actively giving away the five thresholds: putting this wisdom tool about postmodern conversion out there to see what others might do with it, how it might be helpful to others, if it really had legs.

This was about the time that I (Val) encountered the five thresholds. I was working with college students and staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in New England who were intentionally asking this question: How do we meet students on campus who might never set foot in an InterVarsity meeting? I have always been committed to evangelism but am in no way a natural evangelist. When I first bumped into the five thresholds in 1999, it gave me a basic framework to carry around with me. I found myself referencing the five thresholds in my head as I talked with non-Christians. I had a better sense of what kind of conversation the person I was talking with might be ready for. While my mind had always been filled with an endless list of things I could potentially talk about, the five thresholds helped me discern which of those things might actually be helpful. I could almost feel and hear the thresholds during my conversations. Learning which threshold someone might be at began to shape which part of my own story I would share and which Scripture story might have the most impact.