Just Walk Across The Room [Paperback]

 

 

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Excellent companion to the book. This study guide gets you past the reading into your own situation and into the lives of your family, friends and neiborhors. It challenges you to make a difference in their lives and that it is possible to see lasting change by simply starting friendships.

Just Walk Across the Room is an easy read - full of stories that encourage people to share their faith. It's NOT a theology text - it wasn't meant to be. It's really one person's story; an attempt to role-model what it might look like to take the risk to cross the room, talk to someone you may or may not know, asking the Spirit the whole time to help you see where there might be an opportunity to bring God/faith into the conversation. The book gives Christians permission to talk about faith in simple, non-pushy ways and just watch to see if the Spirit takes that anywhere. Christians know a lot about God. They often know how to present the Four Spiritual Laws or do the Bridge Illustration - but many don't know how to get a conversation started, nor are they sensitive enough to the Spirit to know when that same conversation ought to end. Along with that - what if sharing faith also means sharing life - and what if the "God-conversation" happens over months or years and not just in one fell swoop (where a Christian dumps everything they know about God on some poor soul the first time they open their mouth to talk about Him?) Hybels role-models something different. It's lovely and helpful and every believer trying to live faith in a workplace or within a network of non-believing friends and neighbours ought to read it!

I found it a good reminder to build relationships with the lost, but it caused me concern in other areas. In my opinion it represents a very watered-down Christianity and portrays a seeker-friendly approach to evangelism that can be counter-productive to winning souls.

Hybels deliberately avoids church terms like "born again" (which he calls "church jargon", even though those are the words of Christ), "saved", "sin", and "damnation" and substitutes terms like "faith decision", "Christ-follower" and "faith journey". I can count on one hand the number of times Hybels used the word "sin" or "repent" in the book. He never once used the word Christian.

The term "Christ-Follower" is not synonymous with the term "Christian". You can be a Buddhist, for example, while being a "Christ-follower" (emulating Christ's example), but you can't be a Buddhist and a "Christian" at the same time.

The book is endorsed by Dan Kimball, author of The Emerging Church. The Emerging Church movement is a throwback to Catholic traditions and 3rd century mysticism.

On page 46 Hybels talks about a relationship he built with a guy named Tommy. After 3 years the guy had not made a commitment to Christ, but when one of Hybels' friends asked him whether he was ready to do so, Tommy said all he needed to know was "how to get things squared away". After a 3 year relationship Hybels had not made it clear to Tommy how to ask forgiveness for his sins (Hybels is a pastor don't forget). Don't get me wrong, I believe it's important to build relationships; but not just for the sake of building relationships.

Hybels has said in the past that Robert Schuller was a great influence on him in his early Christian walk. Schuller's influence can be seen in paragraphs like on page 67: "[Jesus] somehow saw... the hidden philanthropist in the life of a crooked tax collector named Zacchaeus. The risk-taker in a cowardly Jewish ruler named Nicodemus." This is rather fantastical isn't it?

On page 81 Hybels talks about his chance meeting with two homosexuals in a restaurant lounge. It seems they didn't like the terms "judgment" and "hell", so he suggested they substitute the words "grace" and "power". I agree we should be sensitive, but not at the expense of the gospel. Christ was crucified because he told the truth, not because he suggested lost people just substitute positive words to make themselves feel better. This is rather Schuller-like too. Schuller was a friend of The Power of Positive Thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale.

On page 157 Hybels mentions a joint meeting of Christians and Muslims he had in which he "came away from that experience with a better understanding of the people of Islam."

In another meeting Hybels' attended, he and 138 others Muslim and Christian leaders, including Robert Schuller, signed a joint declaration in which they claim common ground shared by Christianity, Judaism and Islam. What common ground does Islam have with Christianity? Islam denies that Christ is the only way to salvation and demands of its followers that all the Jews must be killed to bring Islam's messiah.

While Hybels offers some common sense techniques to build relationships, one might be better to read, for example, The Soul Winner, by Charles Spurgeon. In it Spurgeon says, "Everything appears to be shaken nowadays, and shifted from the old foundations. It seems that we are to evolve out of men the good that is already in them... But we should think of ourselves to have failed if we had produced a world of total abstainers, and had left them all unbelievers."

In summary, I can't agree with Hybels free-wheeling interpretation of scripture and unconventional method of feel-good evangelism.

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