Common Ground

Over the last couple of months, the grow groups in Manchester have been working through a teaching course all about how to reach out to our friends and colleagues to see them saved. This has been a really good time of discussion within our groups and helped to give us new ideas and change the way we approach this area of our lives. We all know that we are called to help accomplish the great commission and Jesus himself came to seek and save the lost and yet so many of us desire to see many more of the people we know come to Jesus.

One of the biggest thoughts that I took from the course was simply that reaching out to our unsaved friends is not a difficult thing or something massive to overcome but evangelism and witnessing is really quite simple.

As we read through the chapters this week, I was reminded of this and the ‘technique’ that Paul used to try to win people to the Lord. In Chapter 9 v 22, Paul talks about how he “tries to find common ground with everyone, doing everything I can to save some” (NLT) and we can see here that Paul’s over riding passion and desire was to find a connection point with people so that he might get the opportunity to see them saved.

One of the main things I have been reflecting on over the last few weeks has been about how I develop friendships with unsaved people that I know. I have been really encouraged, through doing this teaching course in the grow groups, to invest time (and that could be years) into my unsaved family and friends in developing strong and deep friendships with them.

During the course we found that many Christians after a few years of being saved end up with fewer and fewer unsaved friends. Whilst this helps us to surround ourselves with like-minded faith people which is good, it really does reduce the amount of opportunities we have for seeing the lost reached.

There has often been that saying used that ‘people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care’ and, in some ways, I think this probably really relates to how we reach out to the lost. Paul says that he tried to find common ground with people; he wasn’t trying to just tell people the truth or show them where they were missing it with God but instead, he connected with them first and then this opened the door to see some of them come into the truth.

We will all have people that we want to see saved and I want to leave us with this simple question to consider: What common ground are you finding that will help build a friendship and relationship with them?