Why do people experience fear when they engage with people (and even friends) about
the great things of the gospel and is there anything that can be done about that?
To address this let’s begin by saying, it seems reasonable that generally speaking people’s fears can be divided into two categories: reasonable fears and unreasonable fears. That is, some of our fears are “reasonable,” like in this photo (to the right), it seems reasonable to fear the consequences of doing electrical wiring while standing on a metal step ladder....that’s standing in a swimming pool. Duh.
“Normal” psychologically healthy folks, it would seem, would properly have some apprehension. Typically we deal with these sorts of fears by taking into account potential pitfalls and consequences and by organizing and making plans to reduce the likelihood of their occurrence. In some cases where the risk/reward calculation doesn’t jive, we abort. And there’s nothing “wrong” about checking the wiring multiple times if your job is to detonate and demolish a high-rise building.
On the other hand, there are fears that many of us have that given the circumstances are more “unreasonable or non-rational.” That is, there are times when we can assess the situation rationally and there aren’t good grounds for fear or the level of fear experienced...but some people in exactly that situation feel it strongly anyway. When we speak of this we ordinarily think of things like phobias: arachnophobia, agoraphobia, triskaidekaphobia and the like of that. These fears are not as easily managed because they don’t tend to disappear (or perhaps are only marginally helped) by the planning, organizing and checking that seems to work effectively on our reasonable fears.
These sorts of fears are notoriously hard to deal with--some suggest different sorts of therapeutic emersion experiences (in the Lord) while others prefer other sorts of strategies like hypnotherapy, prayer saturation experiences, etc. Right now we are not recommending a particular course of action, rather to merely point out that these sorts of fears are dealt with in different ways than the reasonable ones. That’s important because simply telling folks to “trust the Lord” (something they should do anyway), may not “heal” these sorts of tendencies in certain situations. In fact that sort of advice may just make that sort of person feel even worse.
So when it comes to our fears about engagement with people about the great things of the gospel and what we can do about it, we need to understand which of our fears fall into those categories given those particular circumstances, and from that determine what we can do about it.
Our suggestions would be along the following lines: 1) reasonable fears will be greatly helped, we believe, by learning the skills of relational and conversational evangelism in all sorts of situations where there are low chances for “failure” and negative consequences for you if it does; 2) ceteris paribus, we think it is best to learn to do the sort of relational and conversational evangelism were talking about is by watching people who are good at it before “trying” it ourselves. It can save you a lot of mistakes and relational pain if you are blessed to have a colleague or friend who has the social graces, wisdom and spiritual gifting to do this well and you have the opportunity so that you can watch him or her do that on a regular basis; 3) we do strongly urge you to learn to trust the Lord with what you can manage and change, have patience with yourself with the fears you cannot manage and change and the wisdom to know the difference. 4) if you identify “unreasonable” fears we believe it is helpful in many cases to seek ways to deal with those fears and issues in ways that are unique to those sorts of fears. In a profound sense it’s up to you to manage your life and your fears and not let well-meaning but (to put it nicely) ignorant or mis-informed Christian colleagues badger you into facing phobic tendencies in the same way you face reasonable fears.
We can agree that the added dimension that entering spiritual conflict (which typically can and does manifest itself in witnessing situations) makes the discernment of reasonable and unreasonable fears more difficult. However, we believe it is best to treat you as an adult and no one better than you can make you (once it is discerned), face your fears better than you. And when that doesn’t work, then seek the kind of help or therapy that seems most likely to help you over the bump in the road...and keep trusting the Lord.