How Dare You? Talking to Hostile People
By: Colette Aikema
I used to hate confrontation. When I was a 10 year old girl living in Holland, I remember sitting around our table and having a family dinner. I am the youngest of five children, and all of us can get passionate and feisty. On this particular afternoon, my older siblings - all teenagers - got into a heated argument, the kind where clearly no one would back down or ease up on their debate. As their voices rose higher, and their emotions as well, I recall putting my hands over my ears and curling up under the tabletop. Suddenly everyone went quiet and asked me why I was crying. All I could say was, “Please stop fighting. I can’t handle you fighting.”
So it still surprises me, sometimes, that one of my favorite things to do now is speak with hostile and antagonistic audiences. I started having confrontational conversations not by choice, per se. I began having them because perpetrators of injustice were having them quite successfully.
A few weeks ago, for example, my pastor and I hosted a Prayer in the Park event with our municipal election candidates. We gathered in a downtown park, well known for its family friendly events and, increasingly, drug-related debris and homelessness. A gentleman circled our event throughout the evening, making sure to keep himself out of reach from us. By the end of the night I looked at his scowl and strongly felt that I should go over and ensure that he had no reason to resent Prayer in the Park. When I approached him, he took several steps back, and, taking a deep breath, he let out an emotional appeal to what he saw as another Christian injustice. “You already have way more public spaces than you need. How dare you come to this public park, surrounded by Indigenous people you have forced into drug addiction through colonization? You do not care. Trust me I know, I used to be a self-righteous Christian like you.”
Like this young man, Canadian culture is increasingly hostile to the Christian worldview. As a speaker who does conversation training, I have seen this on more occasions than I can count. I spend a lot of time thinking about why this might be, and I have learned to ask the experts: Canadians themselves. God has helped me have awesome conversations with people who are particularly hostile to myself and the faith I represent. He even used their anger to unite us, and our differences to make us friends. I am glad to share three lessons that I have learned about navigating conversations with a hostile audience.
“the church has a reputation that makes the culture angry”
The first thing God taught me to understand about hostility toward Christianity is that the church has a reputation that makes the culture angry. There's two reasons for this of course. The first we can't control, the second we ought to. Firstly, the culture will always be hostile to the church because we are going against its worldview. We teach truths that are "foolish to this world" (1 Corinthians 1:18) and confounding to them (1 Corinthians 1:23 ) . This isn't due to our bad character but the simple truth that people who are far from God hate the things and people of God. Even Jesus warned that just as He was hated we would be hated too (John 15:18). But we also can't ignore the fact that some of our own actions as Christians have contributed to the world's animosity. Our moral failures to call out sin, particularly sexual sin, in our own lives as well as actions taken in the name of Christ by His followers (even if He never mandated them) have contributed and sadly still contribute to a hostile environment for the gospel. In other words many in the church share responsibility for its bad reputation.
From Christian slaveowners in the southern United States to church residential schools in Canada, history is littered with misconduct in the name of Christ. Today, entire movements have become dedicated to exposing current moral failures of those who call themselves Christians. Searching ‘#churchtoo,’ for example, will flood your device with accounts of abuse at the hands of the church. Christian colleges, universities, charities and churches have been accused of denying Christ by mistreating its people. Reading Rachael den Hollander’s ‘What is a Girl Worth’ and following her work, I no longer wonder why the culture paints us with a broad brush. New stories emerge almost daily of the vast, monumental failings of individual believers, church leaders, and whole denominations. Does our wrongdoing not offend God, and damage our witness to His glory? Why should we not be angry too? Maybe we need to ask ourselves if the culture sees this more clearly than us - and therefore has reason to be angry.
This is why I started having hard conversations, I now realize. It was not because I felt like it, necessarily. It was because every person I met had something to teach me about God and that which is important to Him. All people are made in His image. If I chose not to engage with them, it was a conscious decision on my part because it was simply easier and less potentially painful to do so. It is also, however, a sign of deep disrespect for God and His calling on our lives. By disrespect, I mean that being a silent bystander to His Name being misrepresented or defamed is as bad as doing it ourselves. (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 99).
I began practicing having hard conversations ten years ago, but these are lessons I continue to learn. It is not something that happened suddenly, it required intentional learning. That is why we created our conversations course, Designed to Dialogue, as a guide to help believers learn what we have learned. We are eager to help you, knowing there is no need for you to start from scratch. I started by talking to complete strangers about abortion. Our group often used abortion victim photography, which is a depiction of true violence, and very difficult to behold.
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But even when we did not use the evidence of abortion, it is a topic that makes people angry and uncomfortable.
Every time I went out to do this kind of ‘conversational activism’, I encountered aggressive and highly emotional people. Like the student at a university who stayed for two and a half hours at our abortion victim display. He assured me repeatedly how angry he was that we refused to leave his campus and go ‘take our hate somewhere else.’ Or the young man in Lethbridge who expressed his deepest wish that I would be raped and forced to have an abortion. While doing activism downtown his anger caused him to walk quickly past us as he added, “Or better yet - I hope you will have a daughter who has to go through that!” The anger I witnessed was raw and actual. And it required the balm of Jesus.
We are surrounded by millions of people who have never been loved enough to be told about God - the very God who promises to hold and tackle reality for every person who lives in His truth. Consider this: would you not be mad at the idea of Christians? Think of the last time you got angry. Was it not - at least partly - due to some perceived injustice that you had a strong emotional reaction?
“anger is not a bad thing”
This is not the sinful response that we might imagine. Here is where God teaches us our second lesson: anger is not a bad thing. In fact, God uses what makes us angry to give us the energy we need to fight injustice. This is why a strong anger response can make us feel like we are ready to run a marathon - it is a motivating and energizing emotion. Scripture tells us the same thing in several instances. In 1 Samuel 11:6 for example, Saul experiences the power of the Spirit of God that ‘came upon him in anger’. It enables him to be instrumental in saving the men of Jabesh-Gilead from the cruelty of their enemy, the Ammonite Nahash.
“mad is the bodyguard of sad”
The third foundational piece to remember when it comes to hostility is what God allows our anger to shield us from. A few years ago I went to a fantastic talk by Dr. Jody Carrington, a child psychologist from rural Alberta. When describing how best to connect with disconnected children, she told the audience to remember that mad is the bodyguard of sad. In other words, our anger tends to indicate a deeper sadness or sense of loss that needs to be acknowledged. We all have this in common because God, in His infinite goodness, knew that our minds would need cushioning from the trauma that sin causes. This includes the pain we cause as Christians.
The next time you find yourself face to face with a person whose anger unsettles you, I encourage you to put yourself in their shoes. If what we speak (the entirety of the Christian worldview) is true, then why did we wait so long to tell them? Why do we wait until the moment of desperation to speak up? Unfortunately this has been my biggest frustration with the church throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of where believers stand on the danger of coronavirus, the efficacy of vaccines, or government control, they have made it quite clear that they are more than willing to have hard conversations - if the perceived injustice affects them directly.
I cannot tell you how many Christians I have talked to who are uncomfortable about abortion, and therefore never brought it up. In fact, most of them felt very strongly that abortion was a direct human rights violation. But instead of trusting God to use their discomfort as a witness, they thanked me for being willing to get uncomfortable enough to stand up for women and girls. ‘That is just not my gift,’ they would say. The memory of these conversations can still make me cringe. What special privilege do people think I possess to have conversations about hard things? And why did others act like they had the right not to have them?
Until this pandemic, I truly wondered if many Christians were simply unable to talk about the things that were so dear and dangerous to them. I was wrong. I have met Christians who in recent months chanted ‘My body, my choice!’ outside a hospital, but they were the same Christians who said they were ‘too shy’ to speak to pro-choice women chanting that exact same slogan. Other believers have leveled accusations at people for believing ‘conspiracy theories’, while never caring enough to speak to them about the conspiracy inside our souls since, they say, ‘I am not cut out for evangelizing.’
If we look at the emotional reaction of our culture as a response to the church’s legacy, which includes colossal moral failure and neglecting the Great Commission, we can experience a perspective shift. We can start to consider whether it is any wonder that Canadians are mad. If we are going to be honest, we need to acknowledge and repent deeply of the fact that we have pulled out of our culture for much too long. So long, in fact, that many of today’s most active Canadians have never even heard the Christian alternative to their worldview. We have allowed it to become terrifying for our culture to be invited into the story of reality.
Regardless of where you are, I pray that you will join me in a humble acknowledgment of our failure and neglect in doing the right thing. We, human beings, are the stain on the name of Christianity. But God never gives up on them, and neither should we give up on the church. That is what I told my new friend *Storm. The very same guy I told you about at the beginning of this article, who hated me before he knew me at Prayer in the Park, has become my friend. His anger about homelessness and Indigenous issues was the bodyguard to the grief and sadness he felt at their suffering.
Here is how the conversation went: “I can see your heart to love the people of our city, especially the vulnerable,” I said to him, “and I am so grateful for the people like yourself who keep us accountable for being consistent Christians.” He responded by saying that what we are doing is wrong, and that it does nothing good for those actually struggling with drugs or homelessness in our city. “I love your desire to pursue what is good for people,” I replied. “What do you mean by the word ‘good’?” At this Storm’s demeanour changed. After I listened to his understanding of what is good, we were able to exchange contact information.
Storm and others like him teach me so much about how our words matter and how our words can bring us together. Our neighbors, friends, and family may hate the very idea of Jesus. But we are called, like Jesus did, to both defuse the emotional collateral and build bridges to the Christian worldview. When others share the reasons underpinning their passionate feelings and concerns about the COVID pandemic or any other emotionally charged topic, seek first to understand them. We may end up united, in a new and unlikely friendship based on our mutual agreement that we indeed are motivated by concern, love, compassion and sacrifice for the sake of another’s health and safety. What a concept! And God can and does such things every day. Storm and I continue to meet regularly to discuss worldview issues further. If we can do it, so can you!
So join us today as we repent eagerly, excited for how Jesus will wash away that stain when we talk about Him. Preacher D. T. Niles gives the greatest analogy I have ever heard to illustrate this and it encourages me daily. “Evangelism”, he said, “is one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.” Canada has very little options left to bring its people a renewed hope in God. But like the early church learned, God loves using conversations to change lives, cultures, and nations.
