"I'm not qualified"

Ask a room full of ordinary Christians why they do not talk about Jesus with the people around them, and you will hear the same three answers, in some order, every time.

I’m not a pastor. I don’t know enough. I wouldn’t know what to say.

They are not excuses. People say them because they believe them, and they believe them because nobody has ever told them otherwise. Somewhere along the way they picked up the idea that speaking about Jesus is a trained skill — that there is a body of knowledge you have to master first, and a level of articulacy you have to reach, and until then the honest thing is to stay quiet and leave it to the people who went to school for it.

The bar is on the floor

Here is what this whole class rests on. Witness, for an ordinary Christian, is not a sermon. It is your own story, plus a sincere invitation.

That is it. That is the entire skill.

If you can say what Jesus has done for you, and then invite somebody to come and see for themselves, you have done the thing. No training. No eloquence. No theology degree. Nothing you have to go away and acquire before you are allowed to start.

And notice what that means about who is qualified. You are the world’s leading expert on what Jesus has done for you. There is not a scholar alive who knows that subject better than you do. The one topic you were most afraid you were unqualified to speak on turns out to be the only one where nobody can correct you.

Somebody worse-placed than you already did it

If the argument feels too easy, look at who Scripture uses to make it.

A Samaritan woman, at a well, at noon — which is the hour you fetch water if you are avoiding the neighbours. Foreign, female and disgraced, in a culture where each of those on its own was enough to make her testimony inadmissible. She had no schooling in the Scriptures, no standing in her town, and no warning that this was going to happen to her that day.

By evening her whole town had walked out to meet Jesus because of what she said.

We will spend the next chapter on exactly what she said, because it is shorter and plainer than you expect. For now just hold the fact: the first person in John’s Gospel to bring a crowd to Jesus was the least credentialled person in the story.

What this class will not do

It will not teach you to run a Bible study. That is a real skill and it has its own classes in this library. This one stops at the doorway — the moment where somebody hears your story and is willing to look at the book with you.

It will also not turn you into a preacher, and it is not trying to. If you finish this class more articulate but not more honest, something has gone wrong.

Recite this

I am the world’s leading expert on what Jesus has done for me.

Try it this week

Say the objection out loud, in your own words, before you argue with it. Which of the three is actually yours — I’m not a pastor, I don’t know enough, or I wouldn’t know what to say?

Write it down. Then finish this sentence:

The real reason I have stayed quiet is ________________.

Be honest rather than tidy. Some of us are not afraid of being unqualified — we are afraid of being embarrassed. That is a different problem, and naming which one you have is the beginning of getting past it.