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What does our culture really think about Christians?
As we have been putting together the Gospel Shaped Church curriculum, we've been filming Christians and asking them some pointed questions. One of which was this:
If you went down to the local shopping mall and asked people what they thought about Christians, what do you think they would say?
The answers were pretty consistent across the board. Christians thought that people would say things like:
Turns out we're wrong. Completely wrong.
A research project by the UK Evangelical Alliance, conducted by the Barna Group (a professional polling organisation) has recently announced the results of a large-scale survey into what people in the UK think about Jesus, and Christians in general.* The results were so counterintuitive that the researchers initially thought that there was a problem with the data. They polled more people, and were surprised to find that their original findings were absolutely correct.
The survey revealed that two thirds of people who describe themselves as "not Christian"—that is from another religion, or with no religion at all—know someone who is a practising Christian. And they like us!
The vast majority of people describe the Christians they know using words like "friendly" (65%), "caring" (51%), "good humoured" (48%), "generous" (38%), "encouraging" (26%) and "hopeful" (24%).
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are much smaller numbers of people who would describe us as "narrow minded" (13%); "hypocritical" (10%); "uptight" (8%); or "Selfish" (5%).
What's going on here?
Like most people, I guess we are vulnerable to taking people who are critical more seriously. We think more about the negative comments we receive than we do the positive ones.
But maybe we have also fallen for one of the Devil's lies. He would love us to shut up about Jesus. He would love us to think that the world hates us, and that people will bite off our heads if we dare to mention Jesus to them. He would love us to have a bunker mentality in churches where we cut ourselves off from relating to the world. And when we buy into a media-fuelled mentality which says "nobody likes us, everybody hates us," we're much more likely to stay in the cosy security of our fellowships and fail to reach out with the gospel of hope.
In fact, the opposite is true. Just one in eight of the people who know a Christian as family, friend, neighbour or work colleague has a negative view of their faith in Christ. The vast majority actually like us – and think very positive things about us.
Fewer than one in ten think we are homophobic. Only one in 20 think us "foolish" because of our faith in Christ.
What this boils down to is this: If we are scared of talking about Jesus with others because we think we will get a hostile reaction, we are wrong. Of course, as Rico Tice says in his excellent book Honest Evangelism there is a pain line to be crossed in initiating a conversation about Christ. We put ourselves on the line. We open our lives up to scrutiny. And some will be hostile to the gospel, and to us personally. But perhaps not as many as we think.
What this research shows is that we are, by and large, doing OK with witnessing with our lives. Others are seeing the love, openness and good humour that the Holy Spirit grows in us. And they are warm to these qualities. But because of our mangled mindset about what others think of us, too few of us are moving on to witnessing with our words.
* Full details of the Talking Jesus survey results can be found here.
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Tim Thornborough is the founder and Publishing Director of The Good Book Company. He is series editor of Explore Bible-reading notes, the author of The Very Best Bible Stories series, and has contributed to many books published by The Good Book Company and others. Tim is married to Kathy, and they have three adult daughters.
