Westserve

Out for the count

I’m having trouble with this latest effort at turning any hobby/interest into an evangelistic ‘tool’.
Having said that of course, I leave myself open to comment with my low key efforts at using my coffee passion as a tool for the gospel.
But Pro-Wrestling and evangelism?
My memories of Pro-Wrestling on TV is as some sort of tongue-in-cheek, badly-acted, overly-aggressive pretend sport. Then I discovered it wasn’t tongue-in-cheek!
There are plenty of ‘sports’ around that are aggressive in nature – Rugby League and Union are two good examples. But the aggressiveness is incidental to the play. At the end of the match, members of the two teams shake hands and go and have a drink together. Well, most of the time anyway.
But with wrestling of any sort (like boxing), the aggression is the sport. The object of the ‘game’ is to physically abuse, damage, subdue and humiliate your opponent. Now with Pro-Wrestling, people either tell me is all acting – in which case, why bother – or that’s it’s not acting at all, in which case my argument above applies.
Either way, I find it hard to reconcile the purpose, rationale and practise of wrestling or boxing with anything vaguely Christian, and attempts to use it as a means of getting people to hear the gospel smack of hollow opportunism.
We need to be very wary of the carrot and stick approach to evangelism.

So what about my ‘coffee-evangelism’? Well at least coffee drinking is a naturally social activity, where it’s normal for people to chat and talk. All of which can be an easy and comfortable lead-in to the gospel.