Embrace: Showing And Sharing The Love Of Jesus Book Review by Ideal Curtis
In our world today, we embrace each other for so many reasons – celebration, greeting, sadness, grief, joy, affection, good-bye, and more. An embrace is a beautiful symbol of our human connection. My favorite version is when my sweet granddaughter sees me and runs into my arms. Something passes between us in an embrace, something unspoken, yet deeply real and full of whatever emotion we are sharing in that moment like the sweet, innocent love of a toddler for her grandma.
What Embrace Teaches Us About Evangelism Today
In her six-week study Embrace, Kim Reisman (Executive Director of World Methodist Evangelism) uses the metaphor of the embrace as a fresh, even transformative, way to understand, explore, and experience evangelism. Building on the work of theologian Miroslav Volf, she takes something familiar and deeply human – embracing – and teaches us a meaningful approach to sharing our faith.
With scriptures as her guide, Reisman presents six core values that form the essence of authentically showing and sharing the love of Jesus: humility, clarity, prayer, integrity, worship, and urgency. Each week of the study includes thoughtful discussion guides, reflection questions, prayer prompts, and practical next steps. Participants are encouraged to share their own faith stories and begin identifying people in their lives to whom they can show and share Christ’s love – taking practical, applicable steps along the way.
The Foundation of How We Share Our Faith
From the beginning of the study, Reisman reminds us that God was the creator first, and then the redeemer. She states: “It begins with the goodness of creation, and God’s faithfulness to it. It begins with God’s desire for creation to be whole. Human beings desperately need redemption, but God did not create simply so that God could redeem. God redeems out of faithfulness to the love relationship that is formed when God freely creates.” This perspective reorders the way we see and understand our faith. Seeing our faith from God’s view changes the way we share it. Understanding that sin is not the reason for God’s grace, but rather God’s grace is part of God’s nature. It was active long before sin entered the picture. That grace brought creation into existence. Yes, it includes the pathway from sin to redemption, but also so much more! This is a wonderful way to think about our relationship with God, and how it impacts us. In fact, it impacts everything in our world.
How the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Shape Faith Sharing
Our Triune God is a creating, redeeming, sustaining God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who continues to be about restoring all of creation. This understanding shifts our view of evangelism from one of “saving,” of “heaven or hell” to one of the good news that God, the creator desires for all his creation to be restored and redeemed, brought back into right relations with Him.
This shifts our understanding of evangelism to a positive place, beginning with the goodness of God’s creation and His desire for that creation to whole.
The Embrace study leads us to a deeper dive into this understanding, revealing important aspects of the trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
God the Father’s love motivates Him to interact with and relationship with His creation. This reality motives us in turn to desire interaction and connection with others, focusing on those who are not yet in relationship with Jesus.
Seeing God the Father as self-giving in Jesus as the path to redemption also shifts our mind set about the redemption of all creation. It’s all connected, tied up in Jesus Christ. Reisman points out that redemption is the redeeming of all creation (not only human beings). Full redemption is when God’s holy love is in all and overall.
In giving His Son, God redeems all, the oppressor, and oppressed, the perpetrator and the victim. We cannot truly show and share the love of Jesus without these two important realities: It’s our faith journey story too, the only one we can share. This is what evangelism is all about.
The Holy Spirit is the underlying force of God’s kingdom. It is the evidence of God’s presence in our lives, residing in each of us, giving us the boldness and courage to live as we wait for God’s kingdom to fully become on earth as it is in heaven. It is our saving strength – the grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit which connects us and gives us power. Our experiences with the Holy Spirit create in us hope for the future. As Reisman put it, “The presence of the Holy spirit gives our faith-sharing its future focus. We look forward to the future, already begun in Jesus Christ, when God will be all in all. These foundational truths make way for the understanding and definition for our showing and sharing the love of Jesus.” It moves us to a “way of being,” forming a “posture” we take as we encounter different cultures, places, and people.
I appreciate the way she presents these truths. For so many of us, our thinking and understanding of evangelism, even salvation, has been in a very different place. These concepts open the door for a new, fresh willingness to allow ourselves to intentionally seek ways to share and show the love of Jesus. There is a freedom in knowing that creator God is seeking to restore and redeem all creation, and to do that He gave us Jesus as a path to that restoration and redemption. He did not ever expect us to do it on our own, rather giving us the Holy Spirit to empower and guide us. This shift takes away the misconception that we need to “save people” – that we need to only have a script of important verses and words to share. Rather it invites us to be real and transparent as we tell the only faith journey story we know – our own. It takes the expectation off us and moves it to the hope and good news of the triune God being vital in our showing and sharing the love of Jesus.
Based on these truths, Reisman guides us through the metaphor of Embrace.
The Four Stages of the Embrace: A Model for Authentic Connection
She begins by sharing how the metaphor of Embrace is based on the motion involved:” It is a connected movement with four stages flowing from one after the other: opening our arms, waiting, closing our arms, and then opening them again. Without all four elements, an embrace is incomplete.”
Such a wonderful way to think about our relationship with Jesus. He opens His arms, as an invitation, waits for us to respond, and then closes His arms in love, grace, forgiveness, and redemption. From His open arms, we then go and follow His example. And by looking through this lens, we have a fresh, new look at our faith journey. It is a catalyst for our going out to show and share this same love with others. This is a relatable metaphor that everyone can understand, has experienced, and is able to share. This “way of being” as we evangelize enables us to not only show and share the love of Jesus, but to experience it in our own lives every day.
The Six Core Values of Effective Evangelism
Reisman does not ignore or shy away from our brokenness, our separation from God, but at the same time she reminds us that opening our arms (the first step) invites us to acknowledge our brokenness as we meet others where they are. Seeing the world for how it really is and recognizing we are a part of that world requires humility and clarity (the first two Embrace values). We make room for others, “opening our arms” meeting them where they are, reflecting our Triune God. As we show and share the love of Jesus, humility reminds us of our faith journey. It is not them and us – but rather we are all in need of redemption. Clarity helps us realize our need to understand and appreciate how our experience, our story, intersects with God’s story. As Reisman puts it, “Clarity is crucial to authentic faith sharing because how we understand Christian faith will significantly influence how we share it.”
The next step in an embrace is waiting. We all know what it feels like in those first few seconds of reaching out to embrace someone. It takes both sides to make an embrace work. There is that instant when we check for their response – we wait. In our metaphor, waiting involves the third value – prayer. It is only the power of the Holy Spirit that moves, transforms, or changes anyone. Another freeing acknowledgement. We are not responsible for their response. Our part is to wait and pray. Prayer is an essential part of showing and sharing the love of Jesus. When we pray for others, we see them in a different light, we have opened our arms, entered their world, and now our prayers are personal, trusting God’s timing. It deepens our faith in God. Using scripture, Reisman unpacks aspects of prayer, types of prayer, and our acceptance and understanding of prayer. All of which are vital to evangelism.
Closing our arms is the third step to an embrace. Reisman declares,” There is a sense of completeness that comes when the arms close in an embrace. The other person, whom we experienced as absent when we opened our arms in the first stage, is now present. The void is in some way filled.” The value associated with step three is integrity. Integrity in this context is defined as the quality or state of complete or undivided: the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished. In other words, one heart, one life, one faith – all undivided, focused on Jesus. In order for others to join us in the embrace, we must be able to meet them where they are, but there should be no doubt that we are about Jesus. This session is full of insights and truths about how who we are should affect how we act and what others see in us. Evangelism is not about us, or even about them. It is about the work of the Holy Spirit. We are simply creating space for transformation.
The fourth step in an embrace is opening our arms again. Reisman introduces the idea of a circular movement to embrace: “The open arms that let the other go in the final stage are the same open arms that in the first stage signal a desire for the other’s presence, create space, set boundaries, and issue an invitation. They are the same arms that wait and then encircle the other’s body. The end of an embrace, in a sense, is already the beginning of a new embrace, even if the new one might not take place right away.” This opens the conversation and understanding about how the Holy Spirit continues to work, how important worship and community are, and where discipleship begins. Worship is the value highlighted, helping us to see that worship, the gathered community of faith, provides the environment for some of the Holy Spirit’s more powerful work. This work includes our continued transformation, our continued showing and sharing the love of Jesus. We are moved to open our arms again and again.
The need to show and share the love of Jesus is not a new one. When it comes to sharing and showing the love of Jesus, urgency takes on a new understanding – a bold urgency or urgent boldness: immediate action or attention. The need for a relationship with God has always existed. Yearning for connection and relationship in a human condition. Reisman points out that this need has remained consistent – in 1910 1/3 of the world’s population was Christian and it is still 1/3 today. What has changed is our perception of evangelism and faith sharing. The difference is attitude. In 1910 the World Missionary Conference lamented that only 1/3 of the world was Christian. At the 2010 gathering, they celebrated that same statistic. What a difference! Transformation through the power of the Holy Spirit – on an individual and societal level – is not just possible today, it is desperately needed.
Reisman sums it up this way: “The essential values of evangelism rooted in embrace point to the truth that the gospel is not a message to be privatized. It has been entrusted to the body of Christ. We make it known to the world through the communal life when we embody Jesus’ expansive welcome and invitation. When we live in solidarity with the poor and suffering. When the presence of the Holy Spirit of Jesus can be met and experienced in our worshiping together. We make it known through the sharing of our own stories, our commitment to prayer, and our willingness to live as witnesses to the faithfulness of Jesus through our own faithful obedience to the God who sent him.”
How to Start the “Embrace” 6-Week Group Study
I highly recommend this 6-week study for any group, class, or congregation who are seeking a new and fresh way to think about and live into evangelism. This study is impactful in helping folks know, own, and share their faith story with boldness and confidence.
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