Though relatable stories, practical advice, and inspired counsel, Cyntheia Heidi shares how students and young professionals can live and share their attractive faith with their well-educated peers without coming across as weird or pushy.

ACF Institute 2017: Never Alone

<p>Though relatable stories, practical advice, and inspired counsel, Cyntheia Heidi shares how students and young professionals can live and share their attractive faith with their well-educated peers without coming across as weird or pushy.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Christian Fellowship (ACF)

Cynthia Heidi

How to Share the Gospel with the Well Educated

All right, so it looks like most of us are undergraduate students, but there are a handful of graduate students and, of course, non-students as well.

We're going to go ahead and check out the second question, which is, how do you feel about engaging in spiritual conversations with a non-Adventist, non-religious, or atheist peer.

So this could be somebody who doesn't really care about God, or somebody who's actually quite antagonistic and actually does not like the idea of God at all.

So how do you feel about engaging in spiritual conversations with somebody like that?

But a good number of you said, I worry they will think I'm pushy or preachy or weird.

And in another group, a lot of you also said, I worry I won't know what to say if they ask me a hard question, which is completely valid.

I felt the exact same way when I was in my undergraduate years as well, still to a certain extent today as well.

So thankfully, not a lot of you are worried that you're going to get into an argument or a fight over it.

But only 30% of you actually say you're completely comfortable and find it natural and easy.

But I was definitely more in the 50% category here.

So what I want to talk about today, and what I hope you're going to get out of this time together, is at the end of this, I want you to feel like you're actually more in that bottom bucket, that you're actually completely comfortable with the idea that this is something that you can do naturally, that it doesn't have to be scary, and that more importantly, that God has actually called you and put you in a place on a secular campus or in a professional work environment that nobody else really has access to.

And you have access to people who are probably never going to encounter a traditional Bible worker.

So that's what I want you to get out of this talk.

This is actually really helpful so that I know that I'm actually talking about something relevant because I didn't bring anything else to talk about so Hopefully you guys are gonna be as interested as I am in this topic, okay?

So there's this famous verse right in first Peter I'm sure many many of you have heard this verse before, but you are chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people.

So, first of all, you get the sense that, you know, God has really called us for something important.

And remember what I said, we're all here in a secular environment, which there's probably not a lot of traditional Bible workers going around talking to the friends that you're meeting every day, to the professors or the neighbors that are down the hall.

There's not a traditional Bible worker or a pastor getting engaged and having conversations with these people.

So there's definitely this weight of God has put you in a place for a purpose.

The problem is when I was your age and when I was an undergraduate, doing my undergraduate degree, I was not feeling particularly royal, not feeling particularly holy, and I was feeling very peculiar.

So I actually want to talk about this a little bit, because I've been sort of in school slash working professionally for around 26 years.

And about 70% of that time has always been in the secular setting.

So I did go to public high school, I went to public university at Georgia Tech, obviously business school, and then I've been working in the professional world either in financial services or business for several years now.

So in all this time, I've had that feeling that I'm sure many of you realize, which is that we're a little bit different.

And I hope you'll feel after the end of this talk that that's totally fine.

And I think Darlie did a great job of talking about some of the amazing things that we have to share with people that's different about what we believe in and what God does for us.

So let's talk a little bit about my first experience at Georgia Tech.

Is anyone else here in engineering or the hard sciences?

But I have a special place in my heart for the hard sciences and engineers.

So Georgia Tech, the social currency at that time, and by the way, there was only probably 25% women in my class, but the social currency there was pretty much academic excellence.

And I'm sure that many of you can relate to that as well.

But the problem with that is I was not heart converted at the time.

I was born and raised Adventist, much like I'm guessing many of you are as well, but I can honestly say that I had never...

I don't think my faith matured at that time to the point where I was truly heart converted.

Well, when you get asked questions, choices, you're given choices all the time, right?

Whether you should eat certain things, whether you should do certain things, whether you should go to certain places, you're always given these choices when you're in a secular environment, right?

And so what's the problem with these options?

Well, if you're not heart converted in these places, either you're constantly saying no, purely out of stubbornness in my case, and eventually what happens when you constantly say no to people?

People are going to, your friends, let's pretend it's your friends.

They're constantly asking you to go do things with them or whatever, and maybe it's not quite right or not completely kosher.

They're gonna basically, you're not gonna stay friends for very long, right?

Maybe you'll say hi and be friendly, but you're not really gonna be friends, so that's a problem.

On the other hand, if you can't think of any good reasons to say no, you're potentially gonna start saying yes, and you're going to start down a path that potentially you'll start falling away from God.

So neither of these is a great place to be when you're unconverted on a secular setting.

So in my case, I remember when I was, I don't know, let's give an easy example.

If somebody says, hey, do you want to go to the club on Friday night, right?

I was, remember, my God at the time was academic excellence, so I have to say it was actually not that hard to say no, but it was not because I wanted to maintain my relationship with God, it was more because I just needed an excuse to not do that so I could focus on other things.

So my reasoning for that was not very compelling to this person, right?

I didn't say anything compelling about the Sabbath or what I wanted out of a relationship with God, I would say things like, well, I'm really busy.

And I think Darlie was talking about this as well.

It's like, how do you frame the reasons why you do the things you do?

So I unfortunately did not do this very well.

I'm sure that I was not particularly good at presenting the picture of God that is in the Bible.

And so this is an end of what happened is I was not a social butterfly is the down arrow here.

So what I want you to realize is that, what happens when this happens is in 4 and a half years of getting my bachelor's degree, I literally never studied the Bible with a non-Adventist person.

Okay, Now, I don't know if that's the case for any of you there, but that was the reality for me, is I never had any Bible studies with anybody who wasn't Adventist, and I never intentionally engaged in a spiritual conversation with anybody in those 4 and a half years.

It might have been like accidental, like somebody was like, oh, I noticed that you're not here on Saturday mornings, like where are you?

But that was never because I intentionally wanted to reach out to people, never, in 4 and a half years.

So, What I think I want you to understand from this experience of mine is that being Adventist or even going to these conferences, which by the way, I wish I had things like this when I was your age because this was not really a thing.

Like we didn't have any kind of national conference or anything like that for public campus ministry.

But I have to say that just being here is great, but it doesn't mean you're heart converted.

I would go to conferences, I would go to church.

I had friends that were in church, but again, just sitting here actually doesn't really make you heart converted.

There's something else that makes you heart converted.

So what is that barometer of heart conversion?

Well, let's look at the Bible for a second.

So in John, Jesus actually told Nicodemus, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he said, you must be born again of the Spirit.

Right, so only the Holy Spirit can give you that experience.

And 2 is, Luke said, well, Luke really quoted Jesus when Jesus told the disciples, the Spirit will make you a witness.

So if we like put those 2 things together, it's basically saying if your heart converted by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit's going to make you a witness.

So if you're heart converted, you will be a witness.

Conversely, if you're not a witness, you're not heart converted.

So if I think back to my experience at Georgia Tech, that's why I say I was not heart converted at Georgia Tech, because I had 0 interest, frankly, in going out of my comfort zone and engaging people with the intention of showing them God.

So if you don't feel like you're a witness, don't feel bad, but just take this as an opportunity to really explore the state of your heart conversion with God.

Now, let's contrast this to business school.

So, I graduated from business school last, about a year ago actually, and This was a very different experience.

So I just kind of described to you a little bit what my undergrad was like.

Now, thankfully, and I thank God every day for this, God sort of gave me a very personal experience during a couple years after I graduated with my bachelor's degree.

So, unfortunately, I don't have the time to go into what happened there, but essentially I had an experience, and when I was getting ready to go to business school in, I guess it was the fall of 2014, I had a completely different mindset when I was about to start school for the second time.

Or I guess, if you count elementary and high school, I guess it'd be the third time, fourth time.

So the big difference is this mindset, right?

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How to Share the Gospel with the Well Educated

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