“And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Luke 14:23. As a Mennonite who has renounced all use of force, how can this verse apply to my attempts to share the gospel?

In the 17th century Blaise Pascal wrote that the first step was to make Christian faith attractive. How do I do that? By arguments backed by supposedly irrefutable facts? By syrupy sweet stories, that bear no relationship to real life? I know that in my pre-Christian days I would have just shook my head and walked away from such things.

In the 20th century Simone Weil wrote that people need poetry to help them see light from heaven. Is that what Pascal meant? To me that seems to be getting a little closer to a possibility.

What is poetry? One definition is “A form of writing that expresses ideas or feelings through the sound and rhythm of words, as well as through their meaning.” A poem is a thing of beauty that touches the heart before it stirs the mind, and some parts of it will linger in the memory long after you have read it.

Some poems rhyme; some don’t. Not all compositions that rhyme are poetry; some are just doggerel. Poems don’t need big words or flowery words to be effective. Read the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John, most words are one-syllable, there are few adjectives and not an adverb to be seen. Yet this is one of the most profound and powerful pieces of writing in the English language.

Another point in making the faith attractive is to remember that it is not about me. People who reject Christian faith are not dumb. In most cases their reasoning is sound and logical, but the starting point of their reasoning was a false assumption. The best approach may be to ask a few questions and leave them to figure things out themselves.

Consider the account in the fourth chapter of John of how Jesus approached the Samaritan woman. Jews considered Samaritans to be an impure people with a corrupt religion. Anything touched by a Samaritan was unclean. This woman knew that; she didn’t think highly of Jews either. So what did Jesus do? He walked up to the well, sat down, then asked the woman for a drink. Her hostility was disarmed and the way was opened for a meaningful conversation.

There is another lesson at the end of that chapter. Jesus told the disciples that the fields were already ripe for harvest, all they needed to do was lift up their eyes. What did they see when they lifted up their eyes? A stream of Samaritans coming out of the town wanting to see this man whom the woman had told them was the Messiah. These were about the last people a self-respecting Jew would have considered as candidates for salvation.

What about my presuppositions? Are my eyes open? Am I making the Christian way appear attractive to the people I meet?