Authentic wine tasting

“Thank goodness that’s over,” you sigh, laying your head on your pillow. As the organiser of your church’s ‘wine tasting’ event, your day had been very full. First thing this morning you had been to a number of superstores to chase down the twelve required varieties. As the rain poured down, you loaded the cases into your little old car. Puddle water soaked through your shoes, but you reminded yourself that it was all for the gospel. You arrived at the church and helped arrange the room with a small number of volunteers. Just as you sat down for lunch you received a call from the expert who was going to lead the tasting but now needed to pull out. A few hours, a lot of anxiety, and many phone calls later, you found someone who could fill in for him. Your phone beeped again as you received a message from the friend you invited. Unfortunately she could no longer get away from work in time and wished you a pleasant evening. You felt really disappointed. However, having an official role made it much less awkward for you than for other members of the church family who arrived without a non-Christian.

Just as you finished briefing your serving team the clock struck 7.30 and the wine tasters started to arrive. They mingled and sipped for an hour, before you interrupted with three taps on the side of your glass. You announced that it was time for a talk entitled ‘How Jesus turns us from red to white’. A speaker you had invited spoke for a good 25 minutes on Isaiah 1:18, which had been printed out and left on various tables around the room. He spoke clearly and strongly about the issue of sin, and ended by calling his listeners to repent. The evening concluded with a final half hour for drinks to be finished. Only after a further hour of washing up and cleaning were you able to head home too.

The effort and urgency with which Christians are engaging in evangelism is highly commendable. In love many are acting upon the truth that men and women can be saved from eternal misery and brought into God’s kingdom only by coming to trust in Jesus (John 3:36). Some of us feel our friends would be helped by hearing God’s word from a third party, and so take our friends to a special occasion such as a guest service, football tournament, jazz night, craft evening, pub quiz or wine tasting event where the gospel is preached.

I do not wish to discourage fellow Christians from using invitational forms of evangelism. However, I do wish to question the way in which such evangelism is generally conducted. The Apostle Paul teaches us that Christian outreach should not use deception (2 Cor 4:2) and yet it appears that in two ways we are being far from transparent. Read more