Monday, June 21, 2010

A double standard?

An interesting incident happened over the weekend. Four Christians from a group called Acts 17 Apologetics were arrested, it sounds like without justification, for witnessing at an Arab-American festival in Dearborn. You can read the report from the folks involved here. As they were being arrested by the Dearborn police, the crowd was reportedly shouting "Allahu Akbar" in celebration.

I am not as concerned with arguing about the methodology of the Acts 17 group. Some may say that this sort of bold witnessing is counter-productive. It is not my cup of tea but it certainly looks a lot more like the evangelism we see in the book of Acts than a "come hear a sermon" evangelism, as does the reaction they received from the crowd and the authorities. What I am interested in is how little attention this is garnering from the media. Imagine a different scenario. Imagine a Christian festival with a small group of Muslim apologists handing out material and talking to Christians getting arrested and as they we being hauled off being surrounded by people shouting "Praise Jesus!". I think that would be all over the media.

Again, this should not be surprise to us. The Gospel is going to cause a visceral reaction from those who are unregenerate. If what you say to people causes them to shrug their shoulder, perhaps the problem is in the message. I am interested in seeing the video from this incident and after that comes out I plan on posting a more thorough discussion of the relative merits of the methods they use.

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