This is part 2 of a series of posts that interact with Guy Kawasaki's 10 principles of "evangelism." Refer to my February 22, 2006 post for the set up.

Principle 2:
"Love the cause. “Evangelist” isn't simply a job title. It's a way of life. It means that the evangelist totally loves the product and sees it as a way to bring the “good news.” A love of the cause is the second most important determinant of the success of an evangelist--second only to the quality of the cause itself. No matter how great the person, if he doesn't love the cause, he cannot be a good evangelist for it."

In my last post I wrote about “doing love” as the primary (maybe even primal) means of evangelism. In the context of Kawasaki’s second principle, “love the cause,” we can take some steps away from this idea being a nice platitude and closer to making it an everyday reality.

I read two separate items in the past few days which helped me better define this idea of doing love as our chief cause.

The first was a quote of the week from Judith Hougen that went along with her January 29, 2006 post, “Knowing and Loving.” It comes from Parker Palmer’s book, To Know As We Are Known.

“The intimate link between loving and knowing is implicit throughout the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The Hebrew Bible uses the word ‘know’ to indicate the conjugal relation of husband and wife (as in ‘Abraham knew Sarah’), the same word it uses for our knowledge of God and of the created world. The most common New Testament word for ‘know’ is also used for lovemaking. The images that inform the biblical understanding of what it means to know--images of personal involvement and mutuality--are neither accidental nor antiquated. They reflect the quality of knowing at its deepest reaches.”

There was an interesting comment discussion after my episode 1 post in this series (link to those comments here), and reading this Palmer quote led me to make this observation: To love someone—especially to the point of having an overt evangelistic impact—we must be willing to know them. To love well, one must know well.

Take this to the utmost level, God knows and loves us infinitely and perfectly.
As His beloved adopted sons and daughters, we are called to play a part in God knowing/loving others, and in others beginning to know/love God as His children.

In simplistic and clichéd terms, to know people is to love them. And “loving this cause,” as Kawasaki puts it, is performed by striving to know people as God knows them.

Personally I am guilty of having completely wrong ideas about what love is. This has begun to change slowly as I have aged—more so now that I am a parent. And my long-held, dysfunctional ideas about love seem to be pretty widespread among Christians. This passage from Don Miller in Blue Like Jazz really captured this for me. He describes the prevailing economic metaphor often used to describe or define love and relationships.

“The problem with Christian culture is that we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. … If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who didn’t agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.”

As I read that for the first time I found myself in violent agreement and deeply convicted. It was a personal revelation worth much more than the price of the book. Miller continues:

“I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.”

It’s pretty easy for an American, white-male, middle to upper class, conservative republican type like I am (or maybe once was in the case of the latter two) to embrace and live this economic model of love. It’s really emotional supply side economics. And in my observation this attitude is exhibited by such a large percentage of the evangelical church, that I believe there is a critical need for a real love revolution—a revival of love.

In another of Miller’s books, Searching for God Knows What, he makes this observation on Scripture’s defining metaphors of our relationship with God:

“Biblically, you’re hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant scriptural metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father and bride to a bridegroom. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.”
More of this particular excerpt can be found here—additional food for thought on evangelism.

This knowing and loving is all relational—and can be exhibited at all levels when we think about doing love personally, locally and globally. The personal context is obvious, albeit the most challenging for me. Likewise, doing love locally means coming to know your surrounding community and culture. Rather than random acts of love (which are still positive things), knowing the personality, needs and issues of your communities makes expressions of love more intentional and effective from a Kingdom perspective. Globally it is the same idea, but at a macro level. Knowing your global community can help drive your political outlook and shape your democratic voice (if you have one) from the perspective of wanting to express love and compassion as a nation.

To “love the cause” of God’s love for humanity and truly begin to love others, I must first dislodge and discard my old defining metaphor for love. Love is not currency. Relationships are not a zero-sum game. This is not to say doing love and truly knowing others is without risks and the potential for pain. It most certainly is. Early church history is filled with accounts of such sacrifice—leading back to Christ’s ultimate act. But the Source of love is infinite, inexhaustible and true.