I was in Glasgow when two young men approached me on the street, their expressions earnest yet strangely distant. “Would you like to come to our meeting?” one of them asked. His tone was polite enough, but it carried the stiffness of a line repeated many times before. I explained that I already had a personal relationship with God and with Christ and shared how that relationship had grown—how it had been shaped through quiet nights, hard questions, and the steady companionship of undeserved grace. I spoke from the heart, but as I did, their eyes seemed to glaze over, as though they were looking not at me but through me. They believed that a relationship with God must come from attending their meetings.
When I finished, the younger one didn’t acknowledge a single word I had said. He only repeated the same mantra, almost mechanically: “Would you like to come to our meeting?” It was as if they had been trained to follow a script that left no room for real listening. In that moment, I felt the weight of a sad truth—religion can be taught, but humanity must be learned.
Over time I have come to see that there are, broadly, two kinds of evangelisers. There are corporate people and godly people. The corporate kind place the organisation above everything else; they serve a structure more than they serve a soul. Their speech can be polished, their methods efficient, yet something essential is missing: the ability to see a person as a person. The godly type, by contrast, put God first, and because of that, they carry the warmth of divine compassion. Their concern is not attendance numbers or tidy reports but the quiet, irreducible dignity of another human being. They listen before they speak. They reach before they instruct. They recognise the fragile, wandering places in others because they have learned to recognise those places in themselves.
Jesus once told a story about a shepherd and a sheep—a simple picture, yet rich with the pulse of real love: “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go after the one that is lost?” (Matthew 18:12)
That shepherd is not a strategist, nor a recruiter, nor a guardian of institutional success. He is a seeker. He notices absence. He feels the missing weight of one small, frightened creature. He does not say, “Ninety-nine is still a good number.” He sets out into the dark with a lantern in his hand, not counting the risk, because love does not calculate—it moves.
True shepherds, in the spiritual sense, carry that same lantern. Their relationship with God becomes a fire that warms rather than burns, and that warmth spills over into the way they speak, the way they touch a shoulder, the way they pause long enough to let another person’s story breathe. They know that a heart cannot be reached with formulas any more than a garden can be watered with dust.
I’ve always liked the words of A.W. Tozer, who once wrote: “Nothing can disturb the heart of one who walks with God as friend with friend.” There is a depth to that kind of companionship that cannot be counterfeited by memorised lines or rehearsed conversations. It grows only where honesty is welcomed and where souls are treated not as prospects but as mysteries.
That is why the encounter in Glasgow stayed with me. It wasn’t the question the young men asked, but the absence behind their eyes—the sense that they had been trained to speak before they had been taught to feel. A church, a movement, a community can produce such people if it is not careful: well-behaved, well-organised, yet untouched by the wind of genuine encounter.
But those who truly know God—who have wrestled, wandered, returned, and been held—carry something different. Their faith is not a script but a song, not a program but a pulse. They embody the truth of that beautiful line written by J.I. Packer:
“There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favour to them in life, through death, and on for ever.”
In the end, it is that relationship, not a meeting, not a method, not an organisation that makes a person able to recognise another human soul and say without words: I see you.
I see You and I'm Listening
I see You and I'm Listening
I was in Glasgow when two young men approached me on the street, their expressions earnest yet strangely distant. “Would you like to come to our meeting?” one of them asked. His tone was polite enough, but it carried the stiffness of a line repeated many times before. I explained that I already had a personal relationship with God and with Christ and shared how that relationship had grown—how it had been shaped through quiet nights, hard questions, and the steady companionship of undeserved grace. I spoke from the heart, but as I did, their eyes seemed to glaze over, as though they were looking not at me but through me. They believed that a relationship with God must come from attending their meetings.
When I finished, the younger one didn’t acknowledge a single word I had said. He only repeated the same mantra, almost mechanically: “Would you like to come to our meeting?” It was as if they had been trained to follow a script that left no room for real listening. In that moment, I felt the weight of a sad truth—religion can be taught, but humanity must be learned.
Over time I have come to see that there are, broadly, two kinds of evangelisers. There are corporate people and godly people. The corporate kind place the organisation above everything else; they serve a structure more than they serve a soul. Their speech can be polished, their methods efficient, yet something essential is missing: the ability to see a person as a person. The godly type, by contrast, put God first, and because of that, they carry the warmth of divine compassion. Their concern is not attendance numbers or tidy reports but the quiet, irreducible dignity of another human being. They listen before they speak. They reach before they instruct. They recognise the fragile, wandering places in others because they have learned to recognise those places in themselves.
Jesus once told a story about a shepherd and a sheep—a simple picture, yet rich with the pulse of real love:
“If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go after the one that is lost?” (Matthew 18:12)
That shepherd is not a strategist, nor a recruiter, nor a guardian of institutional success. He is a seeker. He notices absence. He feels the missing weight of one small, frightened creature. He does not say, “Ninety-nine is still a good number.” He sets out into the dark with a lantern in his hand, not counting the risk, because love does not calculate—it moves.
True shepherds, in the spiritual sense, carry that same lantern. Their relationship with God becomes a fire that warms rather than burns, and that warmth spills over into the way they speak, the way they touch a shoulder, the way they pause long enough to let another person’s story breathe. They know that a heart cannot be reached with formulas any more than a garden can be watered with dust.
I’ve always liked the words of A.W. Tozer, who once wrote:
“Nothing can disturb the heart of one who walks with God as friend with friend.”
There is a depth to that kind of companionship that cannot be counterfeited by memorised lines or rehearsed conversations. It grows only where honesty is welcomed and where souls are treated not as prospects but as mysteries.
That is why the encounter in Glasgow stayed with me. It wasn’t the question the young men asked, but the absence behind their eyes—the sense that they had been trained to speak before they had been taught to feel. A church, a movement, a community can produce such people if it is not careful: well-behaved, well-organised, yet untouched by the wind of genuine encounter.
But those who truly know God—who have wrestled, wandered, returned, and been held—carry something different. Their faith is not a script but a song, not a program but a pulse. They embody the truth of that beautiful line written by J.I. Packer:
“There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favour to them in life, through death, and on for ever.”
In the end, it is that relationship, not a meeting, not a method, not an organisation that makes a person able to recognise another human soul and say without words: I see you.