Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian
by John P. Leggett —
Many of us are consumed by the hidden dread that we aren’t prepared to speak about God—that, if pressed, we couldn’t muster up a single intelligible sentence to express our faith. Or, perhaps we are struck by a related terror, thinking that if we do give voice to our faith, it will only upset the people around us.
If you are haunted by these fears, rest assured that help has arrived.
Tom Long’s book, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, encourages readers to put their faith into words “out in streets and avenues of everyday life” (p. 4). While he doesn’t offer a step-by-step guide to public speech about God, Long does provide ample evidence of how ordinary words about God might sound when spoken by ordinary Christians in the course of everyday life.
Long has divided his book into two parts. The first part contains three chapters and focuses on the idea that people are hungry for authentic talk about God. Long’s main point in this section is that “Christians know that we cannot be fully human without speaking the truth about life and about ourselves, which is grounded in the truth about God” (p. 6). But, as if in response to what the reader may be thinking, Long then offers an important insight to correct a common misunderstanding. In effect, he argues that we don’t have to have our theological systems completely worked out before we open our mouths to speak about our faith. In fact, according to Long, one of the ways we come to deeper faith is by daring to put it into words. “We talk our way toward belief, talk our way from tentative belief through doubt to firmer belief, talk our way toward believing more fully, more clearly, and more deeply” (p. 6). Trying to put our faith into words is a part of discovering what we believe about God.
In the remainder of Part 1, Long discusses how the church enables us to discover and process the language to express our faith. “For Christians, the church is the learning environment for growth in wisdom, the place where the experience of God, which permeates all of life, is given a vocabulary and workable categories” (p. 32). In this way, the church functions “as the ‘language school’ of God, the place where we learn how to speak faithfully in the whole of our lives” (p. 32).
The moment comes, of course, when Christians are sent from the sanctuary into the world to bear witness to all that we have seen and heard about God in our worship. How will we find the words to speak outside the church, in the streets? This is the question Long addresses in Part 2, entitled “Talking through the Day.” In this section, Long breaks the day into five parts and indicates how our language about God can be spoken authentically in such settings as the workplace, the lunch table, or in the political arena. Each chapter focuses on one of these settings and Long provides ample stories of people who are actually speaking faithfully about God in the context of real life.
As should be clear from the book’s title, this is not a book about talking others into being Christian. This “is not a book about techniques of what some people call ‘personal witnessing’ or ‘evangelism’” (p. 4-5). It is, rather, a book that explores the other (and oft-forgotten) reason Christians engage in testimony. “At its most profound level, Christians talk about faith precisely because it is a truly human act to want to tell the truth” (p. 5).
Readers familiar with Long’s style of writing will find here what you have come to expect from him—profound insight, beautifully crafted sentences, and absolute clarity of thought. Long literally paints images with his words, and what he calls your attention to is not to be missed. Throughout the book, he offers his readers compelling images that open to us the sights and sounds of faith in the streets.
If you are looking for encouragement and guidance in learning how to account for the hope that is within you, by all means read this insightful book. In it you will hear how beautiful faith can sound when we dare to speak it aloud.
JOHN P. LEGGETT is a reader and writer, and serves as the pastor of the Massanutten Church in Penn Laird, Va.