Well, I almost hit a deer on my way to work the other night.  In most of the places I’ve lived you always have to watch for animals on the road when you are driving after dark.  In Sri Lanka it was lizards.  The large lizards, often over five feet long, would crawl out onto the roadway after dark to soak up the heat radiating back from the pavement after a long day in the sun.  On Bonaire it was the wild donkeys that roamed freely.  You would come around the bend and suddenly one of these slow moving, utterly fearless, creatures was standing right in the road.

Here in North Carolina it is deer.  From sundown to sunup they are out there.  It seems odd to me how closely we coexist with the deer.  I’ve seen them in my suburban backyard, within a block of downtown Apex, and in the parking lot at Harris Teeter.  There is, however, one place I have never seen a deer and that is at a “Deer Crossing” sign.  Now I will admit that I don’t hang around those signs looking for deer.  It is possible that I’ve just been unlucky; that there are times when deer line up to cross there.  Perhaps some of you who have lived here longer can tell me the schedule.

But in the meantime I will draw this conclusion – that a “Deer Crossing” sign is no assurance that I am going to see a deer.  So if I am going to go deer hunting that may not be the best place to do it.  Come to think of it, I’ve never seen deer hunters standing around those signs either so perhaps this tells me I am right, that I probably won’t find any deer there.

So where can I be assured I will find the deer?  I have no clue so I will turn to the next question.  Where can an unbeliever find someone who can model life in Christ for them and who will tell them about Jesus?  Well, the standard answer is – at a church.  Perhaps people who want to see, and speak with, Christians will go to a church.  Frankly, the signs on our church buildings are our equivalent of the “Deer Crossing” signs.

This causes me to be examining myself on two levels.  For one, if people do come to our church, will they see Jesus in me?  In the end, it is Jesus they are looking for, not me.  Am I showing Him to these visitors?  Do most churches present themselves in such a way that visitors can see Jesus?

But in a larger sense, in today’s culture, we are no more likely to find unbelievers coming to the churches looking for Jesus than we are to find people standing around the “Deer Crossing” signs looking for deer.  We need to go to them.  And we need to bridge a culture gap when we do that is, in some ways, as deep a gap as going to Bolivia.

Most drivers, when they do encounter a deer, are unhappy about the experience.  Their cars are damaged and their lives traumatized and disrupted.  And all too often encounters we have in our evangelism efforts often produce the same results, damage and offense.  Our witness attempts resemble collisions more than meaningful encounters.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

My wife, a city girl, would be horrified to collide with a deer.  But she loves to see them and to gently encounter them.  For her, it is still a treat.  Can we make our outreach efforts more like that?  I think we can.  Be looking later for some ideas on this.