Reaching family and close friends

The people you most want to reach are usually the hardest, and this is not a failure on your part. Jesus said so directly.

A prophet is not without honour, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.— Mark 6:4

His own brothers did not believe in him during his ministry (John 7:5). At one point his family went to seize him because they thought he had lost his mind (Mark 3:21).

James and Jude, two of those brothers, later wrote New Testament letters. James led the Jerusalem church and was executed for it around AD 62.

So it happens. It just took a resurrection and several years.

Why it is harder

They have seen you at your worst. Colleagues meet a version of you. Family have the full archive — the tempers, the selfishness, the things you said at seventeen. When you talk about being transformed, they have data.

The relationship has history. Every conversation carries decades of accumulated dynamics. A brother hearing you talk about sin may be hearing an older sibling being superior again, whatever your intention.

They fear losing you. This is more common than most Christians realise. A parent may hear "I have become a Christian" as "I am joining something that will take you away from us", especially if you also became distant, busy and preoccupied with new friends at the same time — which, honestly, many new believers do.

They may have their own church wound. Something happened to them, or to someone they loved, and you now represent it.

Familiarity flattens urgency. They assume they know what you are going to say, so they stop listening before you start.

What usually goes wrong

Nagging. Bringing it up every visit. Leaving material where it will be found. Sending links. Working it into unrelated conversations. Each individual instance seems small; cumulatively it builds a wall, and after a while they hear the subject rather than the content.

Arguing. Family arguments are never really about the topic. They run on old grooves, and the moment it becomes a debate you will both revert to being fifteen.

Ultimatums and emotional pressure. Threatening to withdraw. Making holidays tense. Crying at them. These produce compliance at best and permanent resentment at worst.

Sudden intensity. A new believer's enthusiasm can be alarming to people who liked the previous version. Give them time to see that you are still you.

Being different in the wrong way. Becoming judgemental about their language, their drinking, their choices. Jesus was accused of being a friend of sinners. That accusation should be available about you.

What actually works

Pray, seriously and specifically

Before anything else, and for years. Augustine's mother Monica prayed for him for over thirty years, through paganism, a cult and a career built on rhetoric he later called selling words. He became the most influential theologian in Western history and wrote a book largely about her prayers.

Pray for specific things: for their questions to surface, for other Christians to cross their path, for circumstances that open a crack.

And pray for yourself — for patience, and for God to remove whatever in your manner is getting in the way.

Be different, visibly and quietly

Peter addresses exactly this situation. Writing to women married to unbelieving husbands — a genuinely difficult position in the first century, with no social power to leverage — he says:

Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.— 1 Peter 3:1-2

Without a word. Peter, of all people, telling someone to stop talking.

The principle generalises. Where words have become noise, conduct still carries. Be less anxious. Be more generous. Handle a family crisis differently. Forgive something you would previously have held. Show up when it costs you.

They are watching, and they will not tell you they are watching.

Answer questions; stop volunteering

Peter's other instruction is to "always be prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you" (1 Peter 3:15). The asking comes first.

Your job is to be so evidently different that the question eventually arrives. Then answer it fully, honestly, without seizing the moment to deliver everything you have been storing up. Answer what was asked, and stop.

Apologise first

This one is uncomfortable and it does more than anything else on this list.

If you have been pushy, superior, judgemental, or absent — say so, specifically, without attaching a message to the apology. "I've thought about how I've talked to you about this, and I was self-righteous about it. I'm sorry."

Do not follow it with "but". Let it stand alone.

An apology with a gospel presentation stapled to it is not an apology; it is a tactic, and they will hear it as one.

Enlist other Christians

You are the worst-placed person to reach your own family, and this is not a defect in you.

But your friend is not their sibling. Invite Christian friends to dinner. Let your family meet people who are normal, warm and obviously believe this. A great many people are reached by their brother's friend rather than by their brother.

Play a long game

Ten years is a normal timescale. Twenty is not unusual.

Which means you must be able to sustain the relationship without visible progress, without becoming bitter, and without treating every family occasion as an opportunity. If your love is conditional on them moving, they will feel it, and it will confirm their worst suspicion — that they are a project.

When to speak plainly

Do not conclude from all this that you should never say anything. There are moments:

• When they ask, directly.
• When something has happened — a death, a diagnosis, a collapse — and the surface has cracked.
• When you can offer to pray for something they actually care about.
• Once, clearly, so that it has been said properly and they know exactly what you believe and why.

Say it well, say it warmly, and then let it rest. Ecclesiastes 3:7 — a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. Both are in the verse.

The promise, read carefully

The Philippian jailer asked what he must do to be saved, and Paul answered: "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household" (Acts 16:31).

This has been misused as a guarantee that every believer's family will be converted. Read the rest of the passage: Paul then spoke the word "to him and to all who were in his house", and they believed and were baptised. It is a description of what happened, not an unconditional promise about your relatives.

The honest position is that God saves people through means, that family is one of the most common means, and that no one is guaranteed.

And keep going

"If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all" (Romans 12:18).

Note the two qualifications Paul builds in. If possible — sometimes it is not. So far as it depends on you — you are responsible for your half only.

You are not responsible for their response. You are responsible for being the kind of person whose life makes the message credible, for years, whether or not anything appears to be happening.

Monica prayed for thirty-three years. She did not see most of it.