Sitting down to watch American Ninja Warrior with my son, I picked up a new term: Parkor. My son embellished its street-running pedigree describing it as, “Traveling the distance between two points in a way that is most complicated.” Did you, like me, have trouble wrapping your head around this concept? It is a cross-training term for creating your own agility-oriented workouts. You gotta love our world’s boundless creativity!
I could not help but connect the idea to what I have termed: “evangelistic mapping” or EM. It is helping a person who is beginning at a distinct starting point to eventually get to a faith destination. The hope of the mapping is to assist Christians with insight on what that journey will need to be, so they can spur their friend forward as easily as possible. Yet much EM today is anything but easy, and looks more like parkor. Reaching a skeptic is never easy. Nor do we find people of different worldviews flinging themselves at our faith. The same could be said from those with hostile feelings, deep questions, or progressive inclinations. The truth is, most of our outside-the-faith friends need someone to figure out how to get him or her from point A to point B. If you are willing to think deeply and wrap yourself around that challenge, God will likely blow your mind with his boundless creativity!