The Great Commission

When I see people object to Universal Salvation by asking "What about the great commission? what's the point of spreading the Gospel then?" I feel like asking in return "Do you want to boast?".

Cause that's what a lot of modern Soul Winning is, I know someone who worked at a local Christian Book Store in my town who said one Church she went to treated it as a competition, everyone kept score of how many people they "got saved".  That terminology about "getting someone saved" is to me just a semantic way to get around that they're clamming credit for that person's Salvation.

There is no Door to Door soul winning in Acts, nor is there Street Preaching.  Paul preached The Gospel at places where you were expected to be talking about religion.  Now today Christianity isn't a sect of Judaism anymore so trying to bring up Jesus in a Synagogue isn't appropriate anymore, the equivalent of that today is in Church, where nominally everyone believes in Jesus already but they may not have the same Gospel you do.  Paul was never pushing his religion on people who don't want to hear it.

The Great Commission is to "be a witness", we should try to be good credible people so that maybe others will actually want to know what our views on God are.  Our mission is to deliver the Good News, not a threat or an ultimatum.

The thing I feel people miss about the Riot of Ephesus in Acts 18 is that the Christians weren't doing what they were accused of.  I feel too many modern culture warriors skim over the chapter and go "we're supposed to be making the Pagans mad".  But at first the only people upset were the people making less money because less people were buying idols, they didn't actually care about respecting Artemis at all.  They then got people riled up by convincing people simply not standing for her flag was an attack on her.  You see the sad irony is today American Christians act like the Pagans of Ephesus not the Christians of Ephesus.

Also the Book Burning of Ephesus was just new Christians burning books they already had from before their conversion.  It was not making a public show of it, or obtaining books just to burn them, and certainly no attempt to ban anything.  It's no more comparable to a Nazi book burning then Linkara burning his copy of Holy Terror is.

I do want to increase the Church's numbers, I want people to know the Good News that I know.  And I believe there are potential benefits and rewards for being a Believer in this life which I'd like the current non-believers I care about to share in some day.  But I also know that being aggressive about it is counter productive to achieving that, and I understood that even before I believed in Universal Salvation, but it was difficult to reconcile that with the urgency that the traditional Western view of Hell instills in us.

Now that I understand the True Gospel I can relax.