But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

   - Acts 4.19, 20

No one can captivate a person who willingly submits to the rule. You should never bear witness to what you have not personally witnessed.

  - The Rule of Ciarán, Irish, 7th or 8th century

Perhaps this is the explanation.

Over the years I’ve been a Christian I have been troubled by the steady decline in personal witness-bearing on the part of believers. Back in the late ‘60s, when I came to faith, and for well over a decade after that, it seems Susie and I were always around people who talked freely and often about their faith in Jesus. In fact, I was a student in seminary, for crying out loud, before I met another believer who didn’t think witnessing for Jesus was all that important – and, alas, he was another seminarian.

But since the arrival en masse of the “seeker friendly” church, the outreach of church members has dried up. As my friend Bob Lynn puts it, the church exchanged its “go/tell” mandate for a “come/see” invitation. I suppose it’s just too easy to let the pastor, the worship bands, the theater lights and seats, hi-tech projectors and lighting, drama teams, and special-interest ministries do the outreach for us.

But the appearance – and now near dominance – of the seeker-friendly church has also brought a decline in doctrinal instruction, emphasis on spiritual disciplines, and commitment to whole-life obedience to the Law of God. Is it because those “seekers” coming among us might be, you know, offended or put off by such matters?

Perhaps the explanation for why people who profess faith in Jesus Christ are not much involved in making Him known lies elsewhere. Maybe we’re just being consistent with the declaration of the apostles and the advice of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise: we don’t bear witness because we have nothing to bear witness to.

Put another way, our silence with respect to the Gospel may be only our most eloquent testimony of how much we have actually seen and heard of the Lord?

It’s not for me to say. I’m just musing.

Still, I think of those first believers, persecuted, deprived of homes and possessions, chased out of Jerusalem and fleeing to the uttermost parts of the earth. Everywhere they went, Luke tells us, they were “gossiping the Gospel” (Michael Green) of Jesus Christ (Acts 8.4). Persecuted or not, they had seen Jesus; they had been with Him; they knew the Good News of the Kingdom. And they could not be silent about it.

So perhaps our silence is stark testimony to what we have seen and heard.

Which, if that’s the case, it's easy enough to repair:

Seek the Lord.

Psalm 63.1, 2 (Nun Danken: “Now Thank We All Our God”)
O God, You are my God, and earnestly I seek You!
My soul thirst and my flesh in weariness now greets You!
Thus I would see Your face, with glory and pow’r arrayed,
In this Your holy place – Your beauty here displayed.

Why am I no more effective as a witness for You, O Lord? Is it because I have not seen or heard You, or been in Your presence, or known the transforming power of Your love? Are You just an idea, and not a living reality to me, Lord? Help, Lord: I would see Your face!