There are some things you simply don’t do on public transport.

You don’t put your phone on speaker.

You don’t blast your music.

And, as one American preacher discovered this week, you probably shouldn’t stand up in the middle of a packed Sydney train and start telling complete strangers that they need to turn to Jesus.

But try telling this to Phillip Blair.

Phillip Blair, an anti-abortion preacher from Torch of Christ Ministries, boarded a commuter train at Sydney’s Martin Place station and began preaching to the passengers around him. He spoke about Jesus, sin, unborn children and eternity, urging those on board to turn to Christ before it was too late.

The reaction was swift and brutal.

“All I want you to do is shut up and leave me alone,” one passenger fired back. Another pleaded, “Can’t you go and stand on the street…?” When Blair insisted he was speaking because he cared about their souls, the response came straight back. “It’s great that you care… but I don’t want you to tell me this… okay?”

Others joined in. Before long, the entire carriage erupted in cheers as the preacher was finally shouted down.

Afterwards, Blair drew a simple conclusion.

Australia, he suggested, has a hard heart.

It’s an understandable conclusion if you already believe the only reason people reject your message is because they reject Jesus.

I’m just not convinced that’s what happened here.

Watching the exchange, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the passengers weren’t rejecting Christianity at all.

They were rejecting something else entirely.

Learn the Culture Before You Preach to It

If you’re going to travel halfway around the world to preach to people who didn’t ask you to come, the very least you can do is spend some time understanding the culture you’re hoping to reach.

Missionaries have known this for centuries.

Before you can communicate effectively, you have to learn how people think. What they value. What they find respectful. What they find offensive. The assumptions they bring to every conversation. Good missionaries don’t simply translate their words. They translate themselves.

Phillip Blair didn’t seem interested in doing that.

He arrived with a message he believed Australians desperately needed to hear, but he appeared to have given very little thought to how Australians might actually hear it.

Perhaps Blair assumed that because Australians speak English, they would hear his message the same way Americans do. They didn’t.

The Apostle Paul understood this remarkably well. Writing to the Corinthians, he famously said, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.” He wasn’t changing the gospel. He was changing his approach. He recognised that if people couldn’t hear the messenger, they were unlikely to hear the message.

The irony is that Blair seems to have interpreted the reaction on the train as evidence that Australians are spiritually resistant.

I suspect many Australians interpreted it very differently.

To them, this wasn’t an argument about Jesus. It was an American stranger boarding their train, interrupting their commute and refusing to stop when multiple people politely — and then not so politely — asked him to.

Whether you agree with those passengers or not, that’s the culture he chose to enter.

And if you don’t care enough to understand the people you’re trying to reach, it’s hard to convince them that you care about them at all.

They Rejected the Medium.

What makes this incident so interesting is that I watched something remarkably similar unfold in America only a week earlier.

A young American woman stood up on a plane before take-off and announced to the passengers that any one of them could die at any moment. She then urged everyone on board to give their lives to Jesus before it was too late.

It was, in many ways, just as unsolicited as Phillip Blair’s sermon on the Sydney train. Yet the response couldn’t have been more different.

The passengers listened. Some smiled politely. Others looked uncomfortable. No doubt many silently disagreed with every word she said. But nobody told her to sit down. Nobody shouted over her. Nobody swore at her or tried to force her back into her seat.

That doesn’t mean Americans agreed with her. It simply means they responded very differently. Which is why I don’t think the Sydney train incident can be explained by saying Australians are hostile to Christianity.

If that were true, we’d expect the passengers to object to Blair’s beliefs.

Instead, they objected to his behaviour.

They didn’t argue about whether Jesus rose from the dead. They didn’t debate the existence of God. They didn’t ask him to defend his theology.

They simply asked him to stop.

To them, the problem wasn’t Christianity.

It was that a complete stranger had decided that an ordinary commute home had become the perfect opportunity to deliver an unsolicited sermon. And because of the nature of Blair’s approach, no one in the carriage had the ability to choose NOT to listen. It was unsolicited. It was uninvited.

By choosing a packed commuter train as his pulpit, Blair ensured that many passengers had formed an opinion about him long before they formed an opinion about anything he actually said. The way a message is delivered inevitably shapes how that message is received.

In the end, I suspect most people on that train weren’t rejecting the gospel.

They were rejecting the way it had been delivered.

Love Doesn’t Corner People

Maybe this is my own Australian-ness coming through, or maybe it’s simply how I’ve changed over the years. Either way, I find it very difficult to reconcile this style of evangelism with the kind of love Jesus consistently demonstrated.

Please don’t misunderstand me.

I’m not suggesting Christians should keep their faith private as some people do. Nor do I think it’s wrong to speak publicly about Jesus. Christianity has always been a faith that is meant to be shared.

But context matters.

Jesus preached publicly because public preaching was a normal and accepted part of first-century life. Rabbis taught in synagogues. Teachers gathered crowds. Philosophers debated in marketplaces. If you wanted to communicate an important idea, speaking to a public audience wasn’t unusual. It was how ideas travelled in Jesus’s time.

That simply isn’t the culture we live in today.

In twenty-first-century Australia, people don’t expect to receive a sermon from a stranger while they’re commuting home from work. Nor do they expect it on a bus, a plane or in an elevator. Those aren’t places people go looking for conversation. They’re places people use to get from one place to another.

That’s why I struggle with this style of evangelism.

If someone is sitting on a train, they haven’t chosen to become your audience. They can’t quietly excuse themselves. They can’t simply walk away. They’re effectively captive until you decide you’ve finished speaking.

To me, that changes everything.

The gospel is an invitation.

The moment it becomes something people cannot politely decline, it begins to feel less like good news and more like an intrusion.

Perhaps that’s just my Australian instincts talking, or perhaps it’s something more universal.

Love doesn’t simply ask, “What do I need to say?”

It also asks, “Do I have a right to say it to this person?”

A Different Question

Perhaps Phillip Blair is right.

Perhaps Australian hearts really have hardened.

Or perhaps Australians were simply asking for something every human being deserves: The freedom to choose when — and whether — they enter a conversation about God.

What if the people on that train weren’t rejecting Jesus at all? What if they were rejecting a method that felt intrusive, culturally tone-deaf and impossible to escape?

As Christians, we’re often quick to assume that if people reject us, they must be rejecting Christ.

Sometimes that’s true.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes people reject the messenger because the messenger has made it unnecessarily difficult to hear the message.

I can’t help wondering whether that’s what happened on that Sydney train.

I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Were the passengers rejecting Christianity?

Or were they simply objecting to the way it was being delivered?

There is a better way!

Create an atmosphere for the supernatural, get on a bus or a plane and release this atmosphere

The way it works: one person is touched and then another, and then another

Charles Finney did it; I read about it, and I began to do it too

The gospel is not in mere words but in POWER!

-GSW-