"I had been working in Central Asia for some time, and had immersed myself in the culture and challenges of the local area. When I returned to England I got something of a shock. I was in a university bar with some others taking part in an evangelistic question-and-answer session organized by a campus ministry. Things weren't going very well. We had a PA system, but still we could hardly be heard above the din of laughing and talking. And when we made ourselves heard no one seemed very interested.

Suddenly a woman stormed to the front, grabbed the microphone, stared me in the face and said, "You believe in one God, right?"

I thought, well, at least we'd managed to get something across this evening, so I replied rather wearily, "Right."

"So," she paused to think over the implications of this, "that means that you think that all the other gods are wrong, right?"

There were a whole host of things I would have liked to have said about that with a little more theological precision, but, given the circumstances, she'd basically got the point, so I said, "right." Her face went purple. She was livid. "How can you be so arrogant?"

The shock I received was not because the evening was difficult. Telling people about God is seldom easy (though it can be very rewarding); doing it in a bar is incongruous. In a way I expected a rough ride. The shock I got came from what was difficult. Things had changed! When we told them that we had good evidence for believing in God no one challenged us or even seemed remotely interested. Even when we told our testimonies of how we knew God no one was surprised. But when it became clear that we believed there was only one God the response was electric. How can you be so arrogant!

Today the one thing that must not be said about your own religion or your own "spirituality" is that it is exclusively right. You are allowed to believe what you like about God as long as you are willing to accept that what someone else believes about God is right as well, even if it contradicts what you believe. When you do not accept that you hit an iceberg of social horror: "how can you be so arrogant!"

What has dawned on me since that evening is that the charge of arrogance leveled at Christianity does not come because Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It comes from a basic presupposition that our society has towards religion. When someone says that Christianity sounds arrogant they are saying more about our society than about Christianity.

I have also begun to realize that this presupposition about Christianity is unfounded. To help you get a feel for what I mean, we need to find out more about the world that we live in. Consider, then, the "map" of the present world in the next chapter."