Many conversations about Jesus with a Hindu friend stall for a simple reason: the Christian answered a question the friend was never asking. The fix is a habit. Find out what your friend is seeking, then let the gospel speak to that. Habits are built by doing, so the work here is practical. You will look at a story, read three passages closely, run a listening exercise, and test what you learn against a real friendship.
You can work through it alone in two or three sittings, or with a group in one session of about ninety minutes. For the main exercise, groups of three work best. No one needs to name a real friend or describe a real conversation to take part. Invented examples are fine.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Rahil Patel, who was a Hindu monk for 20 years before he came to Christ. His most useful contribution is a question to ask before offering any answer: “what is it that a Hindu seeks?” His second question follows from it: “And how can Christ fulfill that?”
Begin with a wall
Patel tells a story from a mission event in south India. Christians got permission to write on city walls, and they wrote that Jesus is the answer, over and over. Several days later, local Hindus got permission to use other blank walls. Their reply, as Patel tells it, was a question of their own: what’s the question?
Try this before going further. Write one sentence you would most naturally say to a Hindu friend about why Jesus matters. Underneath it, write the question your sentence answers. If your sentence is about heaven, the question might be What happens to me when I die? If it is about forgiveness, the question might be How can I be made right after I have done wrong?
Now ask yourself whether you know your friend is asking that question. Patel’s own example is pointed. He once nearly handed a Hindu friend an apologetics book with a chapter about Jesus defeating death. Then he stopped. “Hindus don’t care about death,” he says. In a world of rebirth, death is a passage, not an ending. A sentence about Christ’s victory over death can be entirely true and still answer nothing your friend has asked.
If you are leading a group, have each person read their two lines aloud without discussion. Then ask what kinds of questions showed up, and how many came from Christian concerns rather than anything a Hindu friend actually said. If someone seems embarrassed by their answer, point out that Patel describes this habit in people far more trained than anyone present. He says even prominent theologians looking at Hindu religions “often ask Christian questions” and he adds, “In the hope of finding Christian answers.” Then move on without lingering on any one person’s sentence.
What Scripture asks of a witness
Paul writes in Colossians 4:6, “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” Look at the last three words. Paul assumes different people need different answers, and he treats knowing how to answer as something a believer learns. Grace describes the manner. Salt suggests speech with flavor and substance, not blandness.
Peter writes in 1 Peter 3:15, “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” The answer here responds to someone who asks, and it is given with meekness. Peter also expects the believer to actually have a reason for hope and to give it. Listening prepares the answer. It does not replace it.
In Acts 17, Paul speaks in Athens. Verses 22-23 read: “Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” The KJV’s “too superstitious” is older English. Many translations render it as “very religious,” which fits Paul’s point better. He had walked the city and looked closely at what people revered before he said a word.
Read this chapter as what it is. Luke is describing what Paul did in one city, not handing down a script for every conversation. The description still teaches. Paul’s starting point came from careful observation, and he did not stay there. By verse 30 he is calling all people everywhere to repent. In verse 31 he points to the man God raised from the dead. Starting where someone is does not mean ending there.
- Which of the three passages pushes hardest against your usual instincts in a faith conversation?
- What did Paul have to do in Athens before he could speak about the altar?
- Peter mentions both a reason and a manner. Which of the two do you tend to neglect?
What to listen for
Patel gives a listener concrete things to pay attention to. You do not need to master Hindu philosophy. You need to know where a person’s real concerns tend to show up.
- Practice before belief. Patel advises asking “what is your practice?” rather than asking for doctrines. His reasoning: “So a practice of a Hindu tells you a lot about what goes on in their hearts, what are they seeking, what is the quest.” A temple visit, a fast or a daily devotion is aimed at something. Ask what.
- The weight people carry. Patel suggests that “a great question or conversation to have lovingly, is around the concept of karma.” He notes that even Hindus in the West who share some Christian assumptions turn to karma in hard moments: “when there’s a real crisis, they will start thinking on things like karma.” Pay close attention to suffering and to what your friend thinks it means.
- Honor before worship. Patel describes how he greeted his grandparents: “I would touch their feet and touch my head. That’s honor.” Lisa Fields observed that in many religious cultures outside America “we confuse kind of honor with practice.” Before you label something, ask what it means to the person doing it.
- Tone. Patel says Hindu traditions hold deep respect for mystery, so very definite Christian answers may feel normal to a Christian, “but to a lot of Hindus, it could come across as arrogant.” He calls it a cultural issue. Your conviction can stay. The posture of your first approach may need to change.
The listening round
This is the main practice. In threes, one person plays a Hindu friend, one plays the Christian, and one observes. Run three rounds of about eight minutes so everyone takes each role.
The person playing the friend picks one situation drawn only from what Patel describes. Perhaps they fast on certain days and are asked about it. Perhaps they keep images at home that they honor. Perhaps a parent is seriously ill and they have been wondering whether this comes from past karma. Keep the character modest and human. Do not perform an accent or a caricature.
The person playing the Christian follows two rules for the first five minutes. Ask only questions. Make no corrections and no gospel presentation. The goal is to learn what the practice is for and what burden, if any, the person carries. Patel’s own questions are a good place to start: “So what are your thoughts about karma? Your actions, your thoughts?” In the last three minutes, the Christian may offer one sentence that connects the gospel to something the friend actually said. Patel models the shape of such a sentence: “It’s helpful to share thoughts like, what if someone paid for your karma.”
The observer tracks three things. How many questions came before the first statement? Did the Christian assume a belief the friend never stated? Did the closing sentence connect to something the friend really said, or to something the Christian had planned to say all along?
For facilitators: name clearly that the exercise trains a habit and does not teach anyone what Hindus believe. A real Hindu friend is the authority on their own faith, and nobody in the room is. If a round drifts into caricature, stop it and restart gently. Debrief by asking each trio what made the questions-only rule hard.
If you are working alone, write the conversation as a short script. Give your friend at least six lines before your character says anything about Jesus. Then reread it and mark every place your character assumed something.
Testing the habit
A good habit can still go wrong. Test this one in three ways.
First, your friend is not a textbook. Patel prefers the phrase “Hindu religions” because, as he puts it, “they often contradict each other.” Some traditions eat meat and others do not. Some believe God has a form and others do not. What you have learned is a set of good questions, not a profile to match people against. If your friend’s answers do not fit Patel’s description, believe your friend.
Second, listening can become a technique. If you ask questions only to find an opening for your pitch, your friend will probably sense it. Lisa Fields put the underlying problem plainly when she said that in many conversations “we miss that everybody’s not us, and everybody’s coming from a different background and set of beliefs and a different worldview.” The meekness Peter asks for is not a tactic. Listening to a friend is a way of loving them, whatever comes next.
Third, the bridge is not the destination. Patel does not suggest leaving the conversation at karma. He says, “You need to explain why they need someone to die for them.” Then: “Someone pure like Christ, right?” He is also candid about real differences. In the Hindu world he describes, the one God does not mind prayer through a guru or angelic beings, while the God of Scripture wants no rival in the heart. Knowing which difference is cultural and which is real keeps you from two mistakes: condemning honor, and pretending a real disagreement does not exist.
Taking it into a real friendship
Over the next month, if you have a Hindu friend, try one modest step: ask about a practice you have noticed, with no plan to turn the conversation. If the friendship is new, the step may simply be learning the names of the festivals your friend keeps and asking what they mean.
Let your own faith have visible practices too. Patel thinks many Western Christians present a faith that is mostly ideas, and he urges believers to recover stillness and solitude with God. “We spend time alone in solitude with him,” he says. He imagines a Christian telling a Hindu friend, “Oh, I just meditated on Jesus for a while.” That line invites a question.
Patel also suggests saying “Jesus is my guru.” He explains that a guru is one who takes you from darkness into light, and he expects the reaction: “A Hindu will say, what do you mean?” He is clear that the fuller confession of Jesus as Son of God follows: “you can come to that later, of course.” The phrase carries a real risk. In Patel’s own account, a guru in his former tradition was treated as God’s vessel on earth whose word outranked scripture, and many Hindus honor more than one guru. Your friend may hear that Jesus is one more teacher alongside others. If you use the phrase, your follow-up has to say what makes Jesus different: he is not a guide among many but God come in the flesh, who died and rose bodily, and who asks for the whole heart. If you cannot see yourself giving that follow-up, choose another opening.
Expect grace to land slowly. Patel says it took him two years for grace to begin settling into his own heart after a lifetime of practice. He reminds Christians “That these guys work so hard to please God,” and that being told you are simply loved can sound strange: “It’s like, what does that even mean?” A puzzled response may be the beginning of understanding, not the end of the conversation.
Questions for discussion
- Look again at the sentence you wrote at the start. What would you need to learn about a particular friend before you knew whether it fits?
- Colossians 4:6 assumes you can learn how to answer each person. What has actually taught you that skill so far, and what has gotten in the way?
- In the listening round, what made the questions-only rule hardest to keep?
- Where is the line between respecting a friend’s practice and pretending you have no real disagreement? Use Patel’s honor example to test your answer.
- Would you ever introduce yourself with “Jesus is my guru”? What would you need to say next for it to be honest?
- Which practices in your own faith would a friend from a practice-shaped religion notice, if any? What would change if there were more?
- What would staying faithful in a slow friendship look like, and what would make you doubt your own motives in it?
Before you finish, return to the wall sentence from the beginning. Rewrite it so it starts from something a friend might actually be carrying rather than from the answer you were ready to give. Then keep the question Patel puts at the center of every bridge: “So it’s about going into that world, understanding it, coming back, okay, now what’s the bridge? Where’s the connection?”