Despising none: Joe Ball

Does street evangelism work?

I came across this in  Geg Steir from Dare2Share's blog.   He refrences an article in Salon Magazine (not a magazine that I normally read) where a unchristian student, Kevin Roose, accompanies his Chirstian friends to Florida for Beach Reach.  This chapter in Salon is an excerpt fron a book he has written about being a sinner at one of America's holiest Universities.

It is an interesting read.   Stier says in his blog, "he didn't write his article out of vindictiveness or venom. He seemed to actually like these evangelicals and was exploring why they were willing to go through all the pain and strain of being persecuted without seeing tangible results."

I will post a few excerpts from the excerpt and then link you to both the Salon article and Steir's response.  There are some areas for greaet conversation.

First a little about the author to help set the stage.

But I'm not a young evangelical -- not even close. Two months ago, I transferred to Liberty from Brown, ...I had a secular liberal upbringing and I've always considered myself pretty ambivalent about God, but I decided to enroll at Liberty for a semester to learn about my conservative Christian peers and find out whether any common ground existed between my world and theirs. Since then, I've been living undercover in an all-male dorm ...And when March rolled around, I decided to do what many Christian college students do over spring break: take a mission trip.

A major point for Roose is the evangelist zeal but the lack of a follow-up plan....

The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we'd be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any -- guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there's no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn't), Martina would have led him through the Sinner's Prayer ("Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior" or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion -- which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.

If the new believer backslides, though, like Jason was suggesting he might, Christians are likely to believe that he wasn't really saved. False conversions are a glaring wart on the face of Christian evangelism... I found several sobering statistics about the percentage of apparent converts who stay involved with the church in the long term, including one from Peter Wagner, a seminary professor in California who estimated that only 3 to 16 percent of the converts at Christian crusades stay involved.

The false conversion rate is profoundly depressing if you believe in this stuff. After all, if we get ten converts during this week -- an optimistic number -- and our false conversion numbers are consistent with the average, this group has spent a week's worth of twelve-hour days, thousands of dollars, and suffered massive amounts of emotional trauma for what? One more Christian? Two?

There must be an easier way.

At the end of the week he looks back at this experience and says:

Then again, maybe this trip was never all about the Spring Breakers. Battleground evangelism, it turns out, can be just as useful for the evangelists as for the non-believers. For these Liberty students, going to Daytona is a tool for self-anaesthetization, a way to get used t o the feeling of being an outcast in the secular world. The first 40 times someone blows you off, it feels awful. The second 40 times, you start reassuring yourself that all of this must serve a higher purpose. By the end of the week, you get the point -- you are going to be mocked and scorned for your faith, and this is the way it's supposed to be.

To read the entire excerpt in Salon click here

To read Steir's respons, click here