I don't usually post links, but here is an article about a Campus Crusade Spring Break Trip to Daytona Beach through the eyes of a skeptic who followed along.
I spent two spring breaks during college on similar evangelical trips to Panama City Beach, Florida, and had some comparable experiences and thoughts with the author. I've talked to some Christians who have read the article posted above, and they've without exception had one of two reactions: either they found the article unhelpful because it discouraged them from evangelism, or they found the article disturbingly accurate, discouraging them from evangelism.
The first mistake you could make in reading an account like the aforementioned is to make it interchangeable with evangelism in general, or even initiative evangelism (the type of evangelism that involves spiritual conversation with people you haven't yet met). There is no doubt that Christian evangelism has been what God has used to spread His gospel for centuries to great effect. The same holds true for initiative evangelism. In Acts 8, the Spirit of the Lord tells Philip point-blank to run up and approach an Ethiopian eunuch who was riding by on the road. So there's no use getting discouraged about evangelism or even initiative evangelism because of one singular report of failure in a specific instance; we already know that by God's grace and our obedience, evangelism works. Making this story representative of evangelical outreach at large makes as much sense as dismissing the Baptism of Christ from a bad experience at a Baptist church, and yet people do it all the time.
But the first gain you could take from this account are some pointed examples of what not to do. My experience is that a lot of Christians go to Big Break and other spring break outreaches because they believe sincerely in the cause of Christ's gospel and they want to be obedient to do something about it, and Big Break appears to be the only foreseeable way to reconcile the first two impetuses. So it makes sense that a lot of people would be pretty hesitant to dismiss anything that Big Break does on the rationale of "Well, what do you suggest we do instead?" But sometimes that's a restricting way of thinking. I understand that God is bigger and smarter than we are and that oftentimes we can't foresee the fruits of our labor, but a lot of times, it's better to do nothing than to do things that take backward steps and hope for the best.
And from what I saw, we did a lot that set back the gospel of Christ. The speaker at the conference preached 100% Success Evangelism, which meant that as long as you made an effort to communicate the gospel, God would bless that effort. There's some theological basis for that, but in practice, a lot of students translated 100% Success Evangelism into a really aggressive, pushy approach. I remember I was trying to connect with a guy on the beach and we were conversing about his experience with the church growing up when my evangelism partner sailed out of nowhere with the grace and delicacy of a battering ram. She physically pushed me aside and yelled in a loud voice, "Hey! I have two questions for you! If you were to die today, do you think you would go to heaven?" I tried to wriggle back into the discussion, but she physically blocked me and continued, "...And question two, on a scale of 1 to 10, how sure are you of your answer?"
A lot of people probably don't stop to think about the intellectual set-up necessary for that sort of question to mean anything. To ask whether I believed I would go to heaven would require that I believed in a lot of other fundamental ideas: that there is a God, that there is a heaven, that said heaven is accessible for me, that she is in fact asking about the Christian heaven, that whether I believe I am going to heaven actually reflects whether I am going there or not, and that I actually would want to go to heaven if I believed in such a place. When you think about it, it's pretty galling to assume blindly that a person is in such a place spiritually and intellectually, which makes that a pretty terrible one-two punch as far as introductions go.
For me, the most convicting excerpt of the article was this paragraph:
"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."
In my two spring breaks there, I always did my best to establish contact information and be handy with follow-up advice or a listening ear. It's not easy for an experienced Christian to follow Christ on his or her own; how much harder for a fledgling believer in the middle of a drunken spring break event on a beach? What the author is pointing out is that something about the approach is short-termed, impersonal, and non-committal.
Two conclusions to walk away with from that paragraph. The first is that as negative as this feedback is, it's extremely helpful for us as Christian evangelists. I've always thought it would be a good idea to meet someone and say, "Hey, what were your thoughts on the way we've approached you with the message of the gospel? What were some things you found appealing and what did you find disingenuous? I want to know because the message of Jesus is important to me, and I really think it's the best news you'll ever hear, and I want to see if the way we communicate stands in the way of that, and fix it if I can." And in effect, the author and his article provided exactly that feedback. But the goal is not to be better salesmen with better tricks; the goal is to be better ambassadors of the true good news of Christ.
The second takeaway is that it's important to remember that Jesus is not a cookie-cutter, four-step process.
On we go.
One of the principal observations of the article was that Christians seemed to be in their own sheltered, naive world. And just as Paul became all things to all people, we should understand the importance of cultural relevance and context in connecting with others. But Christians are citizens of a different kingdom. We don't belong to the world; we belong to God. Our ways are not the same, our thoughts are not the same, our habits are not the same. To the author of the article, it was dubious whether all that effort and money was worth it for one more Christian, but to Jesus, it was worth everything to find that one lost lamb, and it was worth His life to give you and me a chance. So I think that in some sense, the frustration with the inability to relate with Daytona Beach Spring Break is finally a sign that they were doing something right. The closer students draw to God's holiness and righteousness, the more the prospect of drunken, concupiscent revelry should seem like something alien and terrible (of course, the same could be true if students were coming from an isolationist Christianized culture, rather than a true pursuit of godliness). And especially in some environment, it makes perfect sense that you'd find a lot of people who are completely uninterested in the gospel. Jesus gave His disciples the command to shake the dust off their feet and move on from such places. So to note that the entirety of Daytona Beach did not become a beacon of godliness overnight is not to say that the project was a failure. In one respect, it shows the need for Christ in more real way than most Christians are used to.
And Panama City Beach also saw a lot of success. Some student groups saw entire baseball teams give their hearts to Christ and every night, students gave testimonies in awe of what God had done that day through their witness. A cynical reflex is to say, "Well, how many of those were real salvation," but there's no answering that, so shut up. And there was something great in seeing the body of Christ, a small part of it, yes, and flawed, yes, but still laboring in the harvest of God's fields of humanity.
The Daytona Beach project has some undeniable flaws, it's true. But in my estimation, the spring break beach project is not fundamentally flawed. I have a lot of concrete ideas for how to make it a better, more genuine experience for both the Christian students and the kids who are just there to party.
For me, those two spring breaks were great learning experiences. I learned everything I just wrote down above, I learned a lot about what I think does and doesn't work in communicating the gospel, and I very vividly remember what a relief it was after a weary day in the world to return to God's people and worship together each night of the conference. To have spent the day wrestling with doubts from other people and doubts from yourself makes the return to God's realm so much sweeter.
It's been a year to the day since I started this blog, and apparently I'm just as long-winded as ever.
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6 comments:
I found the article very interesting but perhaps unhelpful for me since it makes me cynical of evangelism in general. I'd like to hear your thoughts from your experiences, especially what you found valuable from beach witnessing.
-Miriam
Ouch.
I still don't quite know how I view that entire PBC experience.
Interesting. I knew I harbored heretical thoughts, but I had no idea they might be so much like the thoughts of *gasp* a secular liberal!
But seriously, interesting read. I've found a couple of books like this too (Jim and Casper Go to Church, I sold my soul on ebay) that are church surveys from the POV of an atheist. I find them both enlightening, but very awkward for me to read as well.
The more interesting thought I tend to ponder is what our reaction to such articles should be - refuse to listen to them on the grounds that "unbelievers don't know the truth" (or something like that) can turn us into a proud, isolated society of zealots. Listening and bending too much towards society results in the church having little/no influence at all on the earth it's supposed to redeem.
There's a third way here. You don't have to take atheists at their word in order to conclude that cold calling doesn't work. The key is to decide whether or not you're interested in effective evangelism or just in satisfying some sense of duty. This kind of evangelism is annoying and unhelpful, and it's empirically bad at winning converts. It works fine when your audience is an indigenous tribe awestruck at all of the modern technology you're bringing with you, but you can't convert the average American by telling him that he's going to hell. He won't believe you. Further, such evangelists do their cause a general disservice by spreading the notion that to be Christian is to be obnoxious, loud, and perhaps a bit slow. I would bet that the (very small) number of lasting converts won this way is more than made up for by the number of people inoculated against more effective conversion methods.
You absolutely have to consider this from the other person's perspective when your metric of success is empirical (number of lasting converts, here). You have to study the causes of belief and you have to do the hard work of determining the most effective method of evangelizing (and you have to do the hard work of consistently following up if that's what's required).
Now, I'll grant that I haven't been converted yet, but it does seem to me that it's precisely those Christians who didn't try to sit me down and convert me that have made the best attempts. Matt, I went to your bible study for a few years. I've been to church with Marie on several occasions. I do those things because I'm aware that they're important to my friends and want to see what's up. Going in, I already have some respect for those beliefs because I see that people who organize their lives around those beliefs are people I admire doing things I respect, and I imagine that it's my friendships with Christians that I understand to be decent people that have stopped me from adopting the same attitude towards religious belief as, say, Pz Myers and Richard Dawkins. At the same time, it makes perfect sense to me that someone whose only real experience with evangelical Christians was with the sort of cold callers described in the article would have the beliefs that many of the New Atheists do.
The tricky part, of course, is that being a truly effective evangelist requires leading a Christ-like life, insofar as that's possible. It's much more difficult than telling people to repent or burn before never seeing them again.
thanks for the reflections on it. well done in seeing both sides of the picture
I must say that Gotchaye's evaluation is what I expected from an open, honest, and non-cynical non-Christian. Heck, it's pretty inline with my feelings as well.
And yet, I don't want to discount that sort of evangelism all together. It seems to be the method that gave the Church it's initial liftoff, as in Acts 2. But maybe such an approach is inappropriate for a culture and society like ours — which is saturated with the name of Jesus, but not the Life of Him — and is instead more appropriate for peoples coming from an unbiased perspective or a less knowledgeable society. Or maybe even just a situation more amenable for people to listen...unlike the beach on Spring Break.
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