Outrageous and Courageous

Chapter 1
A More Excellent Way

Unholy Terror
Everybody has a bad evangelism story. Here is Fred’s.
It promised to be exciting, but the first part of the conference was predictable. Led by a large local church, it was nothing more than a lecture about the pastor’s faith-sharing philosophy. The conference also promised to be educational. On this point it delivered, but the lessons seared into my heart that day weren’t found in the curriculum.
After the speech, we were divided into small teams, each led by a person from the sponsoring church. We were handed the name and address of one household in the immediate area. The task? Cold-call evangelism. When finished, we’d report back to the others at the conference.
Off we went. We knocked. The door opened. The woman who greeted us was old enough to be my mother. She was not expecting visitors but politely invited us inside. She did not recognize me, but I immediately realized she was a member of a neighboring congregation.
We were barely seated in the living room before our leader cut to the chase. “Are you saved? Do you know that for sure? If you died tomorrow …?” The one-way torrent was not a genuine inquiry but an interrogation with a deadline. His questions were fast-paced and intense. Her responses were slow and timid. But each time, his hard question received her soft answer. Yes. I squirmed and considered her unbelievably gracious for not throwing us out.
Unfortunately, our feckless leader was just getting started. Despite the plain meaning of her answer, he interpreted her hesitancy as doubt in disguise. His strategy, it seemed, was to keep firing religious questions until the response he got was a firm no rather than a gentle yes. As I recall, there were two prize questions that (in his mind) exposed our longsuffering host as a wicked heathen. Jackpot question one: “Before you take your child to school, do you pray to God to confirm that what you are doing is God’s will?” Her: “Uh, no …” Jackpot question two: “Do you pray to God before you go to the hair salon?” Timidity gave way to bafflement, and our host responded, “Well no! Why would I do that?” Our lead inquisitor pronounced that if she were in a right relationship with Jesus Christ, she would find out if it was God's will for her to do each task of her day. Time for repentance!
We prayed a prayer of confession. Our leader prayed for the host’s salvation. Then we left.
When we arrived at the conference center’s parking lot, we spotted the pastor whose church was sponsoring the event. Our leader bolted across the asphalt, grabbed his pastor, and proclaimed victoriously, “I got another one for the kingdom!”
I was aghast. I made a vow to God that day that I would never participate in anything like that again. I vowed to God that I would confront the perpetrator, apologize to the host, and take my leave. And I did.

A Peek at the Playbook
Everybody has an awkward evangelism story. Jeremy’s story involves contact sports.
The man was tall and confident and radiated uncontainable energy. When he said he turned down a career in the NFL because God called him to be a traveling revival preacher, all the young men in the audience were electrified, wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and viscerally absorbed. All the young men, that is, except for me.
It was “Spiritual Emphasis Week” at our small Bible college, and I found myself in the unspiritual position of envying the rapture my fellow students were experiencing. I knew part of the problem was that the inherent connection between God and contact sports was somehow lost on me. Although my dad was and is a committed believer, a pillar in his church, and a faithful husband and father, he also preferred Star Trek to Sunday football. I wondered if he was somehow to blame.
About midweek, the revival preacher called us to a radical task: door-to-door, cold-call evangelism. We’d knock on doors, tell complete strangers about Jesus, and souls would be saved this very week. This very week! He’d done it all over the country! Get in the game! Again, I was in an awkward spot. I believed in Jesus, in evangelism, and in salvation, but for some reason, at age nineteen, I had doubts about the efficacy of this approach. I also had doubts about my doubts and wondered if I was simply an unfaithful, foot-dragging coward for not going along with the contagious momentum of it all.
My single courageous moment came when I approached the revival speaker in the student cafeteria. The young men around him were asking if he’d ever consider going back to the NFL. (Answer: no). With hesitation, I asked him a different question. “You lead students all over the country in door-to-door evangelism. Um, how much good does it actually do?”
He didn’t even look up from his lunch tray. He held his fingers one-inch apart and replied, “About this much. We don’t do it for them. We do it for us.”
His honesty hit me like a blindside tackle. Before I had the presence of mind to clarify who he meant by “us” and “them,” he continued. “Almost no one comes to believe in Jesus because of the cold-calling we do. So it’s doesn’t do much good for the non-Christians.” Then he smiled. “The students who do the cold-calling, though, they get changed. It can be scary to share your faith, but those who do this kind of evangelism usually aren’t scared after an experience like this. After this week, they’ll be able to share their faith with anybody, anytime, so it does them a lot of good.”
I had a few friends who did knock on the doors of strangers. I don’t recall any victory reports or crisis conversions, which we all felt was a little disappointing, but the students still described it as a meaningful experience. When those doors opened, my friends met many people who were lonely, a few who were unsure of what they believed, and several who described themselves as Christians without a church home. They did develop a healthy confidence about sharing their faith, and I loved hearing their stories. I also wondered if it was best practice to rally young Christians to one goal (“Save the lost!”) when the real goal, still good, was much less direct (“Personal enrichment!”).
I didn’t do the cold-calling, but that week changed me too.

Many conversations about evangelism begin and end with unfortunately true stories, stinging encounters with the silly, the inept, or the unethical. Perhaps you have a few tales you could tell. Or scars you could show. The people inside our churches—and outside—probably do too. But should the story end there?
We believe that the unfortunately true stories should be heard, studied, and learned from, but they should not be allowed to have the last word. We believe the good news is far better than the bad stories. Why should an unsavory encounter with a pushy preacher cause a resurrection faith to roll over and play dead? If the gospel is more powerful than sin and death, more powerful than hate and war, the gospel is also more powerful than the evangelistic disasters created by those who lay claim to it. Why should we surrender our hearts to a bad experience? Instead, we should ask, in faith and hope and love, “What is the more excellent way?”
For us, the more excellent way involves relationships.