Friendship Evangelism: Skepticism and Defense

It's uncomfortable for me to speak in positive terms about evangelizing. As I've written before, my early experiences in the Southern Baptist Church--where "evangelizing" meant "constantly asking strangers whether they had given their lives to Christ"--left me cold toward the idea of inflicting my faith on others.

Listening to Ira Glass interviewing Jim Henderson on this week's This American Life, I found myself agreeing with Glass's incredulity about the efficacy of Henderson's "doable evangelism." A variety of "friendship evangelism," Henderson's technique seeks to avoid the confrontational approach--the "urgency" approach--of the Way of the Master. Rather, friendship evangelism's focus is on cultivating authentic relationships with non-believers, letting faith convictions emerge naturally as part of the relationship rather than artificially as part of some "bait and switch" sales pitch.

I can see the appeal. Ideally, a Christian's life should be legitimately distinct enough that any close friend of a Christian would note it. Moreover, one would hope that the Christian's loving attitude would on its own attract new converts or at least provoke people to wonder, "What's up with that person? I want what she has..." People are more apt to listen and learn from someone if they ask of their own accord. The confrontational, if-you-died-right-now-would-you-go-to-heaven questioning of the urgency evangelists presents a face of Christianity that is at best little more than a get-out-of-hell-free card and at worst a shrill, judgmental harangue.

Glass's criticism--his honest confusion, I should say--was this: What if Christianity never comes up? It's perfectly possible to co-exist with people of other faiths, or of no faith at all, and never broach the subject of Things Eternal. Or, as is more often the case, friends practice mutual awareness of and respect for their colleagues' beliefs without needing to know everything about them or feeling like they have to make an issue out of that difference.

What's the difference, in other words, between being a friendship evangelist and just plain being nice? If the goal of the evangelist is to spread the good news, then can you really call a technique that doesn't involve sharing the good news evangelism at all?

The pro-friendship response (and I should emphasize that I have not read Henderson's own work--this is my guess) would likely acknowledge and embrace the risk of the difference-with-no-difference. But that's the point--if your Christianity co-exists seamlessly with non-Christianity, perhaps (as the LOLcats say) "ur doin it wrong." The challenge of friendship evangelism--life evangelism--is to not confine your "ambassador for Christ" identity to discrete, on-the-street encounters where you're in "evangelist mode." Rather, you pattern your entire life after an awareness of your status as Christ's representative on earth. You are aware at all times--not just when "soul winning"--that you are to embody the loving-grace-kindness (chesed) of God for all people.

The challenge is to make this practice of all-the-time-chesed so authentically interlaced into your daily life that people take notice. In a way, this is a deeper challenge, a harder discipline, than even the stage-fright-defying tactics of the Way of the Master. And there's a good amount of scriptural support for this approach.

The life-evangelism approach also highlights the fact that urgency evangelism can at times present a distinctly un-loving and un-Christian face.

Now, Way of the Master folk would (and do) counter that they are the ones showing true love. If someone's blithely walking toward a cliff edge, is it loving to do nothing to warn them, hoping perhaps that they simply see your behavior and follow your example of not-going-toward-the-edge? No! The loving thing to do when you know a saving truth is to shout, scream, plead, challenge--do everything you can to get the person to stop, to turn around, to be saved.

The problem is that in the urgency scenario the love is often only obvious to the evangelists. To the people they're trying to save--the people to whom they're showing real love--the evangelists can seem not loving but annoying, pushy, and hateful. In theatre, we warn young actors that it matters less about whether they think they're communicating X emotion or Y subtext; it only matters if the audience gets it. If the actor (or director or designer or playwright) has to explain that the audience didn't get it but that it's really there, trust me!--then the message effectively doesn't exist.

In other words, love between two people that only one party recognizes as such is at least suspect. True, parents often have to discipline their children ("don't touch that hot stove!" "don't run into the street!"), which is unpleasant for children. The children may not in the moment of discipline feel love per se, but the parent is nonetheless showing love by setting and enforcing healthy boundaries. But even that logic has limits. Abusive parents exercise unhealthy discipline; calling physical violence against a child "love" does not make it so.

Moreover, the child-parent relationship feels wrong when transferred to the evangelistic relationship. For the evangelist to treat nonbelievers as children--they don't know I'm being loving, but I really am!--is a dubious tactic at best. As friendship/life evangelism techniques argue, if it looks like un-love, sounds like un-love, and feels like un-love--well, it's probably un-love.

More tomorrow,

JF