Anxiety and Evangelism (Confessions of a PK pt. 2)

In my experience, living as a Southern Baptist means identifying and managing certain forms of supernatural anxiety.

First, as I mentioned in my last post, was the Anxiety of Afterlife, charmingly captured by any number of standard evangelical questions: "If you were to die right now, are you 100% sure that you'd wake up in Heaven?" "When they search for your name in the Book of Life, what will they see?"

Getting to heaven and avoiding hell--securing your own personal salvation--remains an active concern even after the act of "getting saved." Now, Baptists subscribe by and large to the "once saved, always saved" school of thought. That is, once you've given your life to Christ--really, authentically given it--your place in heaven is utterly secure. No amount of backsliding can erase your name from the Book of Life.

Ah, but is your salvation authentic? There's the rub. See, a sign of authentic faith is inner certainty that your salvation "took," that nothing can separate you from Christ's salvation, etc. Doubt, therefore, is a matter of concern in that it may possibly indicate that you were never actually saved to begin with. Thus the Southern Baptist convention of re-dedicating your life, which to my childhood mind seemed like a kind of insurance policy for those times when you were, say, 90% rather than 100% sure about waking up in heaven post-death.

Apart from that Prime Concern (i.e., yourself and your personal salvation), there's the Close Second: evangelism. In addition to being certain of his/her own salvation, a true Christian was naturally concerned about the ultimate fate of everyone else. "Who did you bring with you?" is, I learned, the question God demands of deceased believers right after "Is your name in the Book of Life?"

I cannot overstress the imperative to multiply that pulses throughout Southern Baptist culture (and through many other varieties of conservative evangelicalism). Churches, ministers, parachurch ministries--just about every aspect of evangelical life rates its effectiveness by how many new visitors, new decisions, new memberships, new numbers it generates.

For individual evangelicals like 8-year-old me, the evangelism imperative meant that I was expected to "share Christ" with any and everyone I met. Anyone--friends, acquaintances, perfect strangers--any relationship was a failure, a missed opportunity, to the extent that I did not in some way confront them with the Reality of heaven/hell, Christ, and salvation.

Pause for a moment and imagine an eight-year-old stranger approaching you in a public place and asking, stammeringly, if you are going to heaven. Better yet, watch a scene from the 2006 movie Jesus Camp where a young girl does just that to a group of strangers at a picnic table in a park. It's an exquisitely awkward encounter (though the picnickers are generous and patient). Watching it with my partner, I was caught between admiration for this youngster's ability to live up to her convictions, embarrassment at her amateur sales pitch, sympathy with the strangers who get to deal with a preteen's questioning their eternal fate--but above all the strong feeling of "I know just how she feels."

I had many a similar conversation with strangers, and I think I was a good deal shyer than the girl in the film. Each time I broached the subject with someone, springing an "are you a Christian" on a stranger or wrenching a perfectly normal conversation toward the fires of hell, I felt just awful: I was imposing, I was intrusive I was boring , I was embarrassing, I was ruining any possible chance for having a normal friendship,,,

But as bad as that awkwardness was, I knew that doing nothing--letting the unsaved go without hearing the Gospel--was worse. Evangelical culture is filled with horror stories of the unsaved dying and finding themselves in hell, screaming in pain, wondering pitifully why oh why their Christian friends never told them about this place? (For a key example, see the viral "Letter from Hell," here). If I loved other people, surely I would care about helping them avoid Eternal Torment.

But underneath this magnanimity--or perhaps alongside it--was the suspicion that if I didn't evangelize, if I didn't go through those interpersonal ordeals, then I had reason to doubt the authenticity of my Christianity. True Christians care enough to put their self-comfort beneath their love of others. Moreover, true Christians "bear fruit"--which I took for a long time to mean "produce other Christians." Those who fail to bear fruit, warn various verses, will be cut off from the True Vine and thrown into the fire. To save others, to evangelize, was thus an aspect of managing that Prime Anxiety of Where Will I Go When I Die?

More next post.