For years, we’ve had some good laughs over evangelical leaders’ ongoing attempts to strong-arm their flocks into performing more evangelism. Basically, the flocks just don’t wanna. And nobody can make them, not even their dysfunctional-authoritarian leaders.
It’s just so funny to me that evangelicals and their leaders have these farcical pretendy games that they do around evangelism, and nobody’s allowed to call either of them out. Today, let’s talk about each side’s pretendy games!
(From introduction: Recipes for chocolate dump cake, ganache frosting, and hot fudge pudding cake. This post first went live on Patreon on 11/12/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
Evangelism in Ye Olden Tymes
Evangelical flocks have never liked evangelism—by which we mean attempting to recruit new members for their churches. And long ago, they didn’t have to do much of it!
In the past, famous evangelists like Billy Graham traveled from city to city to stage giant evangelism events. Various churches in each city paid for evangelists’ time and materials. In turn, the evangelists would funnel “decision cards” to the sponsoring churches. Visitors who wanted to convert to the evangelists’ religion filled out these cards with their personal information. Here’s a sample decision card from a printing company:
But those grand evangelism events aren’t as common these days as they once were. Churches don’t seem to be able to afford to hire professional evangelists on that scale. Of the evangelists still holding these events, they are small time to say the least—and I get the impression some of them (if not most of them) volunteer for the task.
That’s not to say that churches never pay for evangelism, of course. A Southern Baptist guy, Rick Gage, has been busy in the Southeast holding “crusades” aimed at schoolchildren. His website’s information page does its level best to avoid the entire sordid subject of coin, but it’s easy to discern from its dancing-around language that this dude doesn’t work for free.
(The money-grubbing of evangelists and apologists is all we need to know about how effective their wares are. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re getting there. For now, I’ll simply note that the children attending these events may be fairly easy to capture, but their religious decisions don’t tend to last through adulthood.)
But then, Christianity’s decline forced churches to do more with less than they’ve ever had in terms of resources. As a result, church leaders began leaning on laypeople to do their church’s recruiting. They’ve been trying to get the flocks to do more evangelism since about 2014.
In response, the flocks nod and smile, then placidly ignore them and their demands.
Empowering the flocks to do more evangelism
In early 2022, I began hearing about evangelical leaders trying to empower their flocks to do more evangelism.
That’s a fun word, isn’t it? I think the managers of almost every bottom-tier service job I’ve ever heard of have proudly said they empowered their employees. What that word seems to mean is forcing bottom-rung employees to take responsibility for mistakes that aren’t theirs while also not giving them one iota of additional power to actually solve any problems. Some years back, a character in Black Books took a very empowering job at a very empowering big-box bookstore:
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of an employee fooled by all that empowerment blather. I’ve only met a few higher-up employees who actually felt they were empowered to do anything at all.
All the way in 2022, empowerment is exactly what Matt Queen was pushing. And yes, I got interested in this little side rabbithole after checking out his story. In early 2022, he wrote a post for Southern Baptist Texan about it:
Evangelism is that Spirit-empowered activity whereby all disciples of Jesus Christ give an intentional, complete, and verbal witness to his life, death, burial, and resurrection, exhorting unbelievers to become baptized, obedient disciples by repenting of their sins and placing their faith in Christ alone for salvation. [. . .]
We’re trying to find the courage, but if we would just trust the Spirit for a boldness, he would give it.
Obviously, that’s what the flocks were missing: empowerment!
Wordplay, dishonest evangelism style
But Matt Queen’s using the word in a strange way. He uses it to mean powered, not empowered. He means that evangelism is powered by Jesus Power, which all Christians ought to be able to access. As he clearly sees it, his job is just making Christians aware that Jesus will totally give them the right words to say if they “would just trust the Spirit for a boldness.”
By the way, “a boldness” is an interesting way to say “courage.” It’s advanced Christianese from some translations of 1 John 4:17 and then rephrased as “a boldness” by Charles Spurgeon:
Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. [KJV]
17. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have a boldness in the day of judgment. [Spurgeon’s mangling]
I often see evangelicals talking about “a boldness,” even though that exact phrase appears nowhere in any Bible translation I know of. They almost certainly get it from (someone who got it from) Spurgeon. I suspect they’re using it to imply a Jesus-flavored confidence. The word “just” is a filler word they like. It amplifies the Jesus Quotient of whatever they’re saying. Hence, the old joke about their prayer style: We just trust you, Father, to just help us just love others as you love us, and just help us to just speak your glory everywhere…
As Matt Queen explains further into the article, he’s a little sad that so many evangelical sheep think evangelism’s all about training and memorization. Gosh, if they’d just start talking, Jesus would just totally just handle the rest and just give them “a boldness!”
Naturally, Queen himself has been thoroughly trained and has clearly memorized a whole lot of evangelism routines. He acknowledges this fact, but he insists that training and memorization aren’t necessary at all. It comes off like those conventionally gorgeous people who insist that looks don’t matter in dating.
Gosh, the flocks totally want to do evangelism, but the opportunities just aren’t opening up
A few months later in Summer 2022, Lifeway published a post about the sad state of evangelical evangelism. In their research, they found that many evangelicals really truly totally do want to do evangelism, but alas! The opportunities just aren’t opening up for them to do it:
An Evangelism Explosion study conducted by Lifeway Research found Christians express a willingness and desire to talk to others about their faith, yet few have shared with someone how to become a Christian in the past six months.
They’re basing this notion on their “Evangelism Explosion” study. For this study, Lifeway talked to over 1000 American Christians. They found that “93% say they are at least somewhat open to having a conversation about faith with a friend.” That includes 46% of respondents who said they were “very open” and 25% who just said they were “open” to the idea. Only 5% of respondents said they weren’t open to such conversations (and 2% weren’t sure). Of course, the numbers dipped when the question asked about their openness to religious talk with strangers.
Additionally, a full 70% of respondents hadn’t even tried to recruit a total stranger within the past six months. About 75% of respondents admitted to feeling at least a little discomfort and awkwardness around the idea of recruiting anyone.
Poor dears! They totally would, but you see, a natural, easy opening just isn’t happening here! They don’t want to just blurt out a sales pitch without an invitation. Unlike Matt Queen and other evangelical evangelists, they respect boundaries.
That’s what their leaders have got to change.
Lifeway to the rescue!
This entire study was clearly made to boost sales of Lifeway’s evangelism product line. Here’s Lifeway’s executive director, Scott McConnell, giving away the game:
“Half of Christians aren’t ready to tell someone how to become a Christian, and that likely won’t change without some help,” said McConnell. “Most are looking to their churches and its leaders to help prepare them for these conversations about faith.”
The study also gives McConnell an excuse to blow sunshine up the skirts of the Southern Baptist flocks:
“It’s a bold idea to encourage someone to consider converting the center of their life to be Jesus Christ,” said McConnell. “For some Christians, their love for others compels them to suggest this offensive thought. For others, this discourages them from speaking up about what they believe.”
I know evangelicals love to imagine that their faith is deeply subversive and weird and gritty grimdark or whatever. It’s not. In America in 2024, Christianity is the safest fandom to join out of all of them.
Literally nobody thinks it’s “offensive” for people to devote themselves body and soul to any fandom—as long as it’s legal, of course. We see such devotion all the time in many thousands of different fandoms. Back in the 2010s, SuperWhoLock probably beat evangelicalism for sheer numbers. I bet the Firefly fandom still beats evangelicals for passion.
No, what’s offensive is what Matt Queen is trying to get evangelical flocks to do.
The problem here is that evangelicals pretend they’d totally do all the evangelism forever if they only had an opening for it. Matt Queen’s galaxy-brained solution is for them to trample over boundaries to push sales pitches at people who didn’t express any interest in hearing one. Ta-da! Tra-la! Problem fixed!
He’s calling their bluff.
But he’s got a pretense of his own.
It’s like being friends with someone in a multi-level marketing scheme
In Matt Queen’s weird universe, nobody’s ever heard of what evangelicals call “the gospel”:
In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Paul gives the gospel and says, “For I delivered to you as a first importance that which I also received: Christ died for our sins according to scriptures, he was buried, and he was raised on the third day according to scriptures.” Paul believed what someone had told him, and then he could tell others so that they would believe. When we hear the gospel and believe it, that is our evangelism training.
And there do seem to be some Alphas or young Zoomers who haven’t ever heard that specific blend of threats and gimmicks that makes up “the gospel.” It’s nice, in a way, to encounter kids who haven’t been indoctrinated at all and completely miss allusions to Bible myths in, say, analog horror stories. Their sheer unfamiliarity with the Bible heightens the stories’ dramatic tension and liminality.
But I’d reckon that even Alphas recognize an unwanted sales pitch when they see it. They’re exquisitely sensitive to their own boundaries, and they easily recognize promises with no evidence and threats with no teeth. In 2019, Barna asserted that younger evangelicals view evangelism as distasteful. Sure, they said that to sell teaching materials to worried pastors, but still, they predicted that Zoomers would probably hold the same opinion.
In the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up, when a Zoomer asks a much older Gen Xer (at 1:30 in the video below) if he “can be vulnerable in your car,” it probably surprised a lot of older folks:
I don’t think Yule’s question would even have occurred to us older folks. Indeed, the owner of said car seems momentarily surprised by the very idea of asking permission for such a thing. But the question comes off as a point of normal, everyday etiquette for the character. Ironically, Yule is a Christian of deep faith who also has respect for others’ boundaries.
If evangelicals discovered one of their number acting like that, they’d crucify him. They’re big believers in asking for forgiveness rather than permission.
Because of this mindset, evangelism-minded religious people are a lot like multi-level marketing (MLM) victims. They make for very unsteady friendships. Their friends must be on their toes all the time to avoid triggering a recruitment pitch. These zealots are always on the watch for any opportunity to SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY.
If it sounds just exhausting, that’s because it is—on both sides of the pitch.
But Jesus doesn’t magically give evangelicals the words for evangelism
The Bible verse Matt Queen alludes to, 1 John 4:17, isn’t about evangelism. Even Charles Spurgeon knew that, which we know because his sermon was about the correct interpretation of the verse. It doesn’t mean “a boldness” in every other context imaginable in Christianity. It means not being terrified to face Yahweh on Judgment Day.
As for Queen’s other assertion from 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, that this is all anyone needs to repeat in order to have performed evangelism, I think nobody’s fooled by that. If all an evangelist says is this…
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures[. . .]
…Then it’s simply a claim made without evidence, just like the Bible itself. As such, it can be dismissed out of hand. In almost every single instance, it will be.
I’m cringing just imagining the poor evangelical browbeaten into trying Queen’s suggestion. I’ve been there. I think most ex-vangelicals have. We tried it in good faith. Then we found out that popular evangelists might be able to come up with good sales patter on the fly, but most people can’t do that no matter how much Jesus Power they think they have or how much they “just trust the Spirit for a boldness.”
In reality, someone who tries to “just trust the Spirit for a boldness” usually ends up humiliated—and having pushed their target even further from conversion.
But once the attempt is dismissed, its ghost will linger.
Matt Queen wants evangelicals to hunt bear with an umbrella…
There’s a serious survivorship bias going on with evangelism pickup lines in general, but it’s especially grievous with this weird belief about Jesus giving evangelicals the words they’ll need to win converts and make sales. I guarantee that isn’t true. No matter how many Bible verses evangelical leaders mangle to get to this claim, it doesn’t happen in reality.
Evangelicals just think it’s effective because they hear testimonies claiming that’s what someone did. They never hear about the many, many times the technique fails in awkward fizzles and avoidance forever after.
Anyone claiming success with this just open your mouth and talk approach simply got lucky and tried it on someone who was already one gentle nudge away from conversion anyway. They hunted bear with an umbrella, but fortunately for them, someone else with a real gun actually fired on it. Alas, that doesn’t happen often.
If they ever realize the truth, current evangelicals aren’t really allowed to contradict this beloved false belief. By now, it’s one of their very favorite pretenses.
… But he knows damned well that an umbrella won’t kill any bears
Of special note, though, even Matt Queen knows his pretense doesn’t work. Later in the same interview, he offers a few icebreaker scripts:
My favorite kind of go-to is to say, “Hey, has anybody taken the time today to tell you that God loves you?” And unfortunately, most people say “no.” That gives me an opportunity to say to them something like, “I want to be the first person tell you that Jesus loves you. I know you don’t know me and I know I don’t know you, but here’s how I know God loves you.” And then I go into the gospel.
Yesterday I asked somebody, “Have you heard any good news today?” Most people will tell you “no,” and that can give you an opening to say, “Well, you know what? I’ve got some good news for you” and just go into the gospel that way.
Neither of these is just open your mouth and talk. These are simply deceptive questions meant to open the door to a sales pitch, not a conversation.
All these suggestions will do is make evangelism targets learn not to respond to those questions in the way the evangelical wants. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotes of people doing that, and it’s starting to frustrate those few evangelicals who actually want to perform evangelism.
Evangelical leaders still push friendship evangelism
Perhaps Matt Queen’s worst and most potentially destructive suggestion is for young evangelicals to practice friendship evangelism. This is false friendship meant to build strong ties between the salesperson and their target. Once that tie is strong enough, goes the logic, the target is far more likely to sit still long enough to get a full sales pitch into them. Here’s how Matt Queen describes this approach:
When you first meet your neighbor, a co-worker, something like that, give just a brief testimony about Jesus. Then later in the relationship, you’re able to come back and say, “Hey, do you remember when we first met and I told you about that decision I made for Jesus? Have you come any closer to making one of those?”
If nobody asked for a “brief testimony” or any follow-up pitches, then that’s not a real friendship. Real friendship is literally impossible under the terms he describes. Someone practicing friendship evangelism isn’t making friends. They’re just setting marks up for a future sales pitch. They’re tricking those marks into thinking it’s a real friendship.
When (not if) the evangelism attempt is categorically rejected, of course, the evangelical won’t continue the friendship. I’ve heard so, so many people talk about being ghosted after rejecting an evangelism pitch. And from the evangelical’s perspective, I even understand why. After all, they don’t have time to maintain tons of fake friendships that won’t ever result in conversion. Besides, they likely feel very embarrassed to be around those who reject the fandom they’ve made the center of their entire lives.
I wish these evangelicals could spend a few minutes in the shoes of one of those marks after they realize their friendship wasn’t real. I’ve been there. A pretty, popular Southern Baptist girl at my high school pretended to be my friend for a while before giving me an invitation to a “pizza blast” at her church one night. (A “pizza blast” is an old-school evangelical recruitment event featuring free pizza, soda, and a lot of scary preaching.) After I converted, she avoided me forever after.
I’d never been her friend at all, just a little fix-it project she undertook for her church. Once she finished it, she had no further use for me. I was nowhere near cool enough to be one of her real friends.
As you can guess, that whole situation was enormously painful. Even decades later, the scar it left on my heart still stings in cold weather.
I really and truly wish evangelical leaders would stop advising their flocks to make friends for the purpose of eventually evangelizing them.
Matt Queen’s evangelism lives in an older age, not the one we’re in today
The sales techniques we’ve explored today aren’t new, though Matt Queen acts like they’re some stunning brand-new revelation he’s had that’ll totally bring his denomination out of decline.
Everything we’ve discussed here is stuff I heard as a Pentecostal in the 1980s. Just trust Jesus to tell you what to say! Evangelize your friends! Evangelism = love! Use leading questions to open the door to evangelism!
Every bit of it is old, old, old. It’s very clear to me that Matt Queen learned his ideas from the knee of some much-older evangelical leader. As a result, he can’t really do anything new.
Evangelicals don’t innovate very well at all. They support their ideas with tons of mangled Bible verses and super-Jesusy-sounding rhetoric. Once something gets that level of support, it can’t be rejected anymore. The only way to reject it would be to find even more Bible verses and a new way to wrap Jesusy rhetoric around some other idea. Or to admit that the Bible verses and rhetoric for that first idea were a complete misinterpretation, which would immediately call into question the discernment of whoever promotes it.
This exact situation is probably why evangelicals don’t conduct serious research into their methods. They’ve got their pretendy games on both sides, and that’s all they need.
Evangelism destroys friendships, and evangelicals know this—but so do increasing numbers of young adults
But there may be hope on the horizon.
I suspect younger generations learn that friendship is precious at a younger age than did previous generations. When I was but a wee Gen X Pentecostal lass, my crowd always assumed we’d just make more friends if we lost some. That sense of never-ending opportunities made us more reckless with the friends we had. We didn’t find out until well into adulthood that it’s actually really hard to make friends.
That’s when we became more aware of social capital, the currency that fuels friendships and ensures mutuality between friends. When one person withdraws too much social capital in the form of repeated or large requested favors or annoying habits, then the friendship suffers.
Evangelism negatively impacts social capital. The more out-of-the-blue the evangelism attempt is, the more negative its impact. As well, the more intense the attempt—like it if involves threats of Hell or promises of seeing one’s dead relatives in Heaven—the more negative its impact.
I think Zoomers and Alphas figure out evangelical dishonesty earlier than Gen Xers or Millennials did. That knowledge may help forge the iron chariots that finally make evangelicals irrelevant.
If evangelical leaders like Matt Queen are deliberately actively sabotaging their young congregants’ lives to make them more dependent on the tribe, then they’re doing a great job of it. What he is exhorting evangelicals to do is going to wreck their friendships with anyone who’s not a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ just like themselves.
And he doesn’t care. Why should he? They’re not his friends, after all.
NEXT UP: The real iron chariots are coming up next. There’s one segment of humanity that is almost completely immune to evangelism, and we’ll be looking at them next time! See you soon!
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