By its very nature, evangelism is confrontational. It almost can’t be anything else. But in recent years, evangelicals have been questioning why it has to be that way. Some of them even offer other methods to let the more shy and awkward sheep in the fold ways to meet their evangelism obligation. Make no mistake here, though: Evangelism is still very much an obligation for evangelicalsâand it’s one that the religion’s big-name leaders are loathe to change.
So I’ve been very interested to note a number of recent calls for evangelism to become less confrontational. Today, we’ll talk about some of them. And along the way, we’ll explore why none of them will work to reverse Christianity’s ongoing decline.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/13/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! Also: When I cite quotes, emphases are always from the original unless noted otherwise.)
Vignette: Biff was that guy in college
Midway through his college years, my then-boyfriend (later husband) Biff converted to Pentecostalism. He threw himself into that religion for a lot of reasons, but I suspect the main one was its encouragement of his preferred way of treating people.
Even before conversion, Biff had been a very narcissistic person. He had next to no theory of mind, which most children develop between ages 3-5. Pentecostalism pushed all those flaws into overdrive.
In evangelism particularly, Biff found his outlet for mistreating others. He quickly became a caricature of the “turn or burn” Christian. He made colorful pins with slogans on them like “turn or burn” and “fly or fry” and wore them everywhere on-campus. At all times, he kept various religious tracts on him in case he encountered, say, a Mormon or a Trinitarian or even (fingers crossed!) a real live honest-to-goodness atheist. And he was always, always, always ready to get in someone’s face and tell them to convert to his flavor of Christianity.
Our little gaggle of friends at church considered Biff an evangelism hero. All of them aspired to be as bold and brave as Biff seemed to be. He wasn’t either of those things, though. Pentecostalism had simply handed him a golden ticket to pick fights all the time without being seen as the bully he was.
Unfortunately, his method of evangelism rarely resulted in conversions. He definitely had a lot of intense discussions, but in all the time I knew him he bagsied only a few people: Me, our mutual friend Scott, who was never a true-blue Pentecostal, and James, an extremely odd ex-Jehovah’s Witness. And I don’t think James remained Pentecostal for long after his and Biff’s campus club, PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS, folded.
Biff’s ability to walk up to total strangers and talk to them about religion ensured his status in our friends’ minds. Most of them could not even conceive of doing anything like that. As far as they were concerned, Biff’s success rate was almost unimportant. His apparent willingness to confront others about their religious beliefs was what everyone envied.
Evangelism is hard-selling, high-pressure recruitmentâjust for an unspoken product
The very label evangelical incorporates the evangelism that evangelicals think they’re required to perform. Though this custom is far more honored in the breach than the observance, it’s still an integral part of evangelicals’ self-image: they’re the Christians who evangelize. They even think Jesus himself ordered them to do it in the so-called Great Commission.
Evangelism officially sells a particular take on Jesusing. But that’s not an evangelist’s real product. The real product being sold is active membership in the evangelist’s flavor of Christianity. Evangelists just have to start with selling their take on Jesusing. Without that buy-in, they can’t sell their real product. (This is why evangelists get a little frosted when someone buys their official productâbut then joins another flavor of Christianity!)
However, it’s a very difficult task for them to make sales without having the power to force people to join and support churches.
In the “evangelism dialogues” post, I loved how Mr. Captain summarized evangelicals’ attempts at evangelism: “Given that I’m correct about everything, here’s how you should live your life.”
That is exactly how evangelism works. It’s a perfect summary of what evangelicals communicate through their evangelism attempts. They’re right, their marks are wrong, and the marks need start obeying themâor else their ghosts will be set on fire forever after they die.
Evangelicals cannot gain buy-in without threats and a lofty assumption about their beliefs’ superiority to those of their marks. And those two qualities in turn mean that evangelism can’t really be done without confrontation.
What confrontational evangelism looks like
When normies think of evangelism, they imagine someone getting up in their face and telling them they need to change their religion or they’ll be punished forever in eternity. In a nutshell, that’s confrontational evangelism.
To do it, the evangelist goes right up to their mark, issues a call to specific action, and demands a response right then and there. If the mark refuses to do what the evangelist has demanded, the evangelist argues until they gain the mark’s obedience. As one evangelist writes:
[T]he dictionary definition of the term [confrontational evangelism] is to simply have a conversation where we speak to the lost directly about their eternity, helping them to see their sin so they understand their need for a Savior.
LOL, “simply have a conversation” my shiny left hiney. Dude tries really hard to make that definition sound non-confrontational, but almost nothing could be as confrontational as manipulating a stranger into changing their entire religion and worldview on the spot! (I also noticed that his post is about evangelizing total strangers he meets on the street. Remember this detail. It becomes pertinent in a minute.)
Evangelicals are aware that confrontational evangelism is “aggressive,” as one of them puts it. But in their heart of hearts, they also believe it’s the most effective and “biblical” method of evangelism. In Christianese, “biblical” just indicates something that agrees with their quirky li’l take on Christianity. That means not getting “aggressive” means displeasing Jesus. And there’s only one penalty for displeasing him.
Confrontation has always been hard for evangelicals
Alas for evangelical leaders, their flocks don’t like confrontationâparticularly not with people they want to keep as friends and loved ones. Nothing in their culture or social system prepares them to handle mature disagreements with other adults. They have no idea how to approach disagreements without making a huge production out of it. Maybe that’s why evangelical leaders tend to blame the flocks for just not wanting to evangelize, as this aspiring leader does:
In part, we just donât care enough about othersâ salvations. Weâre caught up in our own lives and donât make sharing the Gospel a priority.
We also tend not to share the Gospel because we feel ill-equipped to do so. We havenât had any formal training, we havenât memorized any special verses, and if someone asks us a question we donât know the answer to, weâll feel mortified.
Some of us also fear that if we talk about Jesus weâll come across as narrow-minded or judgmental. We donât want to lose respect in othersâ eyes, and we really donât want to lose relationships with people because we broached the taboo subject of religion.
The good news is we can rectify all of these concerns and get on with our God-mandated duty to tell others about Jesus.
If evangelical leaders can’t even correctly diagnose the reason for the flocks’ unwillingness to evangelize, they certainly won’t be able to fix the problem.
Why the flocks really don’t evangelize
Evangelical culture indoctrinates adherents into tribalistic dysfunctional authoritarianism. This social system arranges everyone into a strict hierarchy. Those with less power must always obey those with more power. As a result, the person at the top has all the power with nobody to obey. In turn, that top leaderâalmost without exception a manâcreates lackeys who owe all their power to him.
Within dysfunctional authoritarianism, confrontation becomes serious drama. That’s because disagreement with anyone higher in the hierarchy constitutes rebellion and disobedience, which the group’s leaders cannot allow to stand. If they do let it slide, they will be seen as weak. In their social system, weakness makes someone a target.
Evangelizing strangers? Well, at least that’s a much safer risk. The evangelists never have to see those people ever again. Even a fight, argument, or an utterly botched pitch will soon recede into the mists of memory.
But evangelizing their parents? Their best friends? Their coworkers? Nope. Hard pass. By the time they’re full adults, they know better. These days, more and more Protestants say they have non-Christian friends. Evangelicals tend to follow those trends, just in lesser numbers. For many, that’s a lot of people to lose.
With their indoctrinated and necessary focus on avoiding social risks, evangelicals know evangelism in those contexts comes with serious social penalties for failure. And they know, too, that their evangelism will almost always fail. (I’m being very generous with that “almost” there. Evangelicals rarely ever score a sale in those mission fields.)
Even if they don’t completely wreck the evangelism attempt itself somehow, these thwarted recruiters will always be reminded of their target’s refusal every time they come into contactâand the target, as well, won’t likely forget the experience.
A hard-sales recruitment pitch changes relationships foreverâand never for the better.
Trying to avoid confrontation is more important than ever to evangelicals
Many decades ago, evangelicals evolved other ways to evangelize without sparking so much scary confrontation. Some of these methods even became important sub-branches of evangelism on their own:
- Beach evangelism: Trying to recruit people who are just at the beach to have a good time
- Lifestyle evangelism: Acting super-pious in the hopes that someone will ask what makes them so, I dunno, DIFFERENT somehow
- Tract evangelism: Handing out religious tracts en masse without much engagement at all with marks
- Service evangelism: Acting super-pious while doing charity work or favors for others in the hopes that someone will ask what makes them so, I dunno, DIFFERENT somehowâor at least feel socially obligated to sit through a sales pitch
- Friendship evangelism: Pretending to be someone’s friend to exploit their feelings of social obligation for a future sales pitch
- Personal evangelism: A catch-all label for any person-to-person sales pitch performed by laypeople; can refer to strangers but almost always refers to someone the evangelist knows
These methods all share two traits:
- These methods are much less intimidating to perform than a direct Ray Comfort-style confrontation.
- If the goal is gaining new, active church members, these methods don’t work.
The perfect evangelism approach is the very one they never use
As one young woman lamented over at The Gospel Coalition (TGC):
Iâm zealous to use and share the knowledge Iâve gathered from videos, podcasts, and articles. I want to defend the Bible and its values, and I can spend hours discussing various points with nonbelievers. But arguments alone, whether theyâre friendly or âbattles,â arenât evangelism. Instead, we should seek to win people for Christ, not just score points in a debate.
As her post there illustrates so well, evangelicals know what proper Jesusy evangelism should look like. I suspect almost all evangelicals have this image in their minds of a perfect evangelism attempt. As this young woman does, they talk about listening over preaching, talking “gently” about Jesus, and making very veiled threats of Hell instead of overt ones. Even big-name apologists like Norm Geisler have boarded this money train by offering challenges to “old models of witnessing” in his 2014 book.
They’ve been talking like this for many yearsâas you can see in a 2009 book about using “tactics” and “artful diplomacy” to evangelize rather than arguments.
Evangelicals just almost never evangelize that way.
Two reasons why evangelicals don’t use non-confrontational evangelism methods
Firstly, the further they polarize into an ultraconservative hardline dysfunctional-authoritarian tribe, the harder it gets for them to knowingly spark confrontation with the people they treasureâand the higher the stakes get for doing it.
As for the other reason, evangelicals quickly discovered it in their early forays into forums and discussion platforms in the early 2000s. They sure like that lovey-dovey stuff: listen for 50 minutes and only talk for 10, share the love of Jesus, just tell people your story, be relational instead of confrontational, make disciples not recruits, begin with incarnation rather than confrontation. But as they soon figured out, this approach explodes at the first contact it makes with even the gentlest pushback. It’s also a time-consuming approach that almost never results in a sale. (Again, I’m being super-generous with that “almost.”)
So evangelicals are very gun-shy about initiating an encounter that could turn ugly fastâor never pay off at all.
I wonder if this exact collision between fantasy evangelism and the real thing is part of why half of American churchgoers think Americans don’t like Christiansâand why 69% of them think that Americans are liking them less and less by the day. Nobody wants to be subjected to a hard-sales recruitment pitch, especially when it was not requested.
New calls for less obnoxious, less confrontational evangelism
With all of this in mind, it’s been interesting to see recent calls to evangelicals to change how they handle evangelism. A number of young evangelicals in particular seem very insistent on this point.
Over at Relevant Magazine, Stephen Mattson lamented this past April that religious-based terrorism, abusive cults, and other such zealotry has given confrontational evangelism a very sour taste in most people’s mouths. He also dislikes “being on the receiving end of bad evangelism,” which appears to mean confrontations about his take on Jesusing and demands that he adopt the evangelist’s take. Of such evangelism, he writes:
Secular society isâunderstandablyâtired of hypocritical Christians trying to change people, especially when itâs done out of selfish ambition, to promote agendas and without love.
I can’t disagree. So he suggests another approach:
So what should modern evangelism look like? For Christians, the answer is Jesus. Itâs dedicating our lives to helping those in need, feeding the poor, taking care of the sick, representing the oppressed, fighting injustice and sacrificially serving the world around us, wholeheartedly loving others without expecting anything in return. We should emulate the life of Jesus to the best of our ability.
Overall, I agree here, too. To me, this looks like the best-case form of Christianity: one focused on serving and charity rather than gaining temporal power over others and cementing one’s tribe into enshrined privilege forever. It won’t happen with evangelicals, but hey, it’s a nice dream.
One evangelism foundation echoes Mattson’s thoughts:
Evangelism is more relational than confrontational or transactional, more communal than solitary, and is more a beginning point than an end. Evangelism involves not only sharing our faith with others, but also welcoming them into a community and enabling them to begin to grow in their faith.
That definitely doesn’t sound like confrontational evangelism to me, either.
Avoiding confrontational evangelism with the BLESS model
The United Methodist Church had a post in May about the “BLESS model for evangelism.” This model supposedly steers well clear of confrontational dynamics. It’s an acronym meaning:
Begin with prayer: Ask God to show you three to five people in your life who do not know God, and pray for them each day.
Listen: Pay attention to peopleâs dreams and pain. Listen for evidence of Godâs work in their lives.
Eat together: Share meals together. There is an epidemic of aloneness and invisibility in our world, and time over a shared meal or cup of coffee is remarkably connective and a simple way to be part of overcoming it.
Serve in love: Be attentive to opportunities God provides you to care for people and attend to their needs without superiority or devaluing their agency.
Share your story: Once you build a relationship and earn trust, wait for the Holy Spirit to make a way for you to share the story of how Jesus is transforming your life and the world.
I can see this approach going very seriously pear-shaped. Some years back, a similar one was lampooned in the severely underrated 1999 movie Go:
When I saw this scene in the theater, I first thought it would become an invitation to an orgy. I’m pretty sure that’s what the two guests thought, too.
But eventually, every evangelism approach has a fish-or-cut-bait endgame. Eventually, the hosts reveal that they’re hunting for multi-level marketing recruits. In this case, the BLESS model tells Christians to build social capital to “earn trust,” which will be blown to smithereens once the marks realize that all this friendship was about was getting an evangelism sales pitch into them.
(Related: Christians never earn “the right” to evangelize.)
Eventually, it seems like all of these approaches and models require evangelists to do the thing.
Never giving a straight answer is certainly one way to avoid confrontation, I suppose
An evangelism-system seller, Pens and Wrenches, wrote an entire listicle in January of different evangelism methods. Confrontational evangelism was one of them. As most proponents of this style of evangelism do, its writer tries to make confrontational evangelism sound less fighty:
Confrontational Evangelism is not about being combative in responding to the culture, yelling at each other, or even standing out in public with a large sign and a bullhorn shouting to whoever may hear. It is lovingly confronting strangers with the gospel directly on the streets, in the mall, or as we go about our daily business.
But it doesn’t matter how “loving” the evangelist feels. It’s not going to go over well with the vast majority of marks who experience it.
Perhaps that’s why the writer provided a follow-up to that post. Though it’s aimed more at Christians criticizing his techniques, it certainly sounds like he’s using confrontational evangelism on them. His attempts to defuse their criticisms relies on just never giving any of them a straight answer:
My advice is [. . .] to find out what the person really believes. Start with, âWhat do you mean by that?â (or some variation) Some others can be:
âWhat do you mean byâŠ?â
âSo, what is your view on?â
âCan you tell me more about that?â
âIâm not quite sure I understand where you are coming from â can you say that again?â
âSo, if I understand you correctly, are you sayingâŠ?âAfter that, expose the flaw in their argument.
It’s hard imagining him not using similar non-answers to any heathens resisting his evangelism. Really, the difference between heathens and the evangelist’s own Christian outgroup is pure semantics. To any evangelism-minded Christians holding to a TRUE CHRISTIANITYâą definition of their faith, they’d consider anyone who isn’t an active member of their flavor of churches to be in dire need of evangelism.
Again, the product isn’t a particular package of Christian beliefs. It’s active membership in the evangelist’s particular flavor of Christianity.
By far the least honest form of evangelism
One recent post stands out in my mind as representing the least honest form of evangelism: Dancing around the topic of Hell to sell the lovey-dovey stuff, but doing it in a really obfuscated way. Gary Yagel leads “Mission-Focused Men.” This appears to be some kind of evangelical men’s group. And Yagel is very sad about “how misunderstanding evangelism makes us fear it.”
In his view, salvation is definitely about getting “a plane ticket to heaven, paid for by Christ’s blood on the cross.” Obviously. That’s a given! But he wants it to mean much more than that, and getting there means pursuing a different style of evangelism:
Some conservative Christians think of the story of salvation as the fall, redemption, heaven. In this narrative, the purpose of redemption is escape from this worldâŠIf however the story of salvation is creation, fall, redemption, restoration, then things look different…The purpose of redemption is not to escape from this word but to renew itâŠ.(The gospel) is about the coming of Godâs kingdom to renew all things.
The inductive evangelism approach fits hand in glove with understanding that our good news is that King Jesus has come to restore everything broken by sin. It includes broken bodies, broken dignity, broken marriages, broken father/son relationships, broken sexuality, broken values that exalt material prosperity and success over caring for the downtrodden.
So he wants evangelism to promise the healing and fixing of all those broken things. (Who wants to tell him that Christianity fulfills precisely none of its evangelists’ earthly promises, either?)
I don’t think that’s going to work, though. Sooner or later, that whole Hell thing intrudes. When it does, all that love and restoration stuff instantly becomes microscopic in scale.
Evangelism is always going to contain confrontational elements
Of course evangelicals want to change how evangelism works. Of course they do. The pandemic in particular made a lot of modern adults acutely aware of how fragile both life and friendships can be, and how important it is to keep up with those we love.
The old style of evangelism always seemed hopelessly confrontational, but now it’s almost a parody of itself. I wouldn’t be half surprised to see it show up at The Onion with a headline like “Local Man Tells Neighbors to Turn or Burn During House Fire.”
So I fully understand why evangelicalsâparticularly the younger ones who were arguably the most affected by the pandemic’s lockdowns and social rulesâseem to be rejecting the idea of that old-school model of evangelism.
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a non-confrontational way to tell another person that they need to make some very major changes to their livesâor else. For Hell-believing evangelicals, that truth goes double for them, because they must include that threat in their pitches.
As I said, we’ll talk later about why fear is such a necessary component to evangelism. For now, I’ll just say this: It’s nice that evangelicals are thinking about this topic. I just hope they realize why their current models look the way they do.
Though most avid evangelists get off on like treating people like that, most pew-warmers don’tâin fact, they’re very reluctant to endanger their relationships. Unfortunately, even the nicest, most carefully-couched evangelism contains that element of “Given that I’m correct about everything, here’s how you should live your life.”
At its heart, that’s all evangelism is, and all it will ever be.
NEXT UP: Uh oh, the Southern Baptist Convention is having some serious money problems! We’ll check out why next time. See you soon! <3
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