It’s Baptism Sunday soon, so queue the evangelism theatrics

Once again, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) approaches Baptism Sunday. That’s the magical time of year when this embattled evangelical denomination ultra-focuses on evangelism. However, SBC leaders are well aware that their flocks are more unwilling to evangelize than ever. Hm, what to do, what to do? Aha! Browbeat the flocks and demand that pastors perform more evangelism! That’ll definitely totally for realsies work this time, even though it’s never worked in the past. Yep, yep! The beatings shall continue until evangelism improves!

Today, let’s examine the SBC’s increasingly-terribad position regarding evangelism—and wonder together why their two current solutions, which have always failed in the past, are always their go-to dead horse to beat.

(Been a while since I shared the Discord invite, so here’s one good for till Friday: https://discord.gg/kUKKVJkE.)

Another day, another evangelical faux-research study about evangelism

In 2022, the SBC’s propaganda and faux-research arm, Lifeway, ran a study they call “Evangelism Explosion.” They asked 1100 American Christians a series of questions regarding evangelism.

If you want a good laugh about just how shoddy evangelical research is, I highly suggest taking a peek at their writeup of it. They tilted their questions as much as they physically could without utterly confusing the respondents, and still came out with absolutely devastating results.

The most surprising takeaway of Evangelism Explosion is that elderly Christians are fookin’ BASED. With almost every question, the 65+ crowd demonstrated outright hostility to evangelism. I kept laughing when I noticed that trend. Check this out from the end of the writeup:

“Sharing with a nonbeliever how they can become a Christian is the most loving thing I can do for them.”
Those age 65+ are the most likely to Disagree (33%)

“Encouraging someone to change their religious beliefs is offensive and disrespectful.”
Those age 30-49 (56%) and 65+ (56%) are more likely to Agree than those age 50-64 (45%)

[Gauging respondents’ agreement with various statements about evangelism] “It’s hope-filled”
Those age 65+ are the least likely to select (7%)

Had a conversation about faith with a stranger who was not a Christian [in the past six months]
Those age 65+ are the most likely to select “0 times” (84%)

It just goes on and on like that. You go, you 65+ based Christians! Party hearty!

File under stuff we already knew: SBC flocks still don’t like evangelism of any kind

Mostly, the study reveals what any evangelicalism-observer already knew: The flocks (still) hate evangelism. Most of them have no clue how to start and are reluctant to initiate evangelism conversations with others. They’re well aware that normies think evangelism is rude. Though they tend to be least a little open to having conversations about their faith, they’d far rather it happen naturally and with full consent from the other person than force unwanted religious sales pitches on their targets.

As a result, most respondents hadn’t even tried to evangelize anybody in the previous six months.

Also, overwhelming numbers of respondents clearly were not even sure how to have a sales-minded conversation in the first place. Very few respondents had been trained in any of the common evangelism techniques like Three Circles.

Lifeway did not seek to uncover any relationships between having been trained in one of those sales pitch techniques and openness to starting sales conversations. Gosh, I wonder why. (Hopefully, it was simply because so few respondents knew those techniques that any correlations found would not be statistically significant.)

Sidebar: This study is deeply flawed and biased

We often talk around here about terrible evangelical research. And this study is the worst one I’ve seen so far. I’m not a statistics person, so I can’t speak to how statistically trustworthy and reliable their answers might be. That said, I can spot other problems that constitute dealbreakers for this study.

Take page 21’s question, for example: “Which of the following describe how you feel about evangelism?” Lifeway allowed respondents to pick one option out of seven. Not one of those seven options was absolutely never, ugh, I don’t wanna. The lowest they were willing to go was “I’m reluctant” (selected by 18% of respondents). Worse, two were almost identical: “I’m neutral about it” (29%) and “I’m indifferent” (11%).

We see the exact same bias on page 24, which asks respondents to state their readiness to evangelize. Not one option was I’m not in the least interested in evangelism. This question and its answer options all make me suspect that Lifeway wants to use this study to sell church leaders evangelism-training materials.

It’s also a little weird that Lifeway sought respondents from the general body of American Christians, rather than seeking out evangelicals. Mainline, liberal and Catholic Christians all have wildly different opinions regarding evangelism than evangelicals do. But the reporting on this study in the evangelical world seems to apply its findings to evangelicals in particular.

[Insert clever segue into today’s evangelism topic here]

That brings us to today’s Original Post (OP): “Gray urges Christians to regain passion for seeing others come to faith.” It appears in Baptist Press, the official SBC news site. The “Gray” mentioned in the headline is Todd Tray, who is the executive director-treasurer of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. As part of the SBC’s lead-up to Baptism Sunday, they asked Gray about how to pump up their baptism numbers.

Baptism Sunday has been going on for quite a while. Usually, it falls on the Sunday after Easter. The tagline for it—this year at least—is “Fill the Tank,” meaning fill up the baptismal tank with water cuz it will be seeing some use that day!

And that’s definitely what SBC leaders hope to see this Sunday. According to their 2022 Annual Report (p. 122), they only managed to dunk 154k people last year. If we divide that by their total number of churches (47k) we see churches recording an average of 3 baptisms each. But of course, that isn’t counting missionary branches and other non-church-associated baptisms, so the actual average is worse than that. And megachurches also report way more baptisms than the tiny little churches that form the bulk of the SBC’s church listings, so a lot of small churches will see zero baptisms all year.

Of the baptisms the SBC is managing to snag, we know from a 2014 SBC report that more extremely young children are getting baptized than adults are. And ex-evangelicals can attest that existing evangelicals often get re-baptized for various reasons, too.

So we don’t know how many of those 154k baptisms represent actual brand-new recruits who’ve never been evangelical. The answer is almost certainly not bloody many.

Despite these sobering realities, Baptism Sunday has become the SBC’s version of Black Friday sales after Thanksgiving: the day that their baptism numbers will hopefully get back into the black after being in the red all year long. So far, 440 churches in North Carolina alone have signed up to participate in “Fill the Tank” Baptism Sunday.

Remember that bit about little kids getting dunked?

Just as a side note, I want to mention this: Earlier, I mentioned that little kids frequently get dunked in the SBC. In that 2014 report (relink), in fact, its writers lament:

The only consistently growing age group in baptisms is age five and under.

Meanwhile, 80% of SBC churches at the time reported 0-1 adult baptisms (ages 18-29). I’ve no reason whatsoever to think that these two facts did anything but worsen further in the next nine years.

Well, in that North Carolina Baptism Sunday writeup (relink), we find this gem:

He [Todd Unzicker, executive director-treasurer of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina] says those who were baptized as a child but were not true believers at the time should be baptized.

“But were not true believers at the time!” Good heavens, are they not asking those little tots anything before rushing them into the water? I thought pastors were supposed to question those seeking baptism, even if their candidates were too young to formulate full sentences yet.

Sounds like someone wants to bagsy his church a few extra dunkings, is what that sounds like to me.

But don’t worry: SBC leaders know what The Big Problem Here is with evangelism reluctance

For years now, the SBC has been trying very hard to blame its ongoing, decades-long decline on a lack of evangelism on the part of their lay members. In this case, the evangelism they mean is personal evangelism, which is a person-to-person, targeted, carefully-directed recruitment attempt. Personal evangelism is performed by a sales-minded layperson who targets an acquaintance or friend, a family member, or even a total stranger.

Many other kinds of evangelism exist—from beach evangelism to friendship evangelism to lifestyle evangelism to tract evangelism and more besides. The modifier tells you what the context of the evangelism is. In this case, personal evangelism involves a personalized, artificially-intimate, pseudo-conversation rather than a rote recruitment pitch or some low-contact method like handing out little evangelism tracts to crowds of strangers.

And the SBC’s leaders have decided that personal evangelism is going to totally save their denomination from its own impending collapse.

In today’s OP, Gray reiterates the party line:

When a person becomes a Christian, they want to tell others what Jesus has done for them but their enthusiasm wanes over the years, Gray said, adding that he believes it’s more than a problem related to enthusiasm or passion. He calls it a sin problem.

Pointing to the commands of Jesus, in passages like Matthew 28:16-20 and Acts 1:8, Gray says a believer who doesn’t share their faith isn’t being obedient to Jesus.
But Gray sees hope for restoration.

See? It’s so simple. The Big Problem Here is that the flocks are so sinful that they’ve lost their zeal for evangelism. But don’t worry. He thinks that there’s still a chance for those flocks to rekindle their relationship.

How to solve The Big Problem Here: evangelism training!

In the Lifeway study from last year (relink), quite a few respondents said their reluctance to perform evangelism stemmed from a lack of knowledge and training. We don’t know if that’s true or not, since the questions and their answer options are so biased. (P. 24 asks about training, while p. 33 asks how respondents would like to be trained in evangelism.)

In my opinion, the flocks’ reluctance stems far more from their understanding of how other people perceive evangelism attempts. Obviously, I think the flocks are quite right to feel reluctant to push evangelism on anybody.

So SBC leaders find themselves stuck in a major quandary here.

They can’t solve the problem of evangelism being seen as rude and pushy, because evangelism by its nature is rude and pushy. It is a violation of other people’s boundaries to push an unwanted hard-sales pitch at them, then demand they change their religion. Even without threats of eternal torture in Hell, which elevates the sales pitch to a deliberate attempt to terrorize its target, evangelism is already rude and pushy!

And the SBC has had very little luck trying to reframe evangelism as loving and its pushiness and rudeness as the equivalent of rescuing someone from an incoming bus. P. 31 of the study actually asks about that. Only 30% of respondents, mostly young Christians, answered that they strongly agreed that evangelism was the most loving thing they could possibly do for a heathen. Another 34% somewhat agreed. Only 23% disagreed. And yet the flocks still don’t evangelize.

So Lifeway is clearly banking on evangelism training being the answer to The Big Problem Here that they’ve identified. It’s about the only thing they can actually do in response to the flocks’ unwillingness to get out there and SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY.

How evangelism training looks on the ground

Gray blames the flocks’ reluctance to evangelize on Satan, of course. As we saw last time we met up, that’s the evangelical boogeyman. Also as we saw last time we met up, this particular evangelical has a compelling theory about why Satan doesn’t want to see any evangelism happening on Earth:

Just as an athlete needs training to overcome an opponent, Gray says there is an opponent trying to keep believers from sharing their faith. He believes training is a tool to help defeat the enemy.

“Spiritual warfare is involved when you step into a Gospel conversation. Satan hates Christians, sharing the Gospel wants to keep us from doing it. All kinds of forces are at work to quietness and training helps prepare the believer to be more ready to share the Good News,” he said.

Gray adds that churches must be “intentional” about evangelism training:

“Training, practicing and role-playing in some kind of an organized way will strengthen the believer as they grow and share in their faith.”

Intentional is a fairly recent evangelical Christianese buzzword that has caught on very quickly. It simply means going at something with a plan and a goal in mind, and guiding it carefully in a particular direction to achieve that goal. Its opposite, which has no Christianese equivalent as far as I know, “let go and let God,” is letting that thing happen naturally and without forcing it to go in any particular direction, and just hoping to meet one’s goal that way.

But Gray has another suggestion for solving evangelism reluctance.

(Thank you for finding our equivalent, Ubi Dubium!)

Once again, the SBC shames already-overworked pastors for not evangelizing enough

Gray also shakes his finger at SBC pastors for not performing enough personal evangelism. He thinks that pastors should “lead by example” in this area. He laments:

“I was witnessing less as a pastor than I did when I was in sales. I was spending more time at Christians’ homes eating coconut pie and chocolate cakes.” [. . .]

“If I missed a committee meeting, I would hear about that. If my sermon was half-baked on Sunday morning, I’d probably hear about that. If I failed to contact someone who was sick or had a pastoral care need, I would hear about that. But nobody complained when I failed a witness to lost people.”

Of course, as the SBC’s membership has dwindled, so has the weekly take for member churches. Once people leave their churches, they take away not only their pew-warming butts but their wallets and whatever tithes they paid. And that means that churches must do their work with less money. One of the first things that seems to go in a financially-strapped church is paid staff. In many churches, the pastor is the only paid staffer there. Thus, more work falls to volunteers. But here, too, dwindling membership means fewer people willing to volunteer.

So ultimately, much of a church’s work now falls upon its pastor. And now Gray wants that pastor to shoulder even more work.

Good luck with that

If a church congregation starts demanding that their pastor devote hours a week to personal evangelism as well as everything else that person must do, they’re only guaranteeing burnout in record time.

I’m no friend to the SBC. However, I’m a friend to humanity. I’ve seen many good, well-meaning pastors in the SBC complaining already about having no time at all, to feeling burned out, to feeling impossible burdens set on their shoulders, to burning their candles at both ends and still not getting everything done that needs to be done. They complain, too, that seminary doesn’t prepare them at all for these realities of pastoring.

Add in the truly vile, venomous, treacherous nature of most evangelical church congregations and their constant power-jockeying, and you have a perfect recipe for swift pastoral burnout.

Maybe Todd Gray has the kind of time needed to do all the things he’s mentioned plus evangelize his neighbors. But most SBC pastors don’t.

How the times are changing for the SBC

Another potent detail really puts Gray’s demand of pastors into perspective:

When the SBC was growing, its pastors didn’t perform personal evangelism. In the 1980s, I attended an SBC church for a few months. I sure didn’t see anything like that happening. That church’s senior pastor was way too busy doing church business to evangelize. Instead, pastors presided over evangelism events.

Even in that SBC congregation, I don’t remember many exhortations to perform personal evangelism. Mostly, the youth group kids did the evangelism there, and mostly in the form of invitations to events hosted by the church. Almost none of us scored any sales.

Nor do I remember any Pentecostal pastors performing any personal evangelism. They clearly felt that they were getting paid to minister to their congregation, so that is what they did. Pentecostal laypeople got urged to evangelize all the time, of course. We younger ones certainly did more than our share of evangelism. Most of it was personal evangelism, too. But we likewise scored almost no sales.

Despite these truths, in the past 10 years or so the SBC has hung all its hopes on this one non-solution. They’ve blamed the flocks for years for failing to perform personal evangelism. They’ve even tried to shame pastors for their lack of personal evangelism.

But that’s not what kept the SBC growing for so long. And it’s not what’s going to stop the SBC from shrinking.

The best salesperson in the world can’t sell what the SBC has to offer

The real problem SBC leaders have is that the product they sell—active membership in their churches—isn’t worth what they’re asking for it: Complete obedience to authoritarian leaders, forced socialization with unpleasant groups, demands for lots of time and resources, and acceptance of a host of human rights violations and deceptions in the form of culture wars and endless moral panics.

Whatever benefits come from using the SBC’s sole product, they don’t come close to justifying the jeopardization of a member’s relationships with their co-workers, family, and friends through personal evangelism.

Evangelism training might embolden a few people to risk their relationships. Intense shaming sometimes does that now.

But I don’t expect many SBC-lings to become hardcore salesbots. There are very few ways in which evangelicalism isn’t inimical and toxic to the human spirit, but personal evangelism is definitely one of the worst. It alienates SBC-lings from the people who care most about them. It reinforces false beliefs in those who do it.

Most of all, the flocks’ personal evangelism efforts benefit church leaders far, far more than they ever do the flocks, while costing the flocks everything and their leaders nothing at all.

This Sunday’s gonna be a hoot. I can already tell.

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