In recent years, evangelicals have gotten more and more desperate for evangelism strategies that actually work. Many of them adopt weird, scripted approaches in hopes of finally achieving success in their recruitment endeavors. ‘3 Circles’ evangelism is only one of a great many such scripted approaches. But it’s the one we’re going to try today!
Last time we met up, I mentioned how some people’s minds just turn off when they see circles drawn in front of them. That may go double with evangelicals and the many, many products that their creators swear will help evangelicals sell evangelism’s only real product. They’re really, really hoping that other people are the same way. Let’s see if ‘3 Circles’ will be the answer to their prayers.
(Narrator: Going into the dungeon, our brave raiding party entertained a few suspicions right away.)
(This post went live on Patreon on 3/12/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is also available to anyone!)
What is 3 Circles Evangelism?
Also last time we met up, I mentioned that I’d never seen or used 3 Circles Evangelism when I was evangelical myself in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor had I ever seen any other evangelicals using it.
It turns out that it didn’t exist at the time. A Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastor, Jimmy Scroggins, invented it around 2008 (archive).
At the time, Scroggins pastored a church in West Palm Beach, Florida. He also led a Bible study and recruitment group there for romantic partners who wanted to Jesus harder in their relationships. He’d gotten his start in Kentucky, which is a solid part of the Bible Belt. But he soon realized that South Florida was a whole other world:
His first class in South Florida filled up fast. But as soon as the couples shared about themselves at the first meeting, Scroggins quickly learned those attending didn’t just need gospel-centered marriage principles. They needed the gospel.
Scroggins said seven of the eight couples in the class were living together. None of them were married. None of them were Christians. Some had been married and divorced multiple times. One was raised a Buddhist and had never been in a Christian church before. He learned later that others had been abused and at least one had been raped.
“I realized, ‘You’re not in Kentucky anymore,’” Scroggins said. “This is a different world.”
“The Origin of the ‘3 Circles‘,” NC Baptist, 2020
Very quickly, Scroggins recognized that he needed an evangelism method that was fast, simple, and most of all effective against his target recruitment market. As we review the results of that quest, please remember that. And remember, as well, the kind of people he considered his perfect targets.
What is West Palm Beach, Florida like?
I can’t speak much about what either town was like in 2008. But comparing their demographics recently, both towns look pretty similar. (The following stats come from the US Census site: Louisville and its archive; West Palm Beach and its archive.)
- Louisville has 250k people, while West Palm Beach (WPB) proper has about 120k
- Both cities have about the same percentage of minors (about 20%) and elderly folks (about 20%)
- As well, both are aren’t exactly teeming with white people (65% for Louisville’s overall county makeup vs 48% for WPB) and about a third Black
- Most folks in both cities have graduated from high school, with about a third of the people in each achieving a Bachelor degree
- As well, about 15%-ish of the people in both cities live in poverty
So it doesn’t seem like it’d be all that different for Scroggins to be in Florida. When we consider their religious makeup, however, things change dramatically.
This move had to be quite a shock!
From effortless dominance to evangelism becoming a very pragmatic focus
In terms of religious demographics, La Wiki says that Louisville is about 30% Southern Baptist. So that probably explains the problem Scroggins had with his relationship Bible study group.
By contrast, West Palm Beach is a good drive north of Miami, which is on the very tippy-most southern end of Florida. In 2015, it landed on Barna Group’s list (archive) of the most “never-churched” cities in the United States. Usually, that term means that its people overwhelmingly were not only not active participants in any religious groups, but also never had been.
(Please keep in mind that Barna Group’s definition of active participation has followed pace with Americans’ dwindling interest in attending church. When they say someone’s churched, they mean that person’s attended Sunday services at some church somewhere in the past six months. At the time, 2015, Barna found that about 40% of respondents counted as unchurched.)
As well, West Palm Beach contains almost no Southern Baptists. According to a site called Best Places (archive), only 37% of its residents consider themselves religious at all—and only 3.7% are Southern Baptists! About 20% are either Catholic or Jewish, so that leaves about 17% of the population maximum who even buy into a worldview that is even vaguely familiar to an SBC minister from an SBC-dominated town. (Another site estimates that Protestants do indeed make up about 15% of WPB’s population.)
For Scroggins, he went from being part of the effortlessly dominant tribalistic caste in his former area to being a very rare duck indeed in his new one. I can barely even imagine how much culture shock he experienced! And it must have made evangelism very, very difficult indeed.
I do not doubt for a moment that Scroggin’s entire “3 Circles” evangelism strategy arose from his very difficult shift from dominance to cultural powerlessness. In such an environment, he had to scrabble and work for every single recruitment he sold.
DIAGRAMS, Part One: And the problems begin here
According to the Multiplying Disciples evangelism site (archive), to begin a “3 Circles” evangelism attempt, the evangelist first draws one circle. Then they draw ickie lines through it and radiating out from it to represent what they call brokenness.
Here is how they explain this word to the mark:
You can make a jagged line through it and say something like, “You may have noticed when you turn on the news, a lot of bad stuff is happening.” Mention briefly a few relevant examples depending on what you think might interest the person.
These things might include anxiety, stress, family breakdown, pain, economic problems, bad government or any number of things that people would agree are a bad thing. [. . .] Then say something like, “This circle represents the fact that we live in a BROKEN world. In fact, we were born into brokenness. Nothing is really fully the way it ought to be.”
And right there, we can see a very interesting dynamic occurring. The recruiter is delineating out the kind of person who’d be interested in their brand of evangelicalism: an authoritarian who is frustrated with their lack of control over others.
Evangelism Fail #1: This world is only broken to broken people
Years ago, I used to call this kind of evangelicalism a broken system. Some folks took exception to that term, since this broken system has existed for many decades in its current form. How, they wondered, can something “broken” last so long and seem to be in so little danger of extinction?
The problem I had was that I was using the term broken in more of an evangelical way. To evangelicals, a broken system can exist indefinitely. It’s just unable to fulfill its stated purpose anymore. It’s not doing what it was first created to do.
I call that kind of system dysfunctional authoritarianism now, and I don’t get that kind of objection anymore. It’s objectively a better and more descriptive term. Still, “Bad stuff is happening” only means broken to the kind of authoritarians who think that an entire world and all of humanity can possibly be broken in a way that evangelicals’ product will totally fix.
Most people would object to that notion. And those people are not the people the evangelism campaign wants or targets. They will self-select out of the evangelism attempt right there. If the world is not broken and humans as a whole are not broken, then the evangelism campaign fails right there.
(Also, it’s interesting that this evangelism attempt uses a logical fallacy called appeal to ugliness. It’s the opposite of an appeal to beauty in that it selects only examples that seem to fit the sales attempt. To debunk it, any one of us could name examples of humans doing wonderful and beautiful things, of the world being grand and remarkable, and destroy the attempted argument.)
DIAGRAMS Part Two: Guessing at an omnimax god’s “original design”
But let’s ignore all of that. Let’s pretend that the person getting this evangelism attempt is exactly the right kind of mark. Having selected the right attempt-ee, the evangelism attempt-er proceeds along to the second part of the “3 Circles” diagram:
Ignoring the obvious fail of having the 2nd circle to the left of the first, reversing the normal way English speakers “read” art, here’s the suggested script for the evangelism attempt:
Say something like, “But it wasn’t always this way. When God first made the world, He made it beautiful and perfect.” In this circle, write things like love, peace, joy, health, and rightness. Maybe draw a love heart.
Our first ancestors lived this way for a short time.
And here, again, the evangelism script selects out the wrong kind of mark. The marks needed here will buy into a very Christian, very evangelical worldview. They’ll accept Young-Earth Creationism as a central pillar of the evangelism attempt.
Evangelism Fail #2: Nope!
Most non-evangelical normies don’t accept such a claim about Creationism. They understand that the Bible’s mythology is just that: a myth designed to support its own supernatural claims. That is why skeptics say that the Bible cannot be used to support the Bible’s claims. The book is already the claim; it is not also the support for the claim. If that were allowed, the Harry Potter books would support the existence of Hogwarts in the same way.
Most creation myths contain similar elements of humans not being what they once were. Greek myths tell similar stories of a Golden Age (archive) wherein humans did not suffer from the needs and flaws of modern people, and then a Silver Age where they began to be more like us. After other ages, finally the gods arranged an Iron Age where they are us. And yet I know of no Greek pagans who think that’s literally what happened, nor any other people who accept it in their stead.
If someone doesn’t accept that humans had some kind of Golden Age at the dawn of our existence wherein we were fundamentally not like our modern selves, then this evangelism attempt fails here.
DIAGRAMS Part Three: The magical fix for the problem created by evangelism
But let’s assume that so far, the mark accepts everything the evangelist says as, pardon the pun, the gospel truth. The evangelist now draws the connection between the circles, a little running person:
This little stick figure represents humans’ rush to commit offenses against this apparently-very-weak godling, which Christians call sin. There is absolutely nothing their god can do about it, either. He must reject it from his afterlife, which means that sinful humans’ ghosts get set on fire forever after they die. For all his amazing love for humanity, the Christian god can’t possibly accept their very human desire to explore, grow, mature, and well, do our human thang.
But don’t worry! Just as humans rushed to commit these offenses, they can also psychically apologize for their offensiveness. The evangelist now draws a third circle, which represents this godling:
Yes, the evangelism guide wants the evangelist to draw a dumb crown on the circle. It’s just not Jesusy enough without one. Another stick figure must be drawn bending literal knee to the crowned circle. And then, little arrows must be drawn to indicate the godling’s acceptance of this apology.
Lastly, our evangelism guide tells the recruiter to draw another stick figure. This one links the 2nd and 3rd circles:
And the guide’s script tells evangelists to say something like this:
“God knew nothing we could do by ourselves would get us out of this brokenness. But God loves us and didn’t want things to stay this way, so He sent his Son Jesus to the earth. He was born of a virgin, lived a perfect life, died on the cross, and rose from the dead three days later.
When Jesus died on the cross, He took the punishment we deserved for our sin. When He rose from the dead, He defeated sin and made a way for us to experience salvation.”
Ta-da! Now the diagram is complete.
Evangelism Fail #3: But um, sin is not actually defeated
Let’s assume that the evangelists’ marks accept the obvious mythology of Jesus’ utter sin-free human life; his divine parentage; his magically-non-sexual conception; his virginal mother (an element in oh so many Greek myths of the time; archive); his totally unfair death at humans’ hands representing a divine sacrifice somehow; and his magical resurrection.
Now the evangelists fully expect these marks to go oh ok cool over the idea of their god’s totes for realsies sacrifice “defeat[ing] sin.”
Um, sin still exists.
Yes. Just ask any evangelical. How is sin defeated if it still totally exists and still totally dooms so many non-evangelicals to getting their ghosts set on fire forever after they die? Why didn’t this defeat fundamentally change humans again for the better, by evangelical reckoning—meaning making us all completely childlike and utterly obedient?
Oh wait, it only got defeated for the specific humans who psychically apologize to this godling within the past 2000 years of his supposed lifetime—and who then buy evangelists’ product, active membership in an evangelical church with the correct style of Jesusing, for the rest of their lives? And even for those specific humans, their god’s sacrifice only defeated sin in the specific way that will prevent the terrible fate that the evangelists promise he’ll set upon those who reject their evangelism pitch? Oh, and even then, even then, they’ll still have to work hard for their entire lives to live according to evangelical rules?
Sounds like a very un-defeated situation.
In fact, it sounds like evangelicals are trying to create a need where none exists. That way, they can more easily sell their only product. Their product cannot exist unless the need does first. However, most people do not feel that need. Thus, evangelicals need this evangelism campaign to create it. Once it exists, they can then fulfill it.
Hooray Team Jesus!
“3 Circles” evangelism can succeed only if its marks accept some fundamental underlying ideas
This is a failtastic evangelism campaign in every single way. But the specific evangelicals who buy into its ideas just love it. And I can see why.
Luckily, the inventor of this nonsense and his primary customers all happen to live in America. Even in unchurched wild an’ wacky South Florida, Americans tend to grow up immersed in Christian-centric mythology and ideas. Even those who grow up completely distanced from evangelical church culture have been exposed, at least, to the general ideas involved. The question is whether or not they accept the general ideas behind evangelism campaigns like “3 Circles”:
- People are broken
- All this brokenness exists despite an omnimax god’s displeasure with it
- Yes yes, it totally does, so people obviously need a god’s help to get un-broken
- Except they’ll still be completely broken afterward and need to buy evangelicals’ product, active membership in evangelical churches, to maintain themselves according to this weakling of a god’s satisfaction
- If they do not do this, this omnimax god will set their ghosts on fire forever after they die
- He could just magically pare out the broken parts or recreate his followers as unbroken, but for some bizarre reason chooses not to do so even though he’ll be doing exactly that in Heaven to their ghosts; somehow, nobody questions this logic
- Somehow this brokenness applies to natural disasters, accidents, geopolitical conflicts, and the entirety of life on Earth—including animals, who don’t even have ghosts that can be set on fire forever after they die
- Everything wrong, unfair, or unpleasant about life on Earth is wrong because of the aforementioned
- But if recruits ask, everything lovely about it is also due to their omnimax god’s meddling; somehow he can ensure that the lovely stuff still exists, but he can do nothing at all about the ickie stuff
If those Americans are Christians, they almost certainly buy into at least the belief that humans need a god. Even liberal Christians accept that one. I’ve heard and read them say so with my own two ears and eyes.
Barring that, successful evangelism only needs one false belief with the right worldview to work
But for those marks who are not even Christian, evangelists can prey upon even obviously non-factual beliefs like the Just World Hypothesis/Fallacy (archive). All they need is a mark who buys into claims that do not have any tether to reality, combined with the right worldview.
If evangelists find that setup, they can easily make the rest of it fall into line.
Unfortunately, almost all Americans—even supposedly secular ones—embrace at least one of those sorts of beliefs somehow. We’re a nation where all too many atheists accept some or all of anti-abortion crusaders’ extremely-religion-derived talking points. For that matter, easily half the Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) that I encounter online are proud atheists.
Yeah, in a lot of ways we’ve made ourselves a post-truth, target-rich environment for evangelism attempts like “3 Circles.”
Case Study: My Evil Ex Biff
That’s how my Evil Ex Biff became Pentecostal. He was a deeply-frustrated, misogynistic control freak and authoritarian at heart. But he’d been born and raised in a household run by a lax mainline Christian mother and a very atheistic, skeptical father. His home community was, to say the least, very socially Christian—but in a personally-private way. He responded to these conditions by becoming a malignant narcissist.
By the time I met him, he’d gotten into really emo-style Wicca. He practiced it alone, though, which annoyed coven-based Wiccans. He even painted a self-portrait of himself casting a Wiccan-style spell. In it, he sat cross-legged in a circle while gesturing and frowning in the most emo, dramatic style imaginable. If I’d been only a few years wiser, I’d have laughed out loud at the sight of it. As it was, even I knew enough as a teenager to keep quiet about how weird it looked.
When Biff encountered Pentecostalism, it was like watching people pour gasoline on a brush fire. It allowed him to maintain his personality—just now with divine blessings and a divine mandate! He could stay misogynistic—with Jesus’ approval! And best of all, he could violate all the social norms he wanted, especially those requesting honesty and good faith of religious people performing evangelism. Now he violated them with the absolute assurance that an omnimax god approved completely.
All he’d lacked were the correct labels on his existing worldview. Adopting those was as easy as changing out the curtains. He slipped new ones over the rods and arranged them nicely. And ta-da! Now he was good to go!
Alas, ‘3 Circles’ Evangelism exists for a culture that no longer exists for most evangelicals
The evangelicals busy buying up and practicing “3 Circles” evangelism pickup lines have their emotional growth stopped at 2008, just like Scroggins himself. He designed an evangelism campaign that pretty much works only in the specific environment in which he found himself in 2008. It seeks, moreover, to recreate the environment he liked better in Louisville. It’s supposed to move recruits from WPB to Louisville in their religious worldview.
However, it works only to the extent that other evangelicals use it. Scroggins has not moved the needle much at all in WPB, Florida. The city has not undergone some massive religious transformation. It has not become the newest Awakening. After 15-ish years of Scroggins and his likeminded evangelicals using it, SBC members still represent only 3.7% of WPB’s population.
In this way, “3 Circles” functions as a perfect representation of all of the products evangelicals buy to help them with selling their only real product. None of them really work. If they did, evangelicals would not be in their current mournful and hilarious position.
And no evangelism systems’ creators need to care
It’s like the “tools” that Amway victims buy to help them recruit new victims of their own. Those multi-level marketing “tools” are simply products in themselves. They enrich those making and selling them at the victims’ expense.
Ultimately, that’s what “3 Circles” does in a nutshell. It’s meant to make evangelicals feel like they can successfully recruit others to their churches. They learn its recommended pickup lines and dutifully draw out its required diagram and label it and explain it.
And after doing all of that blahblah, they still almost never succeed with it.
But ask Jimmy Scroggins if that matters. I doubt it will. The “3 Circles” sellers, like all the others selling evangelism systems to evangelicals, have already made their money with the sale. Thus, the only customers who matter to them are the ones buying what they sell. Recruits sure aren’t buying any of this stuff!
So actual success is purely secondary here. Worse, the people buying these systems won’t care either. It sounds really, really Jesusy. Therefore, it must work! If it doesn’t, then those performing it must have done something wrong.
For those with control-hunger, evangelism success will always lead to them having more control
We find this reasoning everywhere in evangelicalism. This is their reasoning for advocating the passage of anti-abortion laws. Whether these laws result in lower abortion rates or not, they should prevent abortion. Therefore, they can be completely ineffective—even counter-effective by boosting abortion rates, stigmatizing women’s birth control, and even resulting in the deaths of the women seeking therapeutic abortion and miscarriage care—and anti-abortion crusaders will not only not care, but rejoice. Obviously, this consistent result means that anti-abortion laws must be made even more draconian.
In addition, the evangelicals who want church covenants giving leaders total power over members think along staggeringly similar lines: If a sheep acts out despite these agreements, obviously the solution is giving leaders even more power over them.
And I’ve seen many evangelical couples who assume that their marital troubles exist because one or both of them are not following evangelical marriage rules stringently enough. In fact, that’s the entire problem Scroggins decided he was having when he began his couples’ outreach and Bible study program in 2008—the one that gave rise to “3 Circles” evangelism! And this evangelism is meant to recruit more SBC-affiliated evangelicals. More SBC-lings means more people for SBC leaders to control—particularly financially!
For dysfunctional authoritarians, the solution set will always involve giving them more power over others. Always. If somehow someone comes out of evangelism with less control given to evangelicals, something happened that shouldn’t have.
Grading ‘3 Circles’ evangelism
It’s easy to grade this evangelism system. It gets an F for effectiveness. It not only fails on every level, it only succeeds with a very narrow subset of Americans.
Worse, that subset shrinks more and more every year. Zoomers are already easily the least Christian American generation in the last century. Just last year in 2023, Barna Group famously declared that only 4% of Americans had a “Biblical worldview” (archive). But then again, they’ve been saying that for 20 years at least (archive;). Barna Group is a for-profit business, so it helps a lot if their marks feel some pressure to buy the evangelism and church-management systems they sell.
Around 2009, though, they told their customers that “less than one-half of one percent of adults in the Mosaic generation – i.e., those aged 18 to 23 [older Millennials] – have a biblical worldview, compared to about one out of every nine older adults.” Ed Stetzer quoted it in a post he wrote that year. Here’s what their original post said about it:
The same questions were asked of respondents in national surveys by Barna in 1995, 2000 and 2005. The results indicate that the percentage of adults with a biblical worldview, as defined above, has remained unchanged for more than a decade. The numbers show that 7% had such a worldview in 1995, compared to 10% in 2000, 11% in 2005, and 9% now.
In effect, they studied Gen X (who were 20-30 in 1995) and Millennials (whose oldest members were just reaching adulthood by 2000 and were 9-29 in 2009). Now we’re onto them panicking about Gen Z, or Zoomers. In this 2023 PDF written by George Barna at his new gig that we talked about a while ago, he tells us that only 1% of today’s adults under age 30 have “a biblical worldview.” Three years ago, according to Barna himself, that was 2%! Uh oh!
So it definitely hasn’t helped evangelicals’ recruitment rates. Not even a little.
It does grade highly in other ways though!
But it gets a B for SBC-affiliated evangelicals’ esteem of it.
The North Carolina (NC) Baptists website (archive) offers fulsome praise for “3 Circles”:
Scroggins knew he couldn’t pull a bait-and-switch move, because the couples [in his marriage/outreach group in 2008] had come to learn about marriage. He asked God for wisdom, then it hit him.
“That week, I came up with the idea for the ‘3 Circles,’” Scroggins said.
The couples had come to learn about marriage, and Scroggins knew that marriage points to the gospel. The challenge was how to explain it to a group who had no biblical foundation whatsoever. Scroggins explained to the group that God has a design for marriage, relationships, communication and more. God has a design for all of life, and it’s found in the Bible. [. . .]
“Don’t you think there are broken and hurting people where you live?” Scroggins said. “Jesus came to heal the broken people from every neighborhood, and every place and every race. He doesn’t leave anybody out. What if we stopped pushing them out and focused on pulling them in, lifting them up and pointing them to Jesus?”
In the story, we learn that these quotes came from their 2020 NC Baptist Disciple-Making Conference. It did not come from a marriage seminar, but from a conference designed to help evangelicals with evangelism.
Similarly, at Display the Gospel’s evangelism site (archive) we learn:
3 Circles is a very simple, very reproducible gospel sharing tool that anyone can easily learn and easily train others to use as well. [. . .] I’ve personally been using this and sharing this with other for the past few years and it’s been very effective and helpful.
Incidentally, I noticed that their writer does not say that they’ve successfully recruited others with it. If an evangelical doesn’t say something, we may safely assume the worst-case reasons for it. That may be why First McKinney Baptist Church’s website (archive) doesn’t even try to imply success either:
This tool provides a method of turning everyday conversations about brokenness into everyday conversations about Christ. The goal of ‘Three Circles’ is to equip Christians to share their faith with non-Christians.
Talk about damning by faint praise.
‘3 Circles’ needs some high grades for its utter lack of real-world effectiveness
And oh brother, this evangelism system desperately needs some good grades to balance out that lack of effectiveness.
When I asked Google’s AI what the most popular evangelism diagram was, it told me “The Bridge.” (Here’s the link it offered, too; archive.)
Oops. “The Bridge” seems to suffer from the exact same flaws as “3 Circles,” but AI grabbed “The Bridge” when I asked. So there is that. Maybe I should have asked about the most effective diagram.
Ouch. Never mind. “3 Circles” doesn’t even merit a mention out of six different approaches. (The Wheel’s page; archive.)
“3 Circles” also gets an A+ for the number of times I mistyped it. It achieved perfectly-consistent typos of “# Circles” and “[insert stage of diagram] Circles” for all of the individual images I made, named, and uploaded of it. I don’t think I typed it correctly the first time even once at any point in this post or its images. You might not consider that amazing. But this evangelism system needs every kindness a grader can offer it!
In summary: With the general decline of Christianity in America, evangelism-minded evangelicals might simply be getting desperate. Whatever approach they adopt, they’ll do best to assume they will not ever be successful with it. “3 Circles” won’t change anything about that advice, but at least those failing with it will be in good company—at least, if they’re SBC- affiliated or -adjacent.
NEXT UP: How evangelicals use and abuse that “iron sharpening iron” Bible verse. See you soon!
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