Service evangelism is a recruitment tactic focusing on helping others somehow, thus impressing them, and then making the impressed people think that being helpful is just how Christians are. It’s supposed to make the impressed people want to join Christianity. However, you can likely already spot some problems with the concept of service evangelism, and today we are going to talk about them!
(From introduction: A nice starter video about Boogie’s fake cancer claim; Keemstar’s run-in with the anime child-porn artist that Kris Tyson supports; MrBeast’s weekly totals since the controversy.)
(This post went live on Patreon on 7/30/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)
Service evangelism: A brief Christianese intro
In right-wing Christianity, particularly evangelicalism, whenever a word modifies evangelism it’s meant to convey how that evangelism gets conducted. Here are some very common phrases in Christianese, along with their meanings in the real world:
- Friendship evangelism: Making false overtures of friendship to get recruitment pitches in front of unsuspecting marks
- Beach evangelism: Going to the beach to recruit others
- Tract evangelism: Handing out tracts containing recruitment pitches to marks
- Lifestyle evangelism: If you’ve ever heard of the famous advice (mis)attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (archive; “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words”), you’re already familiar with this one; here, the recruiter ostentatiously performs devotions in public and makes sure everyone sees them following all of their group’s rules, then directs the marks’ admiration to their flavor of Christianity as a recruitment tactic
- Personal evangelism: Actually giving direct sales pitches to marks person-to-person; in general, the flocks haaaaaaaaate this form of evangelism and resist it with all the strength they can muster
Of course, many more kinds of evangelism exist besides these (archive).
If you might notice, every one of these forms of evangelism is indirect except that last one. In every other case, the recruiter tries to catch the marks’ attention or impress them, then redirect that attention to the actual recruitment pitch.
In that grand Christianese tradition, service evangelism consists of helping marks somehow, thus impressing them and creating a social contract between them and the helper. Once the marks are suitably impressed, the recruiter issues their sales pitch.
Additionally, indirect evangelism has a really bad success rate. Its variants usually center around constantly hinting about a sales pitch. Marks find these very easy to ignore. Direct evangelism isn’t quite as likely to fail—though when it does, it’s usually more disastrous and embarrassing to the erstwhile evangelist!
And some evangelical leaders are drilling down on this form of recruitment all of a sudden.
Service evangelism, Southern Baptist style
Taking a bit of time off from deep internal infighting, Baptist Press issued a Bible study a week or so ago (archive). Someone titled it simply “Serving.” Its cherry-picked Bible verse reading comes from Acts 6:1-15. But really, it’s about 1-7 for the most part.
And here, we must head into a segue about Acts 6.
These verses tell a story of one early Christian sect. It consisted of converts to what at the time was still simply a new flavor of Judaism. Many of these converts had been regular Jews. Others, however, had been Hellenic pagans.
Like many very early Christian sects, this one practiced communal living. Since there’s no god to make the leaders of any Christian group behave in a truly “Christlike” way, the leaders of this sect were overlooking Hellenic widows in their daily communal food distribution. Part of me suspects this oversight was intentional to at least some extent.
Either way, somehow Jesus was not telling this sect’s leaders, who as we will soon see were actually the highest ranking Christians of their generation, to make sure those widows got a share of food!
Eventually, the situation got really heated. The sect’s membership began fighting about it.
The birth of service evangelism, apparently
In response, “the Twelve,” meaning Jesus’ highest-level disciples and the men directly responsible for the food handouts, had a meeting about it.
But the meeting wasn’t about how the Twelve planned to solve this problem. Nope! They all considered their responsibilities as evangelists far more pressing than feeding the hungry (as Jesus had directly commanded them). So at the meeting, the Twelve delegated. They told their flock to pick some super-Jesusy members to do the distribution for them.
According to the book written specifically to recruit people and validate Christian claims, everyone was super-happy with this idea. They got right on it. Amazingly, the people the sect chose were absolutely perfect for the job. We don’t hear about the results, but Christians assume it worked out. After all, anyone that Jesusy has to be okay, right? Right?
Well, we do know one guy didn’t take his distribution duties seriously. A guy named Stephen apparently still thought his responsibilities as an evangelist and culture warrior were far more important (verses 8-15). But forget him. No, we are meant to think that nobody in that sect ever had any further issues with food distribution ever again. After this brief mention, the issue drops right off the radar. It is never referenced again. Hooray Team Jesus!
Somehow, the Southern Baptist Convention’s leaders think this story translates into a great modern recruitment method for evangelicals.
Service evangelism had nothing whatsoever to do with Acts 6:1-7
In their writeup, our anonymous SBC Bible study writer insists that service evangelism made Christianity spread quickly, as described in Acts 6:7. To me, it’s completely obvious that the “Twelve” devised their food distribution committee as a way to stop wasting time fulfilling Jesus’ direct orders in favor of devoting themselves solely to recruitment.
It wasn’t service that caused the newbie religion to grow. The widows not getting food were already Christian. Obviously, they didn’t need to be made more Christian. They were already recruited. If anything, they were in danger of leaving the group! No, the “Twelve” simply thought their time was better spent in recruitment rather than in caring for the flocks they already had.
And what would modern evangelicals do if they couldn’t make stuff up about the Bible, as we see here:
Stephen served the widows of the church, but he also spoke to those outside the congregation about Jesus.
The actual text doesn’t support this assertion. Look as long as you like. In the actual text, Stephen never serves anybody. In fact, the writer of Acts presents him only as a miracle-worker and evangelist. Enraged Jews murder the guy in the very next chapter of Acts, so his potential food-distribution days didn’t last long at all.
So to me, Acts 6 paints a portrait of an early Christian church that suffers from the exact same problems we see today. Namely, those early groups struggled to find a balance between caring for existing members and recruiting new ones.
Alas, Acts offers no reason to think that early Christians achieved that balance.
How the SBC gets service evangelism twisted
Despite that little problem, our anonymous SBC writer presents us with someone they think embodies Acts 6’s supposed emphasis on serving others:
Anthony served the best food in town. He also served the town. After years as kitchen manager, he knew nearly everyone, and everyone knew him. He referred to the café as his ministry. On his days off, he found ways to serve. An elderly lady needed her grass cut, so he volunteered. Soon he was also cutting four other yards. He considered it part of his ministry. Whenever people were in need, Anthony was there to help and pointed all praise to Christ. His service revealed Christ’s love through his love.
Just like the Hellenic widows, though, Anthony drops out of the story right after this paragraph. The SBC summarizes their poorly-done Bible study thusly:
Acts 6 reveals valuable truths for Christians today. Believers can partner with church leaders in meeting the needs of others. Doing this, serving alongside one another, only expands our influence and witness for Christ. We can trust God to provide what we need when we face opponents of the truth. Serving others leads to greater kingdom work!
HOW? What evangelist’s time frees up thanks to someone else shouldering their service workload? For that matter, who did Anthony free up to do more recruitment in his brief anecdote?
No, Acts 6 does not in any way whatsoever lend itself to an interpretation of serving others in and of itself as a recruitment tool. All that committee did was free up the “Twelve” to do recruitment. And the SBC knows it, because they already told us this:
The church’s unity [in Acts 6] had an impact on the community. The Word spread because the apostles were free to pursue their calling. In addition, people continued to accept the Gospel.
Acts doesn’t actually tell us that this early church was unified after this delegation meeting. Indeed, history tells us that Christians were never unified until about the 4th century. That’s when their leaders got temporal power and could force them to unified on pain of dispossession, torture, and death. Even then, Catholic leaders constantly had to stamp out heresies.
IN THE WILD: Service evangelism
Evangelicals have been talking about service evangelism in the same exact way for decades now.
Here’s a paper likely written in or after 1988 talking about it, just to get us started. Like almost every other source on service evangelism, it discusses the 1974 Lausanne Covenant (archive). This groundbreaking agreement advises evangelicals to serve others only to try to recruit them through it. Service cannot happen in the absence of recruitment. Service must have recruitment at some point, or else the server might as well tell the serve-ees to go straight to Hell.
Evangelicals already hated following Jesus’ direct orders, so as you can guess they loved this Lausanne Covenant.
In 2011, an evangelical shared his “personal strategy” for evangelism (archive):
I plan to maintain a presence in meeting places, whether that is universities, music venues, coffee shops or AA meetings. [. . .] I will use my workplace as a platform for ministry. Through church and community groups we will engage the community through service evangelism.
He also wanted to set up a database “to see what is working and not working.” Alas, he abandoned the blog in 2012, and I see no further references to any databases or community groups he might have created. I suppose he got his emotional reward just from describing his plans, as all too many people do.
In 2012, a Philadelphia news site ran an article about a man doing service evangelism there (archive):
“What I do, I do evangelism, inside and outside [the church]. We have a ‘Go-Team’ every second Saturday. We do service evangelism (and) street evangelism,” Davis said. Davis has a traditional and non-traditional approach to evangelism, for instance, he and his team visit local laundromats and pay for patrons’ dryer service as they share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Like our 2011 database-building guy, this Christian reports no successes at all—except for an urban-legend-sounding experience with a guy who died right after hearing the sales pitch:
I started sharing the Gospel with him, he told me, ‘I don’t believe it, don’t want it, you better get away from me.’ So, I said ‘I’ll just pray for you.’ The next day, [the police] had [crime scene tape] around that sidewalk, that young man got killed on that spot. Prayerfully, he adhered to the Gospel before he got killed.”
Sure, Jan. Either way, this is very obviously the closest he has ever gotten to a sale.
In 2014, John Rothra evaluated service evangelism (archive). He thought it was fun and easy, particularly for children and teenagers—as long as everyone understood that it’s just a way to get one’s foot in the door for a sales pitch.
IN THE WILD: More recent takes on service evangelism
In 2019, an evangelical struggled hard with a book about the culture wars (archive). Like just about every single take on “service evangelism,” it outlines a roadmap that doesn’t track with reality. Instead, it talks up the Lausanne Covenant (relink) and insists that there’s totally a way for evangelicals to fulfill both their evangelistic orders and Jesus’ direct orders about serving others. But this guy will not be the one to describe a reality-tracking roadmap for doing it.
In 2020, the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB) proudly published a post about a former NFL player, Daryl Jones, who parlayed his past career into a new one as an SBC missionary (archive). I bet that got a lot of SBC-lings’ attention. Even I’ve heard of the guy, and I’m not into football at all. Their post mentions that a church he started does “service evangelism projects,” but doesn’t elaborate at all on them.
In 2022, a Facebook page called “The VOICE of Evangelism” offered a writeup of various kinds of evangelism “approaches.” Its sixth approach is “the Service Approach,” and it goes like this (archive):
This is another way to share our faith with people. If you are a person who naturally notices the needs of others, this might be the perfect way to share your faith. A person who prefers this approach enjoys sharing the love of Christ through deed over word. They find this approach to be easy because it is the way God made them. Actually service evangelism is at the heart of the Christian faith. Most of us have been made by God with gifts and talents that call us to be kind to others and assist those in need. At the same time, a service evangelist knows that it is not by our good deeds but by God’s grace that we are truly saved.
The page’s “Approaches” apparently originated with Bill Hybels—hopefully before his giant 2018 sex misconduct/groping scandal.
And a 2023 paper in Verbum et Ecclesia (downloadable from here) declares triumphantly that “evangelism is once again appearing on the agenda” after, one assumes, the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, its authors caution churches to be very Jesusy about evangelism:
It is imperative that the church does not repeat the same mistakes of the past, as the integrity and credibility of the gospel are at stake. Evangelism should then resist the Constantinian temptation and rediscover it in the context of post-Christendom as substantial participation in the mission of God missio Dei [missionality], an invitation to missional discipleship and a discipling participation in the kingdom of God. In this way, integrated, missional and evangelising congregations can be seen as a sign and foretaste of the kingdom of God, which embodies the good news in an authentic way by faithful presence, acts of service and words of hope!
As far as I can tell, evangelicals have largely completely ignored this advice. I only found this paper through advanced Google-fu.
The common thread in evangelicals’ advice about service evangelism
First and foremost, almost no evangelical writing includes any concrete examples of serving others. We heard about that Philadelphia guy who put quarters into dryers for poor people, sure. And the Lausanne Movement’s official site has some examples as well (archive; do a search for “service evangelism” and you’ll find it in the next section after that quoted bit). That’s about all I found.
Second and perhaps more importantly, we get no statistics whatsoever about the effectiveness of service evangelism. To evangelicals, that means recruitment success. That Lausanne page contains some hints of success, but provides no numbers whatsoever about just how many people converted after receiving evangelical help/service.
It’s so funny to me that evangelicals all appear to think the Lausanne Covenant is Jesus’ direct marching orders for service evangelism. They all take it completely for granted that service evangelism totally creates opportunities for Christians to evangelize service recipients, and that these recipients will be far more amenable to conversion once they’re helped. But not a single site I found could offer any real reasons for thinking so.
The funniest thing is that yes, I can see service evangelism making marks somewhat easier to persuade. I’m sure that’s true to some extent. Regardless, service evangelism suffers from some major problems to the process that evangelicals are in no way prepared to resolve.
The first big problem here. . .
As we saw from the anecdote about Anthony from the Baptist Press post, those performing service evangelism try make themselves as useful as they can. When anybody praises them for it, they say they’re doing it because of Jesus and don’t you wanna check out my religion now? In theory, their marks move closer to joining the server’s flavor of Christianity.
But why do evangelicals imagine their marks join after being hit with service evangelism? I can see only two reasons possible:
- They want to be around lots of people who will also help them.
- They want to help people too.
And the most likely explanation sure ain’t the second. Even in Acts 6, the “Twelve” didn’t want to serve their existing flocks.
In this paradigm, Christian recruits magically transform into helpful new service-evangelists upon joining and don’t need more earthly help to get by in life. In reality, that doesn’t happen. These recruits have the same material needs they did before joining, and they will expect the help to keep flowing.
In fact, missionaries have an entire term for this situation: “Rice Christians.” Very poor people join Christian groups when missionaries bribe them with rice/food/resources. Once the rice/food/resources inevitably dry up, they vanish again. Even Catholics have learned that congregants that get material help once will expect it again—and they will leave very angrily when their requests get refused:
Roger had approached the church for help with a hefty utility bill, citing some difficult life circumstances. Shortly after we had paid the bill, we discovered that his story had been a fabrication. Resolving to be less gullible in the future, we moved on, never expecting to hear from him again.
A few months later, however, Roger gave us a call on a phone set to be turned off at midnight due to unpaid bills. He had suffered a landscaping accident and needed the phone to talk to his doctor.
When “Roger” got denied and offered the use of a clergyman’s cell phone instead, he unloaded a huge tirade of anger on that poor guy. After this visit, the clergyman says he “never saw Roger again.” Nor wanted to, I bet.
I suspect evangelicals know deep down that the need for material help exponentially expands. Perhaps that’s why their beloved Lausanne Covenant (relink) tells them to focus way more on recruitment and culture-warring than on taking care of their existing flocks.
To be fair, as well, most churches simply don’t have the resources to do a good job of taking care of their own flocks, much less doing so for everyone outside their insulated bubble. Almost all of a church’s money goes to paying for their staff, clubhouse, and outreach to recruit new people. Almost nothing is ever left over for charity.
However, this isn’t the worst problem here.
. . . And the second, far worse problem. . .
INIGO (impatient): I promise I will not kill you until you reach the top.
MAN IN BLACK (climbing): That’s very comforting. But I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait.
INIGO: I hate waiting. I could give you my word as a Spaniard.
MAN IN BLACK: No good. I’ve known too many Spaniards.
As I just mentioned, Christians are not, as a group, service-oriented people. Churches donate only a tiny percentage of their weekly take on charitable causes. Almost none of their tiny amount of community service comes without recruitment pitches attached.
In real life, evangelicals have always been a cruelty-is-the-point kinda group. They support political causes that hurt people. Their culture wars make the entire world a worse place. And the louder the Christians in the restaurant, the more ostentatiously Jesusy, the worse their tip for the waitstaff will be!
So if one Christian helps tons of people as a form of indirect recruitment, nobody connects their helpfulness to Christianity itself. This one helpful person stacks against potentially millions of very uncharitable, mean-spirited Christians.
(See also: World Vision Forum’s 2014 PR disaster.)
As a result, people naturally assume that this one Christian is simply really nice. We know that person is not the norm for Christians. This one Christian’s kindness matters about as much as my own efforts to tip waitstaff very well when I was Pentecostal. It couldn’t cancel out the countless Christians stiffing them. For that matter, I’m not Christian at all anymore, and I still tip well. I’m just naturally the type of person to tip well. My previous behavior as a Christian had nothing to do with my faith. It’s just how I am. I’d tip well no matter what religious worldview I held. And kind Christians will likewise be kind no matter where they land, religion-wise.
However, this, too, is not the actual worst problem with service evangelism.
. . . And the third absolute dealbreaker of service evangelism
This is the dealbreaker:
Charity isn’t charity when it comes with strings attached.
Service evangelism creates a social bond between the person helping and the one being helped. That social bond builds very fast, very intense social capital. Social capital is an emotional currency built through friendly interactions. We spend it when we ask things of others.
Those performing service evangelism count on social capital. After being helped, marks may feel obligated to listen to whatever recruitment pitch their benefactor issues.
That is a really, really nasty way to recruit. It’s opportunistic and predatory. And I bet their marks know it, even as they’re happy to accept the material help.
At least service evangelism isn’t very successful!
Ever been just bombarded with affection, kindness, and gifts, then realized with a sinking heart that the narc just wants something from us that we’re not usually inclined to give?
Anyone who’s been in a relationship with a narcissist knows exactly what I mean here. And I don’t mean only sex, of course. A particular narc mommy on social media did this same thing to her estranged teenaged son to sweet-talk him into appearing in photos with her for a magazine spread about parenthood. Afterward, he dropped right out of her life again.
If the person doing the kindness would do it even if they knew in advance it wouldn’t recruit a single person ever, that’d be one thing. But nobody who describes their kindness as a “ministry” or form of “evangelism” seems able to do that. They may fail utterly to recruit a single person ever, but clearly they want to recruit.
And yes, they do fail. Just examine “Anthony’s” story in Baptist Press. Does it actually say anywhere that he successfully recruited anyone doing all this extra stuff? No? Then count on this: He did not, ever, recruit anyone. If he had, it would be in the story. Dude would be mentioning it every other sentence. After all, evangelicals love success stories! But there’s no success to report.
Citation needed, Baptist Press
Now that we’ve got all that information under us, let’s turn again to this Baptist Press Bible study (relink):
Acts 6 reveals valuable truths for Christians today. Believers can partner with church leaders in meeting the needs of others. Doing this, serving alongside one another, only expands our influence and witness for Christ. We can trust God to provide what we need when we face opponents of the truth. Serving others leads to greater kingdom work!
I wish that evangelicals could ask critical questions of their leaders. For starters, they could wonder:
Why do we need to bribe people to listen to what we believe is the most important message in the whole world? Why isn’t it compelling on its own? And why are we assuming that so many people haven’t already heard it?
How will our god provide what we need? Through the material help of others, of course. How will we get that aid? Who specifically will provide it and through what process? If the aid doesn’t come through, how will we pay for our efforts’ material demands like food donations? And how does our procurement of aid resources differ from whatever our secular counterparts are doing?
Why are we assuming that those we help are “opponents of the truth”? If we see aid recipients as the enemy, how will that influence how we treat them?
Why do we never hear more specific stats regarding the effectiveness of service evangelism? Every single thing we see implies that its success consists of “planting seeds,” which often sounds really creepy to normies.
But you’ll wait until (the very modern conceptualization of) Hell itself freezes over for those answers. Until we get them, I will continue to mentally evaluate every single evangelical shindig and monument according to how many meals that money would have provided the poor and hungry in their very own towns.
In the end, service evangelism is just a way for evangelicals to rationalize their most predatory recruitment techniques. They can excuse anything they do this way. No love is required of them, nor even wanted. Real love would be helping people just to help them, with no ulterior motives at all. And evangelicals can’t have that.
NEXT UP: I’m feeling a bit old. After weathering evangelicals’ panic over Millennials, now I’m starting to see them panic about Gen Z. And a few of them are seeing even worse numbers for Gen Alpha. I wonder how many more generations of evangelical panic I’ll get to experience? Hopefully at least a few more! See you next time!
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