evangelism

How Confrontational Evangelism is Failing Christians, and Why It Doesn’t Matter.

Christian evangelists act, in a very real sense, as salespeople of their ideology. And they are not making a lot of sales these days. They can’t even keep the few customers they still have! So evangelical churn has become a serious problem–not just for evangelicals, either. Not long ago, we talked about a Christian who thought he’d figured out a brand-new sales tactic. In that post, I touched on the two tactics Christian salespeople typically use. Today, I’ll expand a little more on the first of them, confrontational evangelism–and why it fails, and why Christians can’t stop using it regardless.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

Pick a Gear: Selling Contradictions

The marketers in broken systems have this unfortunate tendency to sell two different and diametrically opposed things to potential consumers. It’s not just a Christian thing; it happens in most broken systems. People in them don’t see that they’re doing it, and the people they’re selling to may not even realize that’s why they distrust the sellers and reject their product. But it happens all the same.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

The Adventures of Thom Rainer and the Strawman

Normally you’d think that inaccuracies in Christians’ perception of others is just their problem. But their cultural flaws have a tendency of creating headaches for other people, too, not just for themselves. While they’re making strawmen about non-Christians and wrestling with their fictional creations, they’re getting an entirely wrong idea of what we’re really like and why we reject their claims and sales attempts. Today I want to talk about why Christians misrepresent us so often.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

The Handbook: The Magic Christian (Doesn’t Exist).

Christians often pull out the stops when they discover that one of us has left the fold. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown at us to read, watch, or listen to. We get invited to “casual dinners” that turn into full-blown interventions. We can’t even visit a friend’s house without discovering a church friend there to try once more to “just talk to us” to “make sure we’ve really thought about this.” And then, once we think we’ve weathered all of it, along comes just one more Christian into the fray, often totally convinced that “God” told him or her to say some particular thing to us.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

Bible Verses Are Not “Magic” Cards.

It’s amazing to me that Christians can take a book compiled over thousands of years with dozens of mostly-anonymous authors, a book of (revised) history and (imagined) science, of folk magic and supposedly-divine intervention, of petty racism and soaring nationalism, of beautiful poetry and stunning brutality, of–yes–transcendent language and startling insight at times, and reduce it down to sound bites they can select, warp, and then fling at their pleasure to score points against those they view as inferior opponents. To me it seems extremely disrespectful for a Christian to treat their holy book in such a simplistic and reductionist way, but I see it all the time regardless.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

Left Behind: Where Dreams Finally Come True.

It’s a very ugly fantasy–the demonstration of a very broken psyche on display in the lewdest possible manner–and though the movie itself isn’t a critical masterpiece, seeing that fantasy marched across a screen for that runtime made me feel like I was reading some Nice Guy’s short story about his revenge on all those high school girls who rejected him long ago. It was that obvious and that disquieting to see this movie and think, “This is what they really think of us.”

By Captain Cassidy, ago