While at work, recently, my coworker and I were approached by a pair of men, one of which was holding a Gospel tract. Before we knew what was going on, one of them asked us, "Are you saved?" I didn't want to answer because I knew what was about to happen. I stood there silently for a couple seconds before I answered, "Well, I am." Based on their reaction I immediately wished I had just lied. They closed in on my coworker and started grilling him. As they held out the tract for one of us to take, I inquired, "What group are you guys with?" "Oh, no, no, no, no," the main man replied, "It's not religion that saves you, it's Jesus. We're part of a home group."
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*stunned silence*
I held my tongue, the voice in my head screams, "You still didn't answer my fucking question. Who are you?" They stood there for about a minute, handing my silent coworker the pamphlet and rapid-firing evangelistic cliches in a very urgent tone. I wished I hadn't accidentally thrown my coworker and dear friend under the bus like that. I should have lied and said that we both were devout Christians or that neither of us were. Even better, I should have told them that my friend next to me wouldn't shut the fuck up about Jesus and that I was an atheist who was considering conversion to a Satanist cult and that I was learning magic spells. It was too late, though. Thankfully, my coworker took one tract and gracefully made his way out of the room. The propaganda bearing stranger brought me another tract, possibly thinking that I had been lying about being saved myself.
After they left, I looked at the pamphlet they had handed me. "Born again?" it read on the front. The inside fold headlined, "THE WAY OF THE CROSS LEADS HOME." Every inch of the flyer that was not occupied by the cartoon illustration was covered in text. I tried reading through the tract and became so bored and irritated, I couldn't finish it. It didn't make sense. I passed by my coworker in the hallway and said, "Hey, I was reading that tract those dudes gave us. I can't even understand it!" He laughed, knowing already the strength of distaste I have for people who evangelize like that. I'm glad he understands that I'm not one of them.
It's funny how things will tie together so perfectly. My dad and I had just been having a conversation before I left for work about how good it would be for people to leave "Christianity" and embrace Christ. I drove to work thinking, "I've got my next blog post topic! My hook is going to be a title that asks people to stop being Christians!" I had no idea all of this was going to happen, but I was glad that it did. Though I would rather that it didn't happen at all to anybody, I'm relieved that it happened on my watch.
More and more things popped into my head as I periodically scanned this small document that had been handed to me by some anonymous evangelists. It took me a while to realize that they had never identified themselves. They handed me a tract, told me to believe in Jesus, and left without providing a means for continued correspondence. The piece of paper they had handed me was not even written in modern English, but was primarily comprised of a dizzying vernacular used only in the stuffiest of church communities. It was a soupy mess of King James Version scripture fragments and some of the thickest Christianese I had ever attempted to read. The truth is that if I had not already been a believer in Jesus Christ but had been vaguely interested in the faith, this experience probably would have been one of the biggest turn-offs ever.
Hindsight's always clearer
During a drive to Oakland for a church service, last Saturday evening, the sun hit the pavement of the I580 Westbound at just the right angle that the surface of the road appeared almost perfectly white. On certain patches of road where there had recently been construction, I noticed that I was not the only driver in traffic who was having a tricky time determining which marks in the road were the current lane dividers. By the time my epiphany happened, I was now driving on a stretch of road where there were no markings to confuse with each other. The fresh pavement, which appeared white because of the angle of the sun, was separated into lanes by the faint outlines of the dashed white lines; which appeared the same color as the road, but different in texture. When I looked into the rearview mirror, I was startled by the fact that the road appeared much darker from the other direction and that the contrast between the color of the road and the broken white lines was stark and unmistakable. I couldn't help but chuckle at how perfectly that illustrates how we see life - perfectly, when in hindsight.
The list goes on and on of all the things I wished I had said to those incredibly confusing evangelists. Mainly, I kicked myself for not demanding answers.
"Are you saved?"
There's not much I wanted to say to that. Really, it's rude to ask. If I could give a better response than I did, I would have said, "I've heard of Jesus but I don't understand why he matters. Gospel in sixty seconds. GO!" If anybody's gonna be going around and cold-selling to a bunch of random strangers, they'd better have a simple and concise explanation for their mission. I really wanted to ensure that they actually understood the Gospel if they were going to be walking around and bothering people with it. Better prepared, I would have put them on the spot.
"Religion doesn't save you; Jesus saves you."
My internal commentary raged, "No shit, dumbass. I asked what group you are associated with. Don't go assuming that I think that only a particular religion or denomination leads to salvation. I don't worship religion: I worship Jesus. You don't know me and I have given you zero evidence that I am not better-read and more thoroughly educated about scriptures than you are." I had literally told these folks that I was a follower of the one true way. They narrowed my query down to this one unspecific fact, "We're with a home group." I have a lot to say about this tidbit:
Think about why I would ask where you came from. You assumed that I believe salvation has something to do with denomination, but it is not the only reason why I asked you. My biggest problem is that you skirted the issue without answering a legitimate question. That casts doubt in my mind of your credibility. I wouldn't have asked the question if I couldn't do something with the information contained in your answer. Telling me if you are associated with the Nazarene, Southern Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Assemblies of God, Calvary Chapel, Pentecostal, United Methodist, Episcopal, or whatever organization will help me understand a piece of who you are and what specifically you believe about the Bible. Even if you're part of a non-denominational home group, enlighten me as to whose canons most resemble yours. Who are the teachers and scholars who have most enlightened your study of scriptures - directly or indirectly? Though you are not wrong that Christ is the only means of salvation, my question was targeted to understand what your means of accountability were to keep you centered on Christ. Telling me that you believe the Bible is irrelevant to me because I've met plenty of crazies who, while saying that they believe the Bible, actually cling to beliefs that are very unbiblical.
The Pamplet
There are several issues I took with the Gospel tracts they gave us. I'm having a hard time knowing where to begin.
1) It's not in any language that a non-Christian would understand. Even to someone who was born and raised in the church, this tract makes very little sense. Not only is this tract incredibly boring to read, but the reader is left to try and figure out what things like, "born again," "kingdom of God, "sin," and "repentance" actually mean. That means that it is neither interesting nor easy to read.
2) In order for me to believe anything that this damn tract says, I have to already believe in the Bible. So even if an atheist or an agnostic takes the time to read and comprehend the contents of this piece of paper, it has made no connections to observable life to make it believable. The verse references are only useful to the people who already respect the Bible as an infallible source of truth. This tract could be greatly improved by removing the constant citations and expressing the word of God in plain modern English. Even footnotes would have been a less obstructive method of citing sources.
3) In this instance, scripture verses cannot be used to establish the credibility of a teaching. The supposed target audience doesn't believe in the Bible, yet. Instead, realities that the reader can already verify to be true should be used to establish the credibility of scriptures. The inerrancy of scriptures should never be an assumption when evangelizing. This is a matter of prudence. A faith that cannot be tested should not be trusted. As believers, we understand the Word of God as a foundation or a rock (imagine a giant boulder sticking out of the ground). Before we build our whole lives on the truth of scriptures, we need to examine it and test it to make sure that it is indeed as strong as it is said to be, which is why I'm still a Christian today. This makes it possible for us to believe in the power of Jesus's sacrifice with full assurance rather than with mere blind faith. In other words, this tract is great at establishing what we want you to believe, but not necessarily why you would be wise to believe it.
Truth be told, sharing the Gospel is a lot like farming. Farming is more than planting seeds. Imagine that the news of Jesus Christ is the seed and that people are the ground. Seeds will not take root in ground that is not cared for. This is stuff that takes time. As Christians, if we ever want to help people get to Heaven, we've got to love the hell out of 'em. The better we love people, the more likely they are to believe the message of love we speak of. And what love means is that even if a person never accepts Jesus, we have still left them better than when we found them.
5) If, after reading this tract, I decided that I did want to follow Jesus, I have no way of contacting these people. One of the biggest things passing out tracts like this misses is that we weren't just commanded to tell people about the Gospel; we were commanded to make disciples. Even after a person is converted, we believers who have been walking with God for a while have a collective responsibility to guide, train, and nurture new believers so that they will be well-equipped to make more disciples.
"Hey, bro! Move along. I'm already taking care of it, here."
Was it weird that I felt somewhat, I don't know, territorial? Protective? Maybe I'm just annoyed that some strangers think they can waltz into my place of employment and convert my friends to Christianity in a matter of minutes with their clumsy "preaching," despite having done nothing to build the trust of their hopeful converts. How can strangers think they can do better than I after I've spent nearly two years there being the best damn friend and witness I possibly could be to people who know that I love, admire, and support them. How dare you come in thinking that you can do better sharing Jesus to them than I? Have you crawled in the retail trenches together with these employees? Have you been to their shows or attended their parties? They're my comrades and you don't know jack shit about their lives. They don't even know you, so why would they give a fuck what you have to say? Maybe it's the arrogance that may have bothered me. Or was it the ignorance?
Deeper than whatever sense of pride or misplaced air of "ownership" I may have felt about it, my heart raced because I wanted to protect people I love, as though I was defending my own family. Not only was it counterproductive and just entirely stupid to think that these dumb little pieces of paper in a foreign language and the intense barrage of high-pressure evangelism could overcome the numerous objections that reside in the minds of my friends and colleagues; it was an assault to my coworkers' intelligence. It's as though our visitors assumed that all the objections standing between my unsaved coworkers and their acceptance of Jesus were feeble enough to be diagnosed and addressed in a matter of minutes by perfect strangers distributing cheaphandouts. It's the fact that I am on a daily mission to clean up the damage that idiocy like this causes to earnest seekers; yet people still go out and intentionally say fucked up shit that makes the entire Christian community look like a bunch of hyper-spiritual, brain-dead, lemmings who lack any critical thinking capacities of their own.
And that's what brings me to part-two of this topic: Don't be that guy. Nobody wants to be "that guy." Somewhere along the line, we get it put in our heads that we're supposed to be so annoying that people will hate us so that we can be martyrs who love Jesus more than life itself. Just because Christianity has been persecuted worldwide doesn't mean we need to try and make people want us dead. If you're living in the United States of America and you think you're being persecuted for your faith, it's likely that you're being a self-righteous, closed-minded asshat who doesn't know how to act like a mature adult.
Please read on to part II: I might ask you to quit Christianity <br/> Part 2 of 2: Don't be "that guy"
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