I think the reason why most people in our culture today hate religious people is because they hate feeling like a walking target. Maybe that's why most Jehovah Witnesses haven't had much luck lately. I've recommended to several of my JW friends that knocking on doors is not the best way to go, but their superiors haven't recieved my message yet. If I wanted to get people to hate Christianity more than they already do, the first thing I would do is probably start knocking on doors. People treat door knocking evangelists the same way they treat unwanted visitors on Halloween: they either pretend they are not home or go to the door and grumble. Growing up, I remember regularly hearing my grandmother look out the window and say, "The Jehovah Witnesses are coming to the door - don't answer it!" The Jehovah Witnesses had attained the same status in my mind as the telemarketer.
I've always been a little cynical, and perhaps somewhat embarrassed, at the way that people go out and market their faith. That's why I hate it when people make you feel guilty for not handing out tracts. Tracts are annoying to everyone, especially in public restrooms. It's humiliating for me to think that someone could be so intellectually and mentally base to accept Christianity because they found a Billy Graham tract next to the toilet paper in a public restroom. It's not as if people in our culture have no idea what religion is, and they need one of our goofy tracts to explain it to them. I've never gone to a public restroom and saw someone reading a tract and said, "oh, so that's what this whole Christian thing is about, makes much more sense." Faith isn't that simple, and a lot of our evangelism methods feel more like bait so we can catch people to feed our guilty conscience .
Gimmicks like that have always seemed like laziness. Perhaps we feel we don't have to live a life of virtue and discipleship as long as we make our conscious feel better by wearing a T-shirt that says, "Got Jesus?" to the popular, "Got Milk?" counterpart. When I see that T-shirt, it doesn't make me think better of Jesus as much as it disgusts me that someone would compare Jesus to a gallon of milk.
Then of course, you have the more sophisticated Christians who will just pummel innocent people with Systematic Theology because they don't want to be like those "Got Jesus?" T-shirt wearing people. They're much smarter than all that. And I think a lot of them can read the original New Testament in Greek, which completely ruins everyone else's idea that the New Testament was written in Olde English.
But I guess I can't judge, because I've been there too. I have been a part of church groups before who would go on college campuses and stalk students until they tell us the meaning of their lives and how they can justify the existence of the world without God. Most of them just looked at us like we were crazy. Maybe we were.
I look back at that now and put myself in the shoes of the people on those old college campuses. I remember how in the rare instance when we found a Theist on campus we would quickly end the conversation because they were already "one of us" and were not apart of our "project". Then my group of Christian friends would continue on to run after the next group of college students.
It took a lot of honesty to look back at those days and realize I had been just annoying to the college students as the Jehovah Witnesses were at my grandmother's door.
I yearn for a faith that loves people just because they are people. I yearn for a faith that treats all people with dignity and respect instead of like projects. I'd like to see a world with no Jesus T-shirts, bumper stickers about God being my pilot, weird evangelism strategies, awkward conversations with non-believers and complete disconnect. Maybe when I strip away all the elements of false and arrogant faith can I truly start to bless.
It's not that I dislike evangelism. I just don't like presenting the Christian life like something it's not.
Christ was the one who constantly compared our relationship to God as a marriage. I really like that a lot, and I think God does too. Marriage is such a great analogy to the Christian life, and in mind, probably the most accurate comparison.
When you marry a person, it starts out peachy, and then after awhile you figure out what it would feel like to be hand-cuffed to another person the rest of your life. Marriage is when you say, "I love you" and actually have to go about proving it. Marriage is like a microscope where you see deeply into another person's soul, and a mirror that you can see more deeply into your own. It's a place where nothing rotten can be kept covered for very long. It's the one relationship in humanity which forces us to struggle with love and while knowing the full truth.
And that kind of relationship is always incredibly difficult. If Christ compared having faith in him to marriage, perhaps he meant that coming to faith was more like falling in love than signing the dotted line. Maybe helping other people come to him is more than just knocking on doors and stalking students on campuses.
That is why evangelizing has always felt like setting someone up on a blind date.
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