I used to tell people that I wouldn’t ask them to do anything that I, personally, wasn’t willing to do.  Saying this once lead me to take  a team of friends through a course on door to door evangelism.  I can tell you now, with full confidence, I don’t give that advice out anymore than I knock on a strangers door with a memorized script.

In my early twenties, I went college to prepare for full time Christian ministry.  This, consequently, led me to volunteer to lead various church study groups and Sunday School classes.  One of these was called College and Career, which was a place for those lost between Sunday mornings full of messy group games for high schoolers and the Ambien-like environment called adult bible study.   This class had around twenty regular attendees, many of them quite serious about their faith, but most were only serious about finding a date.  

I took my role seriously, and I worked hard to help the group work on skills for spiritual formation.  One of these was the skill in sharing your faith with others in a caring and coherent manner. Our church was offering classes from a curriculum called “Evangelism Explosion”  Even then, I wondered why so many Christian groups and churches had names involving explosion or fire.  In my lifetime of church, four years of Christian school, and three years of bible college, I never saw any thing combust or explode.  Even when the power team came and ripped our hymnal in half.

Evangelism Explosion (shortened to EE), taught a scripted approach to sharing the basics of Christianity.  Teams would go out, always with a mixed gender group of three.  We typically followed up on the people who had marked “visitor” on their visitor comment card the previous Sunday.    The first few weeks of EE training were spent learning an outline and rehearsing a script with its outdated and cheesy analogies. One of my favorites loosely compared God’s grace to a never ending pile of french fries.   The point of the process was to have an organized and rational approach to strangers interested in the Christian faith.    In hindsight, what complicated this, was adherence to a strict script and our surprise approach.

I don’t think any one who filled out the visitor card and placed it in the offering plate  knew what they were inviting to their home, yet there we were.  After a knock on the door, our audience would awkwardly greet us, and in most cases allow us inside to welcome them to our church.     The script was always the same but the delivery was not,  if we were talking to woman, a woman would open up.  In some cases, a new EE volunteer would be paired with more veteran volunteers who would guide the newbie on their presentation and provide feedback.  The script had some ebb and flow and volunteers could not afford to take a mental nap during the visit.  At any point your team member could do the “soft toss” and hand the presentation over to you with a segue inspired from the nightly news.  “Let’s go over to Brittany who can tell us more on how sin kills, and also provide traffic highlights, and show all of springs best new fashions for pre-teens.”

Most of the hosts were gracious, even if they were inconvenienced, and many of them sat through the entire presentation.   Only rarely, did we have questions and even more rare was any objection to the material.  At the time, I thought this was because of the solid curriculum  and delivery.  Now, I think most people figured out that the faster we talked the faster we would leave.

At the end of each night, all the groups would return to the church and share their success on a scoreboard displayed from an overhead projector.  We tracked things like visits and conversations (when someone decided to pray with us to become a Christian).    Participating in this was a source of pride for a while until I started to notice that I never again saw any of the “converted” come back to our church.

I suppose it’s true that we can ask people to do things we aren’t ready to do, either.  Even if that means re-defining your world view when it comes in the form of a contrived conversation started on your door step by a bunch of strangers.