Speaking Up and (Not) Being Heard

When I was an atheist, I loathed evangelizing Christians, the kind who handed out little tracts and harangued you about going to hell. Now that I’m a Christian, I’m trying to develop a better attitude. So when I went to the San Diego County Fair and saw a booth plastered with posters about Christ and salvation, I followed my second reaction and went over to say hello. (My first reaction was to flee, but I reminded myself that we are all members of the body of Christ, and shouldn’t I get over my elitist snobbery?) I’d had a kind of interesting encounter with this kind of evangelism a few months ago (I wrote about it in “Salvation on the Street (Fair)“), and I hoped that it would go OK this time. Well, maybe not.

The booth was staffed by two older guys. I introduced myself as a Christian to Guy #1, so as to not make them launch into Conversion Mode. This is more or less how the conversation ran:

Guy #1 to Guy #2: Here’s a nice Christian lady.

Guy #2 to me, indicating my hat: If you’re a nice Christian lady, what’s with the skull and crossbones?

I was wearing a red baseball cap embroidered with “Sabre USA” and a skull and crossed sabres (not bones!). Now, keep in mind that I’m a competitive sabre fencer and this is my favorite hat. Let’s just say that Guy #2′s remark doesn’t make the list of Top 100 Conversation Starters.

But I bit my tongue, replied with a comment about sabre fencing (which didn’t get even so much as a “that’s interesting,” by the way) and continued the conversation. A minute later, we got this exchange:

Guy #2 : Where do you go to church?

Me: St. Michael’s by the Sea Episcopal Church.

Guy #2: Well, keep praying that God will help you find a good church.

Ouch! Zero for two in less than five minutes! I was reminded about something one of our pastors said in a sermon: this was clearly an opportunity to exercise the grace of patience… I politely told Guy #2 that I really loved my church, and we parted on civilized terms.

So where did all this take me? I started reflecting on how I reacted to the Two Guys and their evangelism methods (which also involved little business cards saying “Fill in the blank: Am I going to H______? Hint: Do nothing, and go to Hell; believe, and go to Heaven.”)

Now that I’m a Christian, I can react by sighing inwardly and reminding myself that Guy #2 is still my brother in Christ, even if he did cast aspersions on both my hat and my church.

But the whole point of evangelism is to talk to people who aren’t Christians. And if I’d had this encounter a couple of years ago, I’d have felt judged and insulted, and I’d have walked away with my bad attitude about Christians reinforced.

As I thought more about this encounter, I realized that part of the problem is our rushed, hurry-up-are-we-there-yet, I-want-it-now culture. In this environment, it’s pretty rare that someone would actually slow down to think, or pause to have a meaningful conversation that might challenge his or her belief system. So I think that when an evangelist actually gets some time in the cultural conversation, so to speak, he or she is tempted to maximize it. After all, if the listener is only going to be around for five minutes, better make them a packed five minutes!

Hence, we get a well-meaning interest in changing not just the passer-by’s belief system, but also all the things that grow out of it, from fashion sense to political choices to day-to-day behavior. And I agree that all these things are important and relevant and worth discussing… in their due time and place.

The problem with this is primarily that it’s too much information. I’m an educator and I know very well that you can’t just dump concepts on learners and expect them to absorb. (That approach is what Paulo Freire calls the “banking model of education”; it doesn’t work.) It takes time to wrestle with a new idea, figure out what it means, make sense of it, relate to it. It also takes willingness on the part of the learner, to actively deal with new and challenging ideas. Sometimes it takes a lot of time, as new ideas have to incubate somewhere in the back of the mind, sending out little pings to the consciousness every now and then.

Trying to force-feed information, or trying to push the learner forward before he or she is ready, is fundamentally disrespectful to the learner as a human being. It creates resistance, not compliance.

In contrast, holding back is just about the hardest thing for a teacher to do. It’s also one of the most important. When one of my students is grappling with trying to put together some important concepts, it doesn’t help for me to jump in and provide the conclusion. Sure, the student will be able to repeat what I said, but the all-important learning process got skipped over. It’s the struggle that personalizes the idea; it’s getting your hands on it, turning it over and over, poking at it, that makes it real. A good teacher is invaluable at this point: a good teacher can ask the right questions, provide the right information at the right time (just enough; not too much), push the learner a little bit out of his or her comfort zone.

Unfortunately, in this culture we’re not well situated to have this kind of encounter. When it happens it’s incredible, but it doesn’t happen easily. I’d suggest that we need to make more spaces where learning can happen; where listening happens, and real encounters with truth can happen. Five minutes on a street corner could be the tipping point for someone who’s had a seed planted in him or her at some other time, but I’m going to say that most of the time, those five minutes (or five seconds, more likely) are not going to make a difference because they’re not in a larger context of meaning-making; they’re not part of an overall search for truth.

The other Christians I know are people who are loving and charitable and unselfish and joyful and caring. Not all of the time, of course, and not all of them, but much more so than I expected. They are people who show me what it means to follow Christ, and who make me want to be more like them – and Him.

On the other hand, I met most of these people after I became a Christian. They’ve been instrumental in helping me grow in the faith, but they weren’t how I got here (with one notable exception). These are Christians who are living out the Gospel, loving each other and loving Christ… but I think that maybe they don’t make their voices heard quite as much as they should. In this media-drenched culture it’s hard for quiet goodness to get heard above the din. But I suspect that if we can speak up a bit more, in the right way, it would be a good thing.

How do we do it?

Honestly? Beats me.

There’s got to be a way. After all, the right person spoke up to me, at the right time and in the right way. How can I be that kind of witness?

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