July 16, 2013
Excruciating evangelism: The day I decided that Methodists might go to heaven
Anyone who has spent some time in fundamentalist Christianity knows that one version of “witnessing” or spreading the Good News is to go up to strangers and start speaking to them about their spiritual well-being, specifically to ask them if they know where they will be when they die and then urge them to be saved from hell through faith in Jesus. Sometimes a gospel tract is handed to them as well. The words used are formulaic, Christianity is presented as being simply about the afterlife rather than the here and now, and the approach strikes most strangers as intrusive. In today’s link, Carol Howard Merritt tells of a time when, as a student in an evangelism class at Moody Bible Institute, she was required to talk to ten strangers about their salvation, even though the assignment made her uncomfortable. Read about what she learned as she tried to do the assignment and then what she began to realize when she met a Methodist. Carol Howard Merritt wrote this for her Tribal Church blog, hosted by the Christian Century.
