Friendship Evangelism

Recently I ran across this entry at a site called “wikiHow”: fifteen steps to Persuade a Christian to Become Atheist. It explains how to befriend somehow with the express purpose of destroying their faith in God. Really, it’s kind of creepy: to befriend someone, and to try to become their close friend, not because of shared interests or mutual liking, but with the intention of changing them.

Naturally I think that the destruction of a Christian’s faith in God is an objectively evil goal, just as I think that helping people to know Christ is a good and worthy goal—but what I really want to talk about are the tactics involved. (And for the record…although I think that the goal is evil, I accept that atheists who might try to follow these fifteen steps aren’t simply being destructive but are genuinely seeking the good as they see it.) And the reason I want to talk about the tactics is that I recognize them.

When I was in college, the leaders of the campus Christian fellowship to which I belonged liked to talk about “friendship evangelism”, which was summarized in these three simple steps: “Make a friend. Be a friend. Bring a friend to Christ.” The good side of this notion is that as a Christian I am truly called to evangelize my neighbors, and certainly my friends count as my neighbors. If my words and actions move my friends further away from Christ, then there’s a problem with how I’m living my life.

In practice, though, the message of Friendship Evangelism wasn’t simply that I should live my life so as to reveal the love of Christ to my friends. It was cast more in terms of sales: we’ve got a dynamite product that we believe in, and we want to sell it to as many people as possible, for their own good, and we should all be making new friends just so we can sell to them. It was like the Multi-Level Marketing approach to evangelization. The emphasis wasn’t on sowing seeds, but on the harvest: on closing the sale.

I’ve stated this rather baldly, and I expect that the advisors of my college fellowship (on whom be peace) would repudiate it as I’ve stated it here. Back then, I wouldn’t have stated it quite so coldly either. But looking back on what I thought and what I understood, I think it’s accurate.

But evangelization is not sales. Evangelization is all about loving others with the love of Christ, and being open about the reason for that love. We are to love as Christ loves, unconditionally. We are to speak the truth in love.

Once while I was in college, I witnessed my faith to a girl I knew, with the hope of closing the sale and “leading her to Christ”. And she looked at me and said, “I don’t understand. If Jesus loves me as I am, why are you trying to change me?” That stopped me dead, because in fact I was trying to change her. I was motivated not by her good, but by my desire to please God. It wasn’t about her; it wasn’t about God; it was about me.

The goal was good and worthy: to help a friend of mine come to know Christ. But my focus and intent were wrong, and consequently so were my methods.

But at least the girl was my friend, not someone I’d befriended so as to do good to them. There’s something dishonest, something insincere, in befriending someone with an ulterior motive, even if it really is for their own good.