The Blackberry Walk

Modern day evangelism seems to me to be upside-down. A few weeks ago, a party of black street preachers descended upon the high street of my town, handing out pamphlets. One, aptly named for the Christmas season Ebeneezer, started talking to me about his Pentecostalism, and how he's personally healed many men in the name of Christ. He said he used to be a Roman Catholic missionary, but upon arriving in Rome, realised the Catholic's don't worship God, but rather worship the dead, prompting him to join his current movement. Ebeneezer was a very sweet man. He spoke with a constant, genuine, tear in his eye as he spoke of Jesus, quoted scripture from memory, and, like much of the working class disillusioned of Britain's de facto state-run consensus religion, spoke vociferously on the evils of the vaccine. We ended up having a conversation about some of the topics he brought up; but how would the average person on the street, who does follow Britain's de facto state-run consensus religion, respond to his claims of faith healing? To them, talk of mystical healing is at best 'not following the science'; but it is more likely that whoever you are talking to will think you, and perhaps Christianity, kooky. Perhaps the middle-classes aren't Ebeneezer's target audience. But whether it be black Pentecostalists, or white Evangelicals, the issue seems to be widespread. I recently learnt off YouTube about the 'He Gets Us' advertising campaign spread across America. Despite being a particularly ill-devised campaign for evangelism, the 'He Gets Us' campaign ends up Not Getting their average listener. They advertised on bill-boards and on television, using the short slogan 'He Gets Us', but to many who are secular seeing the advert, why would Christ's caring matter to you? Your parents may care deeply about you; and so too your spouse or lover or friends. Implied in advert is the assumption that everyone listening understands what He represents, and who He is. Again, why would Christ's caring matter? Jesus is simply an inspiring story, or another martyr, were it not for the fact of the resurrection, the promises He made, and the fact He is God, and able to action those promises. But in both of the cases given, from the most local to the most global, the proselytisers assume that you know, agree, and inhabit their presuppositional and metaphysical framework; which is most likely not the case. To repeat, in both these instances, the coach is set before the horse: knowing Christ ought to come after the forerunners of truth, goodness, and beauty. In a sense, to effectively evangelise, you must first prime them! We'll begin with beauty. If Christianity has poor aesthetics, people won't want to join. This may sound vain, but as any advertiser ought to know - and as the apostles understood - optics are everything. Christ lambasting the Pharisees in Matthew 23 should be evidence enough that hypocrisy is the death of the church, and the easiest way to fall away from God; those who don't 'practice what they preach' are destined to not only be ignored and thought of as jokes themselves, but sully what they stand for. Without the radicalism of the early church, and the earnest, honest actions of the first martyrs, Christianity never would have bloomed. And by pointing out the hypocrisies of Christians, the secular world continues to this day to damage the optics of Christianity. In a secular circle of people, any mention of Catholicism receives a joke about paedophilia; and so too for Evangelicals. Even the Church of England has been under a sustained attack by secular institutions as of late. Recently, I woke up on Christmas morning and opened the BBC app, to find the top story was, rather than anything up-lifting and Christmassy, further bishops gossiping about this church sex abuse scandal. Whatever one's thoughts on the scandal itself, it's clear this isn't what ought to be posted on Christmas day: the BBC are running a sustained attack on optics! I digress, but the point remains that seeing the church as a desirable institution and a desirable way of life to adhere to, and for the church to have good optics, is a core prerequisite to conversion. Beyond beauty we have truth. Those who become Christian through the charisma of a celebrity pastor are more likely to flake away from the faith upon encountering the flimsiest of atheists chucking his morsels of facts and logic at you. Many did fifteen years ago. Not everyone shares my passion for arguing, I recognise this, but everyone has a sense of truth, and an ability to discern truth from falsehood. You don't require years of study in the Socratic method for something to 'sound true' or 'seem right'. So much information from the news, and so many myths passed around in popular culture, like 'Christmas is based on the Roman Saturnalia', are swallowed whole by people who are otherwise smart. On a diet of 'Christianity is but a skin-suit of the past' fed to them by prestige institutions like news-media and academia, they can't believe that Christianity contains any truth. Only through apologetics, and asserting the truth of the Christian narrative, can people be made to believe in Jesus. We are a sceptical generation; and our epistemologies have changed at pace since the Second World War. To succeed in apologetics is to succeed at riding the waves, cycles, and trends in epistemology, and adapting the Christian argument to the times. And finally, in the Platonic trinity, is goodness. Goodness is perhaps the hardest to convince people of, since moral opinions are what join us to a group, lest we be ostracised. Few want to give up that which connects them to their friends and family and feel at odds with their community. Over and above beauty and truth, the good is also the hardest to argue, since our culture has been so conditioned to reject any normative moral statement as simply the Behaviourist's conditioning, and thus a free-floating relative proposition. But morality is something objective - whether we adhere to how we are supposed to act or not, there is a way in which we ought to act. And since it is so hard to find moral truth within ourselves, correct morality is something only seen through the action of others; only through the upstanding examples like the lives of the saints, well-known Christian's today, or Christians in their community, can people be evangelised to see that the Christian way of life is better than their current lot. In short, through these three criteria, seeing the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christianity, people are drawn close to Christianity. And once you're close, it isn't a leap of faith you must take, but simply a hop. This is my experience, and likely the experience of many others. How effective the evangelism of promoting Jesus directly without context is, I'm not sure. For me, understanding, or at least beginning to understand, what's written in the Bible and the life of Jesus only came later after I agreed with the presuppositions of Christianity. Salvation was meaningless without understanding what I needed saving from. Only once the weeds of my scientistic mode of thinking were uprooted, the ground ploughed, and a fresh garden planted in my mind's field, could any talk of Christ saving me begin to make sense. Without the presuppositions of Christianity, or at least the presuppositions of the pagan world, can Christianity mean anything more than rote recital of "I'm Saved"? Unlike in the first century A.D., we are not surrounded by pagans: we are surrounded by apostates. Much like how Islam originated from Christian heresy, and was sharpened into a simplified faith designed to convert Christians, so too is Britain's de facto state-run consensus religion of today a simplified faith designed to convert Christians. Converting apostates back out of this predating faith is hard, in part because the presuppositions held by these apostates today are designed to blot out and blind you to Christian understanding. Preying on Christian thinking is the biological modus operandi of these later thought systems; without it, they wouldn't exist. It is my belief, therefore, that only by changing the presuppositions of how people think that widespread evangelism becomes feasible.