Kevin Roose goes undercover with a group of Liberty University students trying to convert spring breakers in Daytona Beach:
The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we’d be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any—guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there’s no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn’t), Martina would have led him through the Sinner’s Prayer (“Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior” or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion—which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.
If the new believer backslides, though, like Jason was suggesting he might, Christians are likely to believe that he wasn’t really saved. False conversions are a glaring wart on the face of Christian evangelism. In the book that accompanies our Way of the Master program, I found several sobering statistics about the percentage of apparent converts who stay involved with the church in the long term, including one from Peter Wagner, a seminary professor in California who estimated that only 3 to 16 percent of the converts at Christian crusades stay involved.
The false conversion rate is profoundly depressing if you believe in this stuff. After all, if we get ten converts during this week—an optimistic number—and our false conversion numbers are consistent with the average, this group has spent a week’s worth of twelve-hour days, thousands of dollars, and suffered massive amounts of emotional trauma for what? One more Christian? Two?
There must be an easier way.
[…]Then again, maybe this trip was never all about the Spring Breakers. Battleground evangelism, it turns out, can be just as useful for the evangelists as for the non-believers. For these Liberty students, going to Daytona is a tool for self-anaesthetization, a way to get used to the feeling of being an outcast in the secular world. The first 40 times someone blows you off, it feels awful. The second 40 times, you start reassuring yourself that all of this must serve a higher purpose. By the end of the week, you get the point—you are going to be mocked and scorned for your faith, and this is the way it’s supposed to be.
Read the full except of his book, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, at Salon.