Evangelism 1.0

I am the worst sinner I know, yet God continues to use me fruitfully for His purpose. For that, I am ever in awe and grateful for His mercy that continually rains down upon us. Today, I went to do some cold turkey evangelizing in Stamp Student Union of UMCP. It was my first experience with this type of evangelizing as I really preferred to talk to people I know. I was pretty concerned with potential confrontations I could get into with people and I didn't want it to end up as merely an argument. Thus, I decided to try to make a sneakier way to try and spark the conversation. I wanted to make it a survey/interview style of introduction and while I was in this idea, I figured that I might as well turn it into a real survey/interview and collect some data on the people I talked to! I ended up printing out 10 copies of my survey but only had time to go through 5 of them during my time at Stamp, which was around 2 hours.

If anyone's interested, in the actual break down, I met 4 Christians (1 who was Catholic) and 1 person who practiced Sikhism. Sadly, the Catholic guy was the one who couldn't tell me what the Gospel was. That was disheartening to see my stereotypes reinforced. I'm actually really concerned for my Catholic brothers and sisters in this day and age. I hope that the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian churches can open up dialogue again. The Sikhism guy was actually really open to what I had to say. Later, I talked to Moses about it and he said that many Indians who practice faiths (that includes Islam) are usually like that and are really tolerant of other religions. This is kind of frustrating as they'll agree to what we agree on, yet never try to see to confirm which side has more truth. This is my first instance of where I see post-modernism's dangers.

Another interesting point I saw that 4/5 of the people were connected to their faith through their parents (being born into the faith) and 3/5 connected their faith throug intellectual curiosity in the search for the truth. It really shows that while we hear a lot about how kids being brought up in the church turns them off to Christianity, rearing children through faith seems to bear fruit. Yet another interesting point is that while all Christians I interviewed said that the Bible was 100% true, half of them told me that the commandments Jesus' gave us regarding to how we should live our life were more like guidelines and suggestions than actual law we needed to practice. Interestingly enough as well, both of them go to The Gathering.

Out of the 3 Christians who were able to share the Gospel with me, Jesus' death on the cross was mentioned 3/3. However, salvation through faith alone was only mentioned once, original sin was mentioned twice, and His resurrection was only mentioned once as well. Despite arguments that might suggest that their unpreparedness for my questions led them to stumble in their incomplete Gospel message to me, I find that main idea of Christianity is pretty important to know at all times if you count yourself as a Christian. One thing I did not expect was that these Christians I interviewed told me that they were not only knowledgeable in Christianity as a faith, but every single one of them told me that they were knowledgeable about other religions as well.

So far, I've seen no correlation between someone's major or someone's race or someone's sex or someone's year in college and their views in faith. Granted, all these evaluations are made on a small sample size and are hardly statistically significant. I wasn't trying to put down any organizations or people in this blog, but I just wanted to share my findings. Generalizations shouldn't be made from the data I've collected so far but I intend to keep this up at least until the end of the semester and see what the data yields in a larger comprehensive study. In case you're wondering, Vincent, I didn't include your interview in the sample because it would've skewed the data.