Or, How Not to Evangelize
It’s been disappointing enough today, incurring debts from gracious people and otherwise being stuck a hundred miles north of nowhere. Never mind. So I’m sitting on the edge of a weathered deck, trying to pilfer some WIFI to tell my family that everything is fine, which is not a complete lie. The cleaning lady, who has been harassing us intermittently, comes out of the shower house in between dabs at the mineral coated showers and brown toilets, and says, “I thought you were leaving today.”
“Hi.” I say. “We were.”
When I tell her we blew a battery, she suggested I try cleaning the terminals. I am not much of a mechanic, but this is not the problem. When I tell her that I also need an alternator, and the country of Canada does not have the correct one; not in Edmonton, Alberta (24 hours away by car), or in Whitehorse, Yukon (110 miles away by car), or anywhere else in the world that I can find.
“Grande Prairie. Get one from Grande Prairie. They have four dealerships there. Four.” She says, spreading her finger to emphasize, never mind Grande Prairie is eight hours in the wrong direction. There are no regular trucks coming from Grande Prairie, but there are regular trucks coming from Edmonton.
“Are you a Mennonite?” She asks.
I affirm that, yes, I am more or less a Mennonite.
“Lots of Mennonites in Grande Prairie. Thousands of them.”
She disappears inside the shower house, pops back out. “Lotsa Mennonites in Grande Prairie. Lots of them. Thousands. Most of them farmers.”
In, back out. “Petersens. You know them? Hundreds of Petersens. Thousands of Mennonites in Grande Prairie.”
Right.
“So I’m a Jehovah’s Witness. You believe in Heaven, right?” She says for starters.
Oh boy.
So I put away my phone, turn to her and say that, yes, I believe in heaven. This is not a conversation I want to hold, my own reductions of heaven in a current overhaul. I sit at the edge of the deck and she paces to the side of me, and I watch her dusty pink slippers cross the wooden deck, edging closer and arcing to the front. I am not in a position to exude confidence via body language; I would need to tilt back like a stargazer to meet her eye. Neither can I stand up without showing unnecessarily aggressive body language, and so take on the role of the proselyte.
“So we don’t believe in heaven. You just return to the dust. My husband, he committed suicide, hung himself in the garage…”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” I say.
“Oh no, it’s ok. So he just goes to the grave, and Jesus is coming back so he will raise us again to perfection on this earth. You would say he is going to hell, wouldn’t you?”
I hedge, and hit on a reply that would suit a politician. “That’s not my job, to consign anyone to hell or otherwise.”
“Well, we believe that people don’t go to heaven. Just God and Jesus, and the twelve tribes of Israel. Only 144,000, will be there. It says this in Revelations. So when my husband comes we will recognize him, but he won’t have any of his depression, and anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. He will be perfect, but back on earth. Makes sense, right?”
Not really, but tell me more.
“You know Jesus was the only perfect person, but he didn’t stand out. They had to have Judas show him which one he was by betraying him with a kiss. But he was perfect. Perfect teeth, perfect everything. But he was human. My husband is fine because God knew what was wrong with him. Makes sense, right?”
I tell her that no, it’s still not making sense. It seems we have departed from the original thesis: Gentiles don’t go to heaven, but only molder in the earth, or return to it in an Edenic state. I’m not sure which, or what it has to do with us here on this porch.
“You know Adam and Eve were perfect, and if Eve wouldn’t have eaten that apple we would be perfect? Jesus came back to bring back that perfection on earth.
“But first there will the end times. There is going to be tribulation, wars, rumors of wars, and earthquakes. I mean, just look at the weather. And then there will come the antichrist; he hasn’t been revealed yet. You know about the mark of the beast? You, know the number 666? That chip in your arm or forehead? You won’t be able to buy or sell without it, right? They are already doing it. You don’t want to raise kids in today’s world. You have kids?”
“No, but we have one on the way.” I say brightly. I look around. We are in Teslin, Yukon, 100 miles from closest settlement that sells gas. Seems like a decent place to raise children if you want to insulate them from the world. But alas, I am naïve enough or brave enough to think that the future will be tolerable, if not downright beautiful. I very much look forward to introducing my baby to the world.
“You really don’t want to raise kids in today’s world. Who are they going to marry?”
Beautiful women and good men, I want to say. I also want to tell her that God has made promises, and that those promises will be available to whoever turns to Him, no matter the times or seasons or age. But it is a useless comment.
“Just look up jw.org. It tells you all about it. It makes so much sense.” She totters off to her camper and retrieves her iPhone, upon which she scrapes up the aforementioned website. “See? Look. It tells you all about end-times, and what we believe. It makes so much sense.”
I tell her that yes, I will look it up. I do actually look it up, later. Granted, I do not read many articles, but at least I haven’t lied.
Thus, having extricated myself on the promise to look over jw.org, I returned to our campsite, not a willing nor ready convert. Rather, the encounter has became a study in how not to do it; I have taken the image of a middle- to late-aged woman who has suffered bitterly, who has found a religious container into which she might dump her fears and through which she might project her own desperation onto the world: That her husband would come back, and all would be well, that she is enlightened. She has a hell to preach, souls to convince, doctrines to spread forth. It felt, however, as though she was pulling widely, frenetically, at the boundaries of her knowledge and religion, trying to convince herself as much me.
She haunts me. I can imagine her this summer, a year later, back at the remote village of Teslin with its population of 500 along the Alaska Highway, cleaning deteriorating shower houses for the tourists that blast through on their way north. She wakes from a rusty fifth-wheel camper in the RV park, the kind of camper that is notorious for roof leaks, and looks out under a dull gray sky. She sees weedy RV parking spots, gray, sandy gravel, the kind of gravel that you track into your camper by the shovelful when raining, which then dries and coats everything with its sticky gray dust. She sees her work for the day: cleaning brown-stained showers and leaking toilets and picking up ice-cream wrappers after the happy families. She is by herself, going away each summer from where her husband hung himself in the garage. Out there, in the unsafe world for babies, in the metropolises of the antichrist, big things are happening, things are coming down, politicians are falling, God is putting a big X on America via two total eclipses as if He had a check mark on it before. It makes so much sense, right? You should believe this.
When I became a member of my church, I promised to engage in “personal and corporate evangelism.” I have often wondered what I promised. I do not go knocking on doors, telling them they ought to believe on Jesus already. I rarely, if ever, pass out gospel tracts.
I wonder what we mean by it. In a Bible-belt state where everyone knows about the Bible but has not taken it seriously, one finds himself in the presence of bobbleheads agreeing with any comment about Jesus to speed up the process of changing the subject. We stand there nodding and smiling at each other, knowing the while that we are not communicating at all. It is almost comical. We also know that to come to the cross we must have a desperation, a humility borne of need, and as long as anyone remains spiritually self-sufficient they are not going to see any sense in a life of suffering.
And I look at my own life. I owe my spiritual maturity (if it can be called that) to a few rabbis, men in my life that I admire and want to imitate. I do not know where I would be without them, these men that I have watched raise families. Or these men I have met in books. The process of coming to and following Jesus, even for my relatively untroubled life, has been a story of discipleship.
Another life is possible. I did not come up with that, but borrowed it straight from the publication The Plough. But it is a phrase that stays with me. My lack of desire to become a Jehovah’s Witness after this encounter is that I had no desire to trade my life for hers. I was, and am, quite excited about the prospect of what the future may hold. In desperation, in troubled times to people with troubled souls, a hopeful alternative shines like a ruby among limestone. Can we show, in one brief encounter, that another life is possible? Perhaps. Is it possible then to live out that alternative with a sustainable faith that neither dismisses doubt, suffering, or flaws, but works among them with a visible redemption? Obviously. But it is very hard work.
I have been slow to assert my religion to anyone. It may be a fault of mine. It may be fear, it may be that I do not love God or my fellow man properly. Maybe I have read too many atheist’s comments about the frowardness of some evangelists whose colonial Christianity was packaged with Anglo-Saxon, economic, and personal ambitions that have disrupted local culture and done more damage than good.
But I see a future in hope, in joy, in peace. It is only I do not know how to go about it calling it evangelism, since it appears to need to come from a whole life. Our evangelism cannot be run as a political campaign or as a fundraiser event, but it must come as a vision from the practitioners who are already doing it. We can show that another life is possible.