Evangelism Gone Wrong

The great blogger at Slacktivist makes a very good point about evangelism (You have to go down a few posts to find it). He has been going through the first Left Behind book and posting on everything he sees wrong with it. I think he's somewhere around 100 posts, and he might be halfway through the book. Anyway, this quote about evangelism, and how it has changed from the idea of hospitality to the idea of marketing, is genius. I bolded the part that hit me hardest, especially because I have heard the first part before (about evangelism being one beggar telling another beggar how to find bread). Enjoy:

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Evangelism" today is not seen as the practice of hospitality, but as a kind of marketing scheme. It is not an invitation, but a sales pitch. Not a matter of "taste and see," but of "buy now." Or, to use one of my favorite descriptions of the work of evangelism, it is not "one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread," but rather one fat man trying to convince another fat man that he's a beggar in order to close the sale on another loaf.

Contemporary American-style evangelism is made even stranger by the fact that it seems devoid of content. It's become a turtles-all-the-way-down exercise with no apparent real bottom. Evangelism means, literally, the telling of good news. Surely there must be more to this good news than simply that the hearers of it become obliged to turn around and tell it to others. And those others, in turn, are obliged to tell still others the good news of their obligation to spread this news.

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