What is best in life is to crush your theological opponents, to see them schooled by your mad logical arguments, and to hear the lamentations of the heathen.
—Conan the Cimmerian
The idols—there were thousands of them—lined the street on either side of the apostle as he slowly strolled through the city. Altars to eldritch gods, horrifying monstrosities. Statues built in service of demons, whose evil grip on the city grew day by day. The monuments to the false gods stabbed the morning sky, unholy symbols of the people’s arrogant defiance of the God who had made them.
Well, the apostle Paul was downright triggered, and he wasn’t gonna take it anymore.
According to the Bible, the man himself ambled right up to the mayor of Athens and leveled him with a brutal haymaker. Then he started break dancing all up on the Areopagus in celebration of his complete and total victory over the heathen gods while those watching called out, “Dang, son!” and “Got ’em, coach!” Paul followed it up with an altar call, and that day hundreds were converted to the gospel as they saw Paul’s mad skills at crushing his theological foes. Then Paul put his tent-making talents to work by designing dozens of provocative picket signs and organizing a protest of all the local non-Christian businesses and government buildings.
We’re not making this up. You can read the historical account in Acts 17.*1
If you’re going to be perfect, you have to learn how to share the gospel effectively. And the best way to do this is to totally own your opponents, arguing them into the faith through the sheer brilliance of your intellect. Combine this with a healthy sense of your own importance, and you’ll be shepherding thousands of people into the kingdom. Lock and load, fellow Christian. Nuke the heathen from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Much of modern evangelism has focused on how to effectively present the gospel and bring people to an understanding of their need for a Savior. This is wrong! The goal in any evangelistic activity is to show off your advanced theological knowledge and to make the heathen understand that they are much less holy than you are. Forget about building relationships: a successful evangelistic endeavor is one in which you scream “You’re going to hell, sinner!” as many times as possible. Seriously, count how many times you scream that exact phrase and gauge the quality of each of your evangelistic efforts by that measuring stick.
This whole aggressive-evangelism thing can be difficult at first, because you might have been raised in a Christian tradition that taught that you should love even those who don’t believe exactly the same things you do, that the best way to share the gospel is to build bridges, attempt to understand where others are coming from, and find common ground with nonbelievers.
Yuck!
Over against these unbiblical methods of evangelism, we recommend learning to harbor a healthy disdain for everyone who isn’t a Christian. When you start seeing other people as less than human, it’s much easier to scream vulgarities at them to the glory of God. You earned your salvation fair and square while they choose to wallow in their ignorance and not pull themselves up by their spiritual bootstraps. So it’s time to begin thinking of unbelievers not as fellow image bearers desperately in need of God’s grace but as vermin who threaten the very existence of your comfortable Christian subculture.
It’s time to get creative. Let’s dig into some of the awesome methods of evangelism and outreach that have been used by God’s people since the days of Noah.
One great way to get the message of God’s love out there is to make offensive signs to attract attention and let people know just how much God hates them, just as the apostle Paul did at Mars Hill. Then organize a protest at absolutely every event in the area that doesn’t line up with your idea of what God likes: community picnics (tools of the New World Order), secular rock-and-roll concerts (unsanitary cesspools of sin), and even seniors square dancing night at the community center (square dancing is still dancing, after all).
Effective Evangelistic Picket Signs
God hates you
Hell = Your final destination
God chose me not you LOL
Honk if you love Jesus—Remain silent if you love Satan
You and all your loved ones are doomed. Have a great day!
Just before Christ ascended into heaven, He commissioned His disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel by offending as many people as possible. So buy the biggest megaphone you can find, make some eye-catching, controversial signs that put people in their place, and start spreading the love of Christ. You want to start a God-centered conversation with people by making sure that only your opinions are ever heard, that they’re unable to get a word in edgewise. Just be reasonable and scream all kinds of obscenities at unbelievers whenever it appears they are about to express an opinion.
If you really care about people’s eternal fate, you’ll need to do more than just picket soldier’s funerals and comic book conventions. If you’re agile, you could pull off some advanced ambush evangelism, first popularized by Pentecostal street preachers in the 1920s. Hide in the bushes in a crowded public place. Lie in wait, carefully looking over your potential targets. You’ll want to select a victim with a tattoo, piercing, or other obvious evidence of reprobation. Then, at the opportune time, leap out with a King James Bible and just deck ’em.*2 They’ll have plenty of time to contemplate the great mercy of God in the gospel as they recover in the local hospital’s trauma ward. Great job!
Evangelism happens even when you’re not audibly screaming at people. As the Bible says, “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” To this end, you need to deck yourself out in T-shirts plastered with clever Christian parodies of popular brands and slogans. A recent study found that more than 97 percent of believers came to faith in Christ after spotting a believer’s “A Bread Crumb & Fish” or “Lord’s Gym” T-shirt. If you’re really committed, you’ll burn all your non-Christian T-shirts in a bonfire this instant, run down to your local megachurch’s bookstore, and replace them all with sanctified Christian culture–approved versions.
Your car, too, ought to be an extension of your evangelistic strategy. Plaster that puppy in judgmental bumper stickers.
Top Ten Most Effective Christian Bumper Stickers*3
In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned
Don’t let the car fool you—my treasure is in heaven!
If it ain’t King James, it ain’t the Bible!
God said it, I believe it, that settles it
Follow me to the creation museum
I’d rather be singing hymns
Don’t be left behind
I hope you follow Jesus this closely
My boss is a Jewish carpenter
Too blessed to be stressed!
Every waking moment of your life can be devoted to evangelism. Even cutting someone off in traffic can be redeemed to the glory of God with the right combination of Christian bumper stickers. Let no square inch of your car’s bumper or rear window remain untouched by clever slogans designed to shout to others on the freeway just how much you love Jesus. A well-placed TRUTH fish eating a four-legged Darwin fish can do more for the kingdom of God than many hours of street evangelism. And don’t settle for the stock, reprobate license-plate frame advertising Frank’s World of Cars. Get yourself a sanctified frame with Jeremiah 29:11 or Philippians 4:13 engraved on that bad boy.
So deck out your whip. Someone’s eternal fate may depend on it.
You can even change the eternal fate of waiters and waitresses by leaving a Bible verse on your credit card receipt instead of a tip. Scribble something down like “God only gets 10%—why would you think you deserve 15%?” and follow it up with “John 3:16—Jesus Loves You!”
We’ll get into gospel tracts a little later, but advanced Christian diners can even leave a tract that looks like a trillion-dollar bill so your server is fooled into thinking she’s getting a good tip before she gets sucker punched with the good news. This trick works best after a three-hour lunch on a Sunday, while you and your Christian friends all wear official church T-shirts. Make sure to be overly demanding and never satisfied with anything the server does to make your meal right. Every second your waiter or waitress is forced to spend serving you is another second in which your holiness is rubbing off on them.
But no matter your preferred style of outreach, remember that evangelism is not so much about quality as it is about quantity.
You know how American pilots during World War II would mark their planes with how many Messerschmitts they shot down over Europe or how many Zeros they sent to a watery grave in the Pacific? You need to do the same thing with any pagans you convert to Christ. Keep a running tab of how many sinners you drag kicking and screaming into the kingdom by your own clever preaching.
You need to puff up your own ego by getting thousands of people saved, no matter how inauthentic their professions of faith may seem on the surface. You’ve probably already seen your pastor do this during his altar calls each week. You might even have gone down yourself to save everyone the pain of sitting there and having to listen to the pastor beg for eons. Each sinner who raises his hand and comes forward is a notch in the pastor’s belt. Even if the gospel wasn’t preached accurately. Even if there was no conviction of sin. Even if the cross wasn’t mentioned a single time. If a sinner walks to the front of the church, no matter what his motive, you’d darn well better believe it counts.
See, your pastor has his priorities straight: Generate tons of baptisms and confessions of faith. Churn ’em out like a factory assembly line. Commitments to Christ are very healthy for the megachurch pastor’s ego, and they can be just as good for your own if you’re faithful to dilute the gospel to the point where it’s palatable to almost anyone. Get that conversion. Really go for it, like those guys selling cleaning products on late-night television or that used-car salesman who promises he’s gonna club a baby seal if you don’t run on down to the car lot this instant and buy a preowned Chevy S-10 pickup for full MSRP.
Faithful evangelism also has the fortunate side effect of boosting your reputation among your fellow churchgoers.
Don’t even bother evangelizing if you’re not going to post online about it or at least tell every single Christian you know how well you presented the gospel. Begin every conversation with a brother or sister in Christ with, “Did I ever tell you about the time I made a Muslim loudly weep on an airplane through my vast knowledge of the Scriptures? Totally owned ’em.” Shout the story from the rooftops until everyone is sick of it. Don’t ever be discouraged. They are just jealous that you’re a modern-day Billy Graham and they’re just washed-up nobodies who couldn’t evangelize their way out of a paper bag.
Now, some of us are shy. It’s difficult for shy people to get out there and evangelize. But you’re not off the hook even if you’re an introvert. For people like you, the Lord invented the gospel tract.
Introduced for the first time by the early church fathers circa AD 100, the gospel tract quickly became one of the most effective ways to evangelize. Rather than talking to people and building relationships, Christians could now just leave fiery Chick tracts in public restrooms, bookstores, bus seats, and homeless people’s change cups in lieu of money.
The ideal gospel tract has a few elements. First, it has a catchy title. Something like “Did You Know That You’re Going to Hell?” or “28 Proofs the NIV Was Translated by Satan Himself” is going to hook people right off the bat. Next, a good gospel tract has really hokey illustrations, second only to the cartoons depicting Charles Darwin with a set of satanic horns adorning every page of a self-published young-earth creationist textbook. Finally, a good gospel tract ends with a high-pressure sales pitch in which the reader is called to either mail the tract to a fundamentalist organization of churches somewhere in northern Idaho or check the box marked “No, I would rather burn in hell.”
On this page is an example of an ideal effective gospel tract. Feel free to tear the page out (download a PDF here) and leave it somewhere to save a soul!
If gospel tracts sound right up your alley, pick out some of your favorites—preferably tracts with cartoons picturing the devil and hell to scare people into the kingdom—and start spreading tens of thousands of them around your town.
(Download a PDF here)
This is perhaps most efficiently done with a fully automatic gospel-tract assault rifle, which you can use to just blast people right in the face with a whole bundle of tracts before they have a chance to say, “No thanks, bud.” Legendary street evangelist Ray Comfort is also reportedly developing a gospel tract–equipped Predator drone, which will be able to deliver gospel-tract payloads at Mach 1.3 all over the world from the comfort of your own home. Ah, the wonders of modern technology! It’s not just for sinners anymore.
When it comes down to it, we need to recognize that we all have different evangelism personalities. Some are gifted at tearing down unbelievers one on one, some excel at picketing Comic-Con, and some are better at blasting people with gospel-tract cannons at point-blank range. Pray that the Lord would reveal how He wants you to spread the good news of how much better you are than everyone else.
No matter how the Lord has gifted you, it’s your responsibility to get out there and subjugate the pagans with your awe-inspiring holiness and unparalleled theological knowledge. Jesus died for you; the least you can do is slam people of other religions for Him!
Simply and faithfully proclaiming the gospel of God’s grace might have been enough in years past, but this is the twenty-first century. It’s time to get out there and kick off a hate-fueled crusade against the heathens for Jesus.
You’ve crested the hill and now you’re breathing down Jesus’s neck! You must have converted thousands to Christ since you started reading this chapter. Nice!
You’re almost there! It’s all downhill from here. Look at you go!