It's not that I wanted to - I HAD to

Heidi and I often joke that there are pet peeves or habits that are so ingrained in us we can't resist ordering our world to fit them. It's like the guy who has to change the toilet paper roll so it rolls off of the top - he can't abide it the other way. Or checking for change in the public telephone. Silly small compulsions.

Heidi read this quote about typical evangelism to me and it has been widely handled in the blogoshpere - but I HAVE to include it - on the off chance that you dear reader haven't seen it or thought about it.

This happened, I think, when what ought to be an act of hospitality was transformed into an act of salesmanship. Salesmanship, whatever else it may be, is ultimately inhospitable.

We could go back and look at the causes of this perverse commodification of the gospel -- tracing the way that 19th-century evangelists like Charles Finney began adopting the techniques of salesmen, and how these techniques were further refined over the years by students of marketing like Bill Bright. But we needn't go into great detail here about how this happened to acknowledge that it has happened.

"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.

Mike Todd's Blog (and the history of the post's origins)

God save us from the corporate church!