What follows is something I’ve been working on and thought I’d share as I continue with it. I wouldn’t make too much of the self-disclosure, which is true enough, but it’s not beyond intellectual distance. Right now it’s little more than bourgeois anomie. It may never rise beyond that, I know; but for now, it’s only one initial stab at an incomplete draft of something to write. Thoughts are of course welcome.

During last year’s Christmas season, my church debated the adoption of a mission statement, but it wasn’t much of a debate. What happened instead was a few people followed up on an old idea and for five weeks presented that idea to the congregation at large. It was a good exercise at the time. We were unpastored and ministerless, filling the pulpit from the pews; to have a set of themes on which to speak gave the pulpit continuity.

One of those sermons I volunteered to give. I was to summarize the series and supply a justification for having a mission at all. But mid-series, the person who had volunteered to speak about evangelism had forgotten he would be out of town that Sunday. It fell to me to fill in for him.

To speak about evangelism and, specifically, the phrase “Evangelize the Lost,” was the last thing I wanted to do. Evangelism has too often been explained to me as if it were a recruitment task for me to believe that any attempt on my part to define it as something else would be just short of pointless. Once, in high school, while attending a large youth rally in Russellville, Arkansas, a friend and missionary’s daughter tapped me on the shoulder in Wendy’s. “See that guy over there,” she said, pointing out some nondescript but well-dressed man eating a Big Bacon Classic, “He was asking about us. He said he’d seen all these kids in town and was wondering what was going on. Why don’t you go over and talk to him? Invite him to the gospel meeting this afternoon?” Everything about that moment was uncomfortable. To interrupt a stranger’s meal, for opportunity’s sake, in order to talk about something someone else overheard, all in the interest of bringing a possibly—but not necessarily—lost man to Jesus seemed silly. Celebrities are justified to gripe about autograph seekers who come to their tables at restaurants. It is righteous to complain when a solicitor calls in the middle of dinner. In no way does proselytizing, simply because it’s proselytizing, make a similar interruption of dinner less rude. Perhaps a case may perhaps be made to claim that proselytizing overrides rudeness, but it doesn’t not make it rude. What I was asked to do in that Wendy’s so many years ago was instigate an encounter for encounter’s sake.

Yet all my life I’ve listened to Christians hold up such encounters as the height of Christian action. To invite to church the woman stuffing $54.60 in her gas tank is boastful action. To remind the Baptists at work that God won’t save until after baptism is exemplary righteousness. This, I’ve been told, is evangelism, and it is what all Christians are called to do by the Great Commission. To claim otherwise is tantamount to saying that you don’t want the church to grow and worse, that you do not wish to save the lost for Christ. Thus saith the Lord: Ye Who Refuse to Invite the Lost Are No Better Than Untended Seeds.

But I don’t buy it. Philip, before he was Philip the Evangelist, was Philip the Deacon, and there is no evidence that the two roles overlapped in his life. So it is that I believe, if women and men are wineskins, the wine they contain varies as widely as the skins themselves. In some it ripens quickly for a wedding feast. In others it ages to complexity to be savored by connoisseurs. In others it turns to vinegar to dress a salad well. In still others it is there to turn, miraculously, to water, to quench a man’s thirst. For this I cannot believe that evangelism represents the single most important act of post-Resurrection belief.

So it was that the last theme I wanted to speak on was “Evangelize the Lost.” One man in my church beats himself up because he doesn’t talk about Jesus to his co-workers nearly enough; another man loves to tell a story of a preacher who gave a waitress a $5.00 tip and baptized her the next day: let either, or both of them speak their minds. I would listen, take notes, and redeliver their words to the church in a few weeks. It was on Friday night I learned that no one who I thought was scheduled to speak would be speaking; it was Saturday when my name was filled in the blank.

It was not in anyone’s best interest, so far as I saw it, to shake up how people understood God-in-praxis. We were a church in flux, and besides, I didn’t have any time to prepare. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to deliver the traditional homily about the Great Commission or about Acts 8. Those texts are so well used in respect to evangelism as to be cliché. Instead, taking my cue from Luke 15, borrowing from Hansel and Gretel, and interpreting a Jeep commercial, I worked out an argument that focused not on evangelism, but on what it means to be lost. Here is part of what I said:

To be lost means to be separated from those we are like—from our family—and it means that we are separated from those who love us. To be lost is to be alienated. To be lost is to be exposed. To be lost is to be at the mercy of those who would harm us. To be lost is to be helpless.

Looking back over the year since I spoke those words, part of me wants to agree completely. But then, this year I dropped out of my fifth year of advanced graduate education. This year I’ve worked shit jobs that are in some ways the underbelly of industrial education. This year I’ve been unemployed for long enough stretches that all my future prospects seem either like no prospect at all or like the cliffs in Didion’s Salvador, where the only reason people go there is to dump their dead. This year I’ve sat in church and for whole services resented how I can’t seem to wrench myself away long enough to visit the Episcopalian, Lutheran, and UCC churches downtown. After this year, in other words, another part wants to say about being lost, “No. That is not it. That is not it at all.”

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