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March 18, 2009 | It’s Spring Break in Daytona Beach, Fla., and hundreds of rowdy coeds are packed into Froggy’s Saloon, where a nubile blonde gyrates seductively on top of the bar, her belly button ring shimmering like a bass jig in the sun. Motley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” plays to wild cheers as the blonde fishes bills out of the empty beer pitcher marked “Tips for Tits.”
When the blonde – who is maybe 18 – removes her tube top to reveal a pair of star-shaped nipple shields, a short, demure college sophomore named Brandon holds his beach towel over his eyes. On his wrist sits a white “LivePure” bracelet. Scott, our group leader, rubs Brandon’s back. “Satan is strong here,” he says. “But remember: Every person is a person for whom Christ died, whether they’re wearing a lot of clothes or no clothes at all.”
I guess I should explain myself. I’m here in Florida with a group of students from Liberty University, the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s “Bible Boot Camp” for young evangelicals. But I’m not a young evangelical – not even close. Two months ago, I transferred to Liberty from Brown, a school whose overall social climate, according to Falwellian standards at least, is only a notch or two above Sodom and Gomorrah. I had a secular liberal upbringing and I’ve always considered myself pretty ambivalent about God, but I decided to enroll at Liberty for a semester to learn about my conservative Christian peers and find out whether any common ground existed between my world and theirs. Since then, I’ve been living undercover in an all-male dorm (Liberty’s 46-page code of conduct, called “The Liberty Way,” prohibits all but the most innocent gender mingling), taking courses like young-earth creationism and Evangelism 101, and getting a first-hand look at the other side of the much-hyped “God Divide.” And when March rolled around, I decided to do what many Christian college students do over spring break: take a mission trip.
Evangelizing to secular spring breakers in Florida might sound like an enormous waste of time. Why not go somewhere where Jesus would be an easier sell? Like Islamabad? Or a Christopher Hitchens dinner party? But Daytona Beach’s bacchanalian atmosphere is part of the allure for domestic missionaries – it’s what’s called “battleground evangelism.”
“Be warned: This is going to be 24/7 spiritual warfare,” explained the Liberty Mission coordinator. “We’re talking about Satan’s home turf here.”
As I listened to him speak, I knew I had to go. After all, one of the things I haven’t seen yet is Liberty students living outside their ideological safe space, in real-world settings where they’re forced to interact with people like, well, me. So a short application, two weeks, and a $600 trip fee later, I was in a white Ford panel van, quickly dubbed the “Jesusmobile,” making my way down I-95 with 14 Liberty students.
Our leader is Scott, a sprightly 58-year-old with a high-pitched Carolina twang and a full head of silver hair; he is, by all appearances, the LeBron James of evangelism. When we get to Daytona, Scott guides us through an all-morning training session on the whys and hows of evangelism. We sit on folding chairs in the Sunday School room of First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, our makeshift headquarters, and eat snack-size bags of pretzels while Scott recites the “Great Commission,” the verse that serves as the architectural frame for all missionary work. It’s found in Matthew 28:19, when Jesus says to his disciples, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
“The first thing you should think when you meet anyone,” Scott says, “is ‘Are they saved?’” It’s safe to assume that almost everyone coming to Daytona for Spring Break is unsaved, he says, adding, “It’s a very dark place out there.”
Before we take our evangelical Delta Force to the beach, though, we need to learn how to witness.
There are several words for what, exactly, will be transpiring here. “Spreading the gospel,” “sharing the faith,” and “evangelizing” are all common terms for the act of attempting to convert non-believers, but “witnessing” seems to be the most all-purpose. (I should say, also, that what we’re doing would strike many Christians as odd. Proselytizing to strangers, which one Christian I know calls “cold-turkey evangelism,” is a dying art, and many evangelicals prefer less confrontational methods of proselytizing. But on this trip, it’s all strangers, all confrontation, all day.)
The best witnessing tactic, Scott says, is beginning conversations subtly, so strangers don’t grasp your intent immediately. Then, they’ll be less likely to walk away. Scott’s favorite technique is the “Way of the Master” evangelism program, formulated by a New Zealand-born pastor named Ray Comfort and marketed by “Growing Pains” actor and evangelical pitchman Kirk Cameron. It is based on a four-question sequence designed to demonstrate systematically to a non-believer that he or she is not, in fact, a good person – that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
The four questions, Scott says, can be remembered with the mnemonic “WDJD.” (“What Did Jesus Do?”)
W – “Would you consider yourself to be a good person?”
D – “Do you think you’ve kept the Ten Commandments?”
J (Judgment) – “If God judged you by the Ten Commandments, would you be innocent or guilty?”
D (Destiny) – “If you’re guilty, where do you think you will spend eternity – Heaven or Hell?”
“This last step is where people realize they’re hell-bound, and they make decisions for Christ to save themselves,” Scott says.
A sophomore named Samantha raises her hand nervously and asks the question we’ve all been considering. “But what if they don’t?”
“Good point. These people may not be ready to accept Christ, but we can plead with them to consider it, because Hell is a real place. So just ask them two or three times: Why would you NOT consider this? Why would you think it DOESN’T matter?” As Scott says this, 14 skeptical faces stare back at him.
“Never forget, guys,” he says, “what we’re doing is kind! We’re doing something better than the best Christmas present they’ll ever get!”
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Before we go, we pray.
Today, we will be doing our beach evangelism in pairs. The fortunate part of this is that I’ll be able to see other members of my group in action. The unfortunate part: I’ll probably be expected to participate. Luckily, my first partner, a sophomore named Claire, is what the cognoscenti call a “bold witness.” Claire, a brown-haired bombshell who wears trendy drink-coaster-sized sunglasses, agrees to let me watch the first few times, since I hinted when we started that I was new at this.
Here’s what they don’t tell you in evangelism training: Being a bold witness doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Claire approaches two dozen people in five minutes, none of whom stay with her past the first question.
When Claire finally gets someone to hear her out, it’s a Rastafarian-looking guy sitting on a bench. He answers the WDJD questions nonchalantly. “Yeah, I’ve stolen. Yeah, I’ve disobeyed my parents. Yeah, I’m probably guilty.” When Claire gets to D, the one about Heaven and Hell, Reece rubs his eye with the back of his hand.
“I’m gonna live forever,” he says. “Heaven is a state of mind, you know? You ever watch ‘The Matrix’? When Neo went to the Oracle, and he’s like ‘Am I the one?’ and she’s like ‘No you’re not, because you don’t know.’ It’s like that. You gotta know, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” Claire says.
Reece goes on his way. As we continue down the boardwalk, Claire turns to me. “I think that man was on drugs.”
Two failed approaches later, Claire tells me it’s my turn. When Scott started schooling us on the Way of the Master method, it became clear that, over the course of the week, I’d be expected to push Christianity to strangers. This made my conscience’s usual swampy morass a little swampier. At Liberty, see, no one asks me about my faith anymore, so to blend in, I rarely have to do anything more proactive than keep up my Christian signifiers – going to Bible study, praying before meals, being on time to church.
Evangelism to strangers, though – that doesn’t sit nearly as well with me. So I set some guidelines for my Daytona mission. First, I would distance myself reasonably from evangelical theology. If I told someone about Jesus, I’d begin, “Well, according to one reading of the Bible …” or “Some Christians think …”. Second, I wouldn’t condemn anyone. And third, if things ever got to a point where I was doing too well, where someone was on the verge of converting, I’d find a way to get out of the conversation quickly, no matter how out of character it was.
I may never have to put these rules into effect, though, because I’m too scared to make my first approach. I wander the sand with Claire for five or ten minutes looking for a suitable target. The two middle-aged men checking their BlackBerrys? The preteen boys stomping on a sand castle? No, won’t do.
Claire points to a guy in a beach chair. “How about him?”
“It looks like he’s about to leave. Doesn’t it?”
“Okay, the guy next to him.”
“He’s tanning. We probably shouldn’t disrupt him.”
After a dozen of these, Claire looks a little irritated. “You know, you shouldn’t be afraid,” she says. “You have Holy Spirit boldness inside you.”
Eventually, I approach three girls tanning on beach towels. They’re good-looking girls, maybe a year or two out of college. One is reading a Patricia Cornwell mystery, and the other two are on their stomachs, listening to their iPods.
“Hi there,” I say, trying to sound as peppy as possible. The Cornwell reader looks up from her book, eyebrows raised, and one of the iPod girls takes out her earbuds.
“I was just wondering if I could give you guys a million dollars.”
When Scott was teaching us to evangelize, he gave us several gimmicky ice-breakers to use when beginning conversations. This one is a fake million-dollar bill with a message printed in tiny letters on the back that begins: “The million-dollar question: Will you go to Heaven?”
“Sure,” Cornwell girl says. “I’ll take one.”
“But first,” I say, “I have to ask you the million-dollar question.”
“Shoot.”
I take a deep breath. “Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”
iPod girl’s eyes bulge. “Excuse me?” She pokes her friend, who turns over onto her back, takes out her earbuds, and stares at me.
“Um … do you guys know Jesus … as your Savior?”
Cornwell girl says pointedly, “We’re Jewish.”
“I’ll take that as a no?” I say. They don’t laugh. Not even the faintest trace of a smile. I turn and walk away, mumbling thanks under my breath.
As I go, I hear them talking: “What a creep,” one says.
After this rejection, I start to get angry. How could Scott make evangelism seem so easy? Doesn’t he see that this is torture? When Claire and I return to the Jesusmobile for our appointed meeting time, the rest of the group looks a little shellshocked. Faces are sullen, postures slumped.
“That was the hardest day of my life,” says Samantha.
“Any decisions for Christ today?” Scott asks. No hands go up.
“Well, that’s okay,” he says. “Decisions or not, we’re planting seeds the Lord will water in time!”
Back at the host church, Scott explains that beach witnessing is just half of our agenda. Tonight, we’ll get another chance at the nightclubs. We spend half an hour in prayer before dinner. It is, I suspect, the saddest prayer circle ever convened.
“Lord, I pray for the medical student I met today,” says Scott’s wife Martina. “Being a hotshot doctor at a big hospital is not going to help her when she has to face you, Lord. Even though she brushed me off, I pray she’ll reconsider later.”
“I pray, Lord, for the old man who spit on me,” says Charlotte, a blonde from Arkansas. “Satan had such a strong grip on him, and I just want to see him know you, Lord.”
Claire is the last to pray: “Lord, let them be nicer to us tonight.”
Around 11:00 pm, the Jesusmobile pulls up to Razzle’s. Razzle’s is a Wal-Mart-size nightclub with a squadron of earpieced bouncers manning the velvet rope and a set of revolving laser lights that overflow onto the sidewalk. We won’t be going inside, Scott says, but we’ll stand just outside the rope, witnessing to people waiting in line.
The first surprise is that there are at least two other groups of Christian evangelists here. One group, a youth team from a Florida church, has set up a shaved-ice machine on the sidewalk. They’re making sno-cones for the Razzle’s patrons, which almost seems like cheating. (Some Christians call this “gastro-evangelism.”) The other group, which is affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ, has done something truly brilliant. A well-funded national organization, Campus Crusade rented the ballroom at a hotel next to Razzle’s and set up a fake party inside, complete with strobe lights, a security team, and attractive models paid to stand outside the hotel and gossip loudly about the great party inside. When would-be clubbers enter the room, they quickly realize they’ve been duped – instead of bar specials and trance music, they get gospel tracts and a salvation message.
Our group has no such Trojan horse, just the same Way of the Master routine we used on the beach. Witnessing at Razzle’s, where everyone we meet is either drunk or well on the way, makes communication a little harder.
“Excuse me, sir. Would you help me with an opinion poll?” I ask.
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Who is the greatest person you know?”
“Hmm … gayest person I know … I’d have to say Richard Simmons.”
Meanwhile, others in my group are having more success. I walk over to another part of the sidewalk and catch Scott’s wife Martina deep in conversation with a large, muscled man.
“Jason,” Martina says as she sees me approach. “Meet my friend Kevin.” We shake hands. Jason is slurring his speech and leaning against a palm tree for support, clearly many drinks into his night. But, perhaps because of this, he’s really opening up to Martina.
“Listen, Martina,” he says. “I just met you, and I like you a lot.”
“That’s very sweet,” she says. “Listen to me, though.”
He slumps back against the tree, a little maudlin, eyes sloshing around in his head.
“Jason, you need to be born again.”
“So what if I am? Then tomorrow, I come back out here and go drinking again, and nothing’s changed. What good is that?”
“You won’t come back out here tomorrow if you get born again. You’ll have the Holy Spirit guiding you.”
