Mission 2000 — How I Lost My Faith in a Push to Evangelize the Globe
It was the late 1970s in Virginia. I was a newly born-again college freshman heavily involved in James Madison University’s Baptist Student Union. It was a dizzying experience, for while most others there were raised Baptist and had been Christians since childhood, my experience was a hodge-podge of no church and phony mainline Christianity.
Army of God
The BSU was a student-run club staffed by a single adult adviser from the Southern Baptist Convention. Sometimes we would have guest speakers from the SBC give us teachings and presentations. Most of these were about something that was new to me — evangelism.
They taught us about the Great Commission and notified us that the SBC had embarked upon an ambitious goal — to share the gospel with every person on Earth. By 1980 the gospel was to be shared with everyone in the U.S. and by 2000 every soul in the world was to be introduced to Jesus.
To my naïve mind it seemed like the logical strategy would be to ask for help. Latin America, for example, seemed like a good target for the Catholic Church and eastern Europe for the Orthodox Church.
Apparently, I had a lot to learn. The SBC was instead undertaking this monumental task all on its own.
And we were its foot-soldiers.
Basic Training
They taught us how to witness to people about Jesus. We learned how to turn a conversation to the topic of spirituality, how to simplify the message of salvation, how not to use “in-group” Christian terminology that an outsider may not understand. And we learned that the optimal opportunity was to approach someone with the gospel message was when they were upset or depressed — if you could find them crying, you had them.
Then they had us practice on each other. Divided up into pairs, we took turns playing the role of the person witnessing and of the uninitiated “target.” As a target, we were to come up with arguments against Christianity that were commonly cited, and the evangelizer was to practice countering them.
In addition to how to evangelize, our SBC visitors emphasized the importance of it — because Jesus was coming back soon. And what would Jesus think if he came back and found us, his disciples, busying ourselves with our own affairs and entertainment instead of planting and reaping in his harvest of souls?
The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. — Luke 12:46
Weak Warriors
In short, we tried and failed. The prospect of witnessing to strangers, classmates, professors, and dorm-mates was just too intimidating. Evangelizing your religion to others is an affront that can damage your relationships and your reputation. But we were told that we should not value our human relationships over our relationship with Jesus. After all, look at all he had done for us!
Basically, we owed him.
So we tried harder. Our entire faith became about transforming ourselves into empty vessels of god’s will. Out with our secular, carnal instincts, and in with the faith that would give us the courage to witness! We tried prayer strategies, memorizing Bible verses, and wondering aloud if we could just witness with our lives rather than our mouths.
Certain of our social leaders would sometimes rant to us at our weekly assemblies about our cowardly behavior — especially in the university dining hall. It had large, circular tables that sat about 10, so it was common to share with strangers. It was also common, however, for groups of friends to monopolize a single table, which is exactly what we did. Several tables had become the BSU tables where we normally congregated.
We were cowering together, drinking in the living fellowship of Jesus and keeping it all to ourselves! If we were the disciples Jesus deserved we would sit at the other tables and witness to the other diners!
And when these same social leaders were spotted at the BSU tables, well, Christian fellowship isn’t always kind.
There were, however, two among us who had the faith we craved. Kyle and Stew (not their real names) were our rock stars. Kyle would ask girls out on dates just to witness to them. And Stew would station himself outside of bars in town with his Bible and witness to students as they entered and left (drinking age was 18 back then). They even managed to get some evangelical films and took them around to the dorms.
Whatever their secret was, they just made us feel worse.
Mutiny in the Ranks
In my junior year our fellowship took a serious turn south. Over the summer many of us had participated in the SBC’s summer missions program, assigned to Massachusetts. But while I had worked at a mission church in Boston and had a positive experience, most of the others had been assigned together in a rural area and had significant issues. Personality conflicts, love triangles, and inconsiderate behavior had left some members cool towards one another.
On top of that, Kyle and Steve were acting weird. They were sneaking around, whispering to certain people with an air of some earth-shattering secret. When the secret leaked out, it went up like a nuclear blast.
Kyle and Steve were speaking in tongues.
Over the summer, they had hooked up with a pastor of a charismatic church near our university town of Harrisonburg in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Now, one-by-one, they were recruiting adherents to their newfound charismatic faith in our ranks. They were holding their own Bible studies and prayer groups, both in the BSU facility and in their dorm rooms, where they would baptize people in the spirit. Eventually they started faith healing and prophesizing as well.
Both our student leaders and our adult adviser were opposed, citing the usual arguments against Pentecostalism. In addition to the broken friendships from the Summer missions, we now split into two camps. The charismatic camp believed that the rest of us were not actually saved because we lacked the infusion of the holy spirit. In the traditionalist camp we believed that the tongues they were speaking came from demons.
This was not the happy fellowship I had joined two years ago.
Defector
Eventually, as more of my friends joined the charismatic camp, I did too. I hoped, as I suspect they may have also, that the baptism of the spirit might be the key that would finally unlock the faith we needed to witness to others, and to enjoy all the other Bible promises that seemed to elude us. So Kyle baptized me in the spirit through the laying on of hands in his dorm room, and I later started to speak in tongues.
I convinced myself my tongue was real, even though I was actually just vibrating my vocal cords and flapping my tongue. I noticed that other people’s tongues were similar — the same set of syllables repeated over and over again — so I must be doing it right.
I also started attending their charismatic church with them. It was held in a large barn in a rural area. The sermons were about spiritual warfare and how Jesus was coming back any day now. We were pressured to evangelize even more intensely than in the BSU, using not only the threats in Luke 12 but another equally potent motivator:
On our way to heaven god may well force us to pass by the tormented souls of everyone we knew who is in hell, as they ask us “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The hoped-for boost in faith was long in coming. But I stuck with it. This had to be it. If this didn’t give me the faith to work in god’s soul fields, nothing would.
Breaking Point
It had been coming for months, in strange little thoughts that crept in from nowhere. I remember sitting at a BSU table in the dining hall where a new freshman had joined the group. As she spoke enthusiastically about a band she was following, I recognized just how new she was. Because if she’d been around us longer, she would never be following a secular band.
She must be a new Christian, just like I had been — still in the honeymoon phase of her faith. She had yet to have the millstone of “Mission 2000” hung around her neck. She had yet to choose between the traditionals and the charismatics.
It was almost like we were luring her into a trap.
Wow. Where had that thought come from?
One night in the Spring I found myself at a bowling alley with my housemates. These were other students who were not religious, and I was finding that I enjoyed hanging out with them just as much as I did with my BSU friends. I would have liked it even more if it weren’t for the guilt.
Every time I was with them I would picture them one day shouting at me from the gates of hell —” Why didn’t you tell me?” And on that night, instead of trying to keep my ball out of the gutter, I knew I should be witnessing to them about their need for Jesus. I kept imagining Jesus coming back and finding me not hard at work in god’s soul fields but throwing duckpins!
Now there they were, just having a fun little break before final exams. They were not worried about a vengeful god catching them goofing off. They were not responsible for the eternal fate of everybody else’s souls.
And I realized I was jealous of them.
Then inside myself I felt something snap. It was not a painful break, but something liberating. Suddenly I was filled with reassurance that everything was going to be okay. I had been okay before, and I would be okay again.
Deserter
I didn’t abandon my faith all at once. I just started questioning and gradually letting go. The prospect of life in god’s soul fields was too dismal to imagine. And the idea of an eternity in heaven, knowing that my family and friends were in hell and blaming me for it, was equally unacceptable.
So I started a journey that eventually led me to a contented agnosticism. It’s a path I have never regretted. Along the way I figured out a lot of things about evangelicalism and my experience in the BSU.
When the year 2000 finally came, I did give a thought to the SBC and its grand mission, which had obviously fallen spectacularly short of expectations.
The thought made me smile. For between me and them, I think I got the better end of the deal.
