The first of a likely brief series of selected highlights from the old mindreader:

04 December (2005)
Sports News: Jesus Inducted Into NHL Hall of Fame, and
I Have Something Important to Tell You, But I’ll Just Write It on the Wall

On Thanksgiving, I was in the Lone Star Steakhouse in Battle Creek. After the meal, I made my way into the bathroom (obviously, the men’s room). And, remarkably, I found humor in the bathroom — and it wasn’t bathroom humor!

On the wall, someone had written a serious message: “Jesus saves.” But a hockey fan, believing that Jesus must be a goalie, had supplemented that message with a simple, direct conclusion:

“And Gretzky scores on the rebound!”

I walked out of the bathroom laughing at the quick wit of that hockey fan.

Though the Gretzky quip was very humorous, it illustrates a major problem with impersonal evangelism. The message of the gospel — summarized as the pithy “Jesus saves” — is worth communicating to everyone around us, but the message loses something important when it is not communicated personally. Not only does it become very dry and detached, lacking the necessary genuine human component (Jesus saves, and I know because He saved me); it also becomes much more open to mockery, as shown in the restaurant bathroom. Anyone else who reads that particular message on the wall is far more likely to be struck by the humor than to be struck by the truth; in that sense, whatever good intentions the original writer may have had were lost in the humor of the second writer.

Of course, in the restaurant, there also was the issue of defacing property. It seems contradictory to proclaim the truth of salvation through Christ through a blatant display of disrespect for others’ property.

My point, I think, is simply this: be careful with impersonal methods of evangelization.