Chrisma went to the streets to report on Christians who are using innovative ways to make Jesus real to atheists. New Agers, sex workers and teen runaways.
Jesus is the best model for evangelism.
He was with the people. He held children in His arms, dined with tax collectors in their homes, healed abused prostitutes and took His message of salvation to the poorest villages in Israel.
Jesus went to the fringes of society. While He did teach in public events, most of His ministry happened up close and personal. He took the time to share with people one-on-one.
More and more Christians are recognizing that the best way to reach our increasingly fragmented culture is to use Jesus’ strategy. They are taking extreme measures to show God’s love—whether it is to Goths and punks, teenagers on crack or lonely strippers.
Just as Jesus was condemned for spending time with sinners, you too will likely suffer some criticism if you dare to take His love to the fringes. But we encourage you to venture outside the lines.
Take courage from the four evangelists featured in the next few pages. They are reaching atheists, New Agers, street walkers and homeless kids. Their stories will show you that once you dare to go outside the safe religious box you will never want to go back in.
20 EVANGELISM TIPS
For 20 practical ways to immediately start reaching the lost in your community go to thelost.charismamag.com. Also get a glimspe of evangelism inside the biker, gang and punk rock cultures.
The Atheist Challenge
When Ray Comfort started the Comfort Food blog, he intended to encourage Christians. But so many atheists kept leaving notes that the blog morphed into Atheist Central, a daily offering of questions and barbs from atheists.
The only rule: Comfort deletes blasphemous or uncivil messages and those in which “God” or “Jesus” isn’t capitalized. He deflects some postings; others are deflected by Christians who monitor the site.
Comfort recently released a compilation of their questions in his book You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence but You Can’t Make Him Think.
“Every atheist is a friend,” says Comfort, whose Living Waters is an evangelism resource and training ministry. “If Jesus can call Judas ‘friend’ as he betrayed Him with a kiss, I can call anyone a friend. I try to reach out to them as much as I can.”
As he admits, that friendship is often one-sided, since he says many atheists are hostile or bitter toward God and His followers. Some don’t find him that persuasive, either.
Michael Doss, president of Orange County (California) Atheists—which hosted Comfort for a discussion last year—says the logic of the evangelist’s arguments was deeply flawed. Nor did any of his evidence change anyone’s mind, Doss says.
“I didn’t get any sense of ‘deep caring’ for atheists in particular,” says Doss, also state director for American Atheists. “He might want to lay off the insults (as in his recent book titles and themes) if he really ‘cares’ for us.”
Still, Comfort delights in how his critics provided him a national platform by ridiculing him and hurtling their critiques around cyberspace.
“I don’t know if there’s any other Christian that has a whole stack of atheists every day, waiting for every word that he’s got to say to jump on to,” says Comfort, whose blog receives about 100 e-mails a day.
“Some Christians have asked, ‘Why are you wasting your time? ... [Because] there are a lot of people who are listening. The blog gets copied and pasted and passed on to other sites.”
The questions run the gamut of those who like to pick apart Scripture, argue that conscience is instilled by authority figures, don’t believe mankind is intrinsically evil or call obedience to God “fear mongering.” Some border on hysterical, like the writer who said, “You’re an @$#!!” before launching into a diatribe about how Comfort scares people.
“You’re a joke; take a good look in the mirror before you go out judging others,” he wrote. “Who knows, that may be you burning in hell’s eternal flames, and your little %$@!# buddy too.”
Comfort replies that skeptics don’t take into account such questions as: What if hell exists? What if the Bible is right? What if God is holy and just and will punish unrepentant murderers and rapists in a terrible place called hell?
“If I am fully persuaded that someone is in terrible danger, I have to at least warn them,” he says. One reader asks how he feels about Jews: “I don’t believe they’re hell-bound; do you?”
Comfort, whose mother was Jewish, says listeners often pose this question when he preaches. Pointing out that all the disciples were Jewish, he replies that eternal life is offered to all, regardless of religion, color or gender.
The questions come to him in person too. During 2007 he visited 13 other countries to film episodes for the upcoming season of his TV program, The Way of the Master, co-hosted by actor Kirk Cameron.
“Much of Europe is becoming atheistic,” Comfort says. “A lot of street interviews we did were with people who professed atheism, but when you start probing they can’t tell you why they’re an atheist.”
One of Europe’s most famous nonbelievers is Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, whose 2006 best-seller, The God Delusion, released in paperback last January. Comfort has offered the scientist $20,000 for a 30-minute debate about God’s existence.
Though Dawkins hasn’t responded, he reportedly told one audience he would do it for a $100,000 donation to his foundation.
“I would love to do that debate because it would be such a wonderful opportunity for the gospel,” Comfort says.
So too should Christians everywhere be ready to offer an explanation of the hope that lives within them, Comfort says. Those who do should respond kindly, obeying the biblical command not to strive but to be gentle with all men, including those who oppose them, Comfort says.
“My agenda isn’t to have someone change their mind about belief in God,” he says. “What we need to do with atheists is not change their mind about their belief in God’s existence but to show them they have offended God and desperately need a Savior. That’s my agenda.”
Good Vibrations in California
Tucked between a tarot card reader and a Rastafarian artist, Cindy McGill is offering “Organic Spiritual Alignments” at her table along the circuslike boardwalk of Venice Beach, California.
As part of an innovative outreach to the New Age movement, McGill is giving “Free Spiritual Readings” and dream interpretations in this bohemian community in Southern California.
Using gifts of the Holy Spirit, McGill and her team of prophetic evangelists attract people who would normally just walk by more traditional proselytizers.
“When I started out with this, the Lord said to me: ‘Cindy, I want you to raise up a team of evangelists because My people are going to hell. I want you to run with the dream thing,’” says McGill, founder of Hope for the Harvest Ministries, an organization that evangelizes at the Burning Man and other pagan festivals.
“I remembered the verse that says God in the last days would pour out His Spirit on all flesh, and many people would dream dreams. They are having God dreams.”
Draped with its “Catalyst of Light” sign, McGill’s table entices an eclectic mix of people.
Venice’s head psychic—a woman with wild, blond hair; pink highlights; and long, red fingernails—is the first to approach the table. She tells McGill she has spent 17 years working as a psychic on the boardwalk.
“I put a spell on someone,” she tells McGill. “I want to make sure everything is going well.”
McGill—co-pastor of the Salt Lake City, Utah, Foursquare Church—reaches out to take her hand, saying she wants to invite her to have a spiritual alignment—a euphemism for asking the Holy Spirit to touch her heart.
“I just want to release the Spirit so everything is very, very clear,” McGill tells her, “so you can see the Truth, the Light and the Way absolutely illuminated.”
McGill gets up from her chair, places her hands on the woman’s shoulders and speaks in tongues, while asking the Holy Spirit to separate the psychic from any demonic forces that may try to interfere with God’s plan for her life. Afterward, the woman graciously thanks McGill and leaves.
“What I wanted to do is to give God an opportunity to let her feel His presence,” McGill says. “I went as far as I could. The bottom line is just to show them love. It’s their language.”
McGill says it’s often necessary to change “our language” to reach New Age believers. In the same way Jesus used parables, McGill says she uses euphemisms, initially, so people will be more open to an encounter with Jesus.
Before each outreach, McGill and her team of volunteers ask God to show them what people’s dreams mean and to give them guidance on the best strategies to reach the lost. After a dream interpretation, people are “even hungrier to learn who we are,” McGill says. At that point, McGill often reveals they are followers of Jesus and ask if they would like to have an encounter with their creator.
Around noon, two Iraq War veterans approach the table. Jeff Lovejoy, a 34-year-old Los Angeles resident with black plastic earrings, tells McGill he’s been having vividly horrid war dreams, but near the end everything fades to black. “I don’t know if I died,” he says.
McGill tells him the fact he doesn’t die means God has a plan for his life. “You have a destiny, something you have not fulfilled yet,” McGill tells him. “You have divine protection and intervention around to help bring you to your purpose.”
Lovejoy’s friend, Brentwood, California, resident Jason Hughes, 31, tells McGill he has been having recurrent chase dreams in which he has to rescue people, but he wakes up before the “bad action” occurs.
His is one of the 25 most common dreams. McGill tells him a spiritual stronghold in his past is trying to block his destiny.
She prays, asking God to stop the dream and show Hughes his purpose in life. She asks if he’d like to commit his life to Christ. He does and gives her a hug. He tells her he plans to go to church.
After the team finishes for the day, McGill says she plans to continue her outreach to the New Age community as God gives more people dreams—including “apocalyptic dreams.” She’s working as well on launching a dream-interpretation reality television show.
“People are getting dreams about the end of the world, and these are nonbelievers,” McGill says. “Hollywood is picking up on this.
“I taught a dream course for a bunch of 5- to 9-year-olds, and they started telling me dreams that were blowing my mind. These little kids are dreaming dreams about Jesus coming, things blowing up, wars and all kinds of things the Bible talks about in Matthew 24.”
On the Orange Blossom Trail
Peg de Alminana leads Open Door, a ministry for prostitutes on an Orlando, Florida, street known for its sex workers. | By Amy Green
She says she is 26, but she looks younger. Tattoos cover her arms, a ladybug among them. A sales tag hangs from her purse. Sunglasses—big, cheap and gaudy—are perched on her head. She is small, feminine, attractive. Immediately she bursts into tears.
The details of her appearance do little to convey who she is. But the moment she hears that God loves her, tears well up in her eyes and run down her cheeks. She wipes them from her face, her dark eyes darting around to see whether she is being watched.
“I believe He’s with me,” she says, not giving her name. “I’ve been in situations with guns going off in houses, and He’s taken me out of situations. He’s blessed me.”
Tearfully she tells what happened just the day before. A man pulled up and asked whether she wanted a date. She asked whether he was a cop, because undercover officers in Florida cannot lawfully misrepresent themselves when asked directly for their identities. The man reached for a Bible and placed it beneath her hands.
“He said, ‘Jesus loves you,’ and he gave me $20,” she relates, sobbing.
Peg de Alminana embraces the young woman, telling her she looks like her daughter, and prays for her. “You are God’s daughter,” she told her. “He loves you, and I love you,” as she gives the woman a white rose.
It is how de Alminana spends most Saturday evenings with volunteers for her ministry, Open Door Healing and Renewal Center for Women. The ministry is for prostitutes like this one—the battered, broken people of a thriving sex and drug trade along Orange Blossom Trail, which snakes through Orlando, Florida, minutes from the city’s prized theme parks.
Here, the rape rate is six times the national rate, and the murder rate is nearly seven times higher. When you consider how many rapes go unreported here you begin to understand just how rife the crime really is.
Bustling big box stores such as Barnes & Noble, Best Buy and Publix supermarkets co-mingle with immigrant-owned eateries, crack motels and strip clubs. Prostitutes walk the Trail day and night.
This is where de Alminana has located her ministry, and on Saturday evenings she and her volunteers cruise the Trail. When they spot a prostitute they stop, give her a white rose, pray for her and invite her to Sunday services.
“For a woman who’s been used and abused, giving a white rose to them is just so unexpected,” de Alminana says. “If you really hear [a woman] speak about her heart, she really wants to be free, but there are all those issues, all those challenges, all those addictions, all those bondages.”
De Alminana established the ministry in February after working five years as senior chaplain at the Orange County Jail. Her mission now is to reach women on the other side of the revolving door. So many experience Christianity inside jail. Then their pimps bail them out, and they are back on the Trail.
Operating on a small budget of donations de Alminana offers crisis counseling and mentoring from a center right on the Trail. She offers Sunday services, Bible studies and prayers. Some of her volunteers are former prostitutes, and together they help women access basic needs such as food, housing and health care.
Perhaps most important they tell them they love them. It is a frequent refrain. De Alminana and her volunteers say it constantly to one another and the women they meet on the Trail.
They say it to a woman named Kat immediately as she opens the door to her motel room, where she has lived for seven years. Kat is not feeling well, and as she accepts her white rose she pulls aside her shirt to reveal a swollen, silver dollar-size sore on her shoulder, covered by a bandage.
It’s a spider bite, Kat says, but de Alminana warns it could be MRSA, an infection that can be fatal. De Alminana talks to Kat about whether she could take her to get it checked. Then she and her volunteers pray for Kat.
Kat knows de Alminana well. Her motel abuts the Open Door center. For 10 years Kat has walked the Trail. She is here every day, earning money to pay rent, buy food, smoke crack. She says she is 49, but the creases in her face make her look older.
She lives in a motel where the pool is filled with dirt and weeds. Her room is cramped and musty smelling but meticulously kept—her knick-knacks arranged just so. Among them is a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her posture is slumped, her manner matter-of-fact.
“I’m a prostitute, and I do drugs. I’m not going to lie,” Kat says. “I pray every day and every night that He’s going to bring me up out of this bondage. And I just sit and wait for Him to do it. I have faith in Him. I think it will happen. I don’t know how.”
The Fatherless Generation
It’s 11:30 p.m. and a Hope for Homeless Youth (HHY) ministry team gathers on Hollywood’s teeming Walk of Fame for its regular Friday outreach. They’ll pass out food and ministry information, witness to hundreds, and invite each young person to return and enter their one-year discipleship program. As usual, Director Clayton Golliher will sleep in a nearby parking lot, his sleeping bag a few feet from several dozen homeless youth.
“They’re a product of the breakup of the American family,” he says. “More of them are throwaway than runaway. Some love the freedom, but most have been abused and rejected.”
Experts estimate 1.5 million youth live on our nation’s streets; each year 5,000 will die of suicide, homicide and accidental drug overdose, and at least 40 percent are not wanted at home. One in four will visit Hollywood.
Golliher says they are prime targets for drug dealers, pimps, porno filmmakers and gang leaders. They hang in “families” as dysfunctional as the ones nearly all of them left. They often rotate “turning a trick” (male and female) to buy the group a one-night motel room.
Based at the Los Angeles Dream Center, HHY operates as a separate nonprofit and houses up to 50 single men and women, including Christian youth in its intern program. Young people up to 25 years old need only show up to gain three days’ emergency shelter.
Xocia Martinez, 20, is a former homeless “cutter.” When Martinez was an infant, her mother left; but when she was 16 her father remarried, problems arose, and Martinez went to live with her mother. She began using and selling drugs and became promiscuous. Depressed, she says she tried to overdose, and when that failed she used razors to slice her arms and legs.
“Cutting myself was a form of suicide,” she says, showing the scars. “Cutting was a way I could control all the pain I felt. It was better than any drug. I loved to see my blood run and drop to the floor.”
Two days after she arrived at HHY she accepted Christ as Savior and today receives personal counseling, attends five Bible studies and chapel services weekly, takes parts in outreaches, and works in the ministry’s office. She plans to attend ministry school and start a home for abused girls.
Sadly, many homeless youth prefer to remain on the streets. During a weekly HHY feeding in a Santa Monica Park, Gina, 23, eats a cheeseburger and talks. At age 13, with her father in jail and her mother dealing and using drugs, she hit the streets. She says she has been raped three times, twice on the streets and once at age 5.
“My own body was taken away from me. It changed my life forever,” she says.
She says her 6-year-old son lives with his father’s family in Vermont. “I carry around stuffed animals just to remind me of him,” she says. When offered emergency shelter and a bus ticket to Vermont, she says her new “husband” won’t join her. Instead, she plans to go to Tempe, Arizona—another homeless-youth enclave—and buy a house so her son can come there.
“I’m really not different because I live on the streets,” she insists. “I just have to work harder to survive.” Still, she takes a ministry card.
Golliher says homeless youth will call, sometimes in the middle of the night, after being robbed, beaten or raped. He always goes if it means getting one into his shelter.
The next day Golliher rises at 7 a.m., feeds a half-dozen youth in McDonald’s and visits the courtyard of a nearby Catholic Church. Some 40 people sit on folding chairs, waiting for food and showers. Golliher walks to the front with 17-year-old disciple Koby Bustillos.
Koby tells how his dad is in jail and his mother’s whereabouts are unknown. Both of them dealt the meth they were addicted to.
At 14 he was hooked and dealing. He lifts his shirt to show scars from a near-fatal stabbing.
Koby says that after enrolling at HHY he begged his best friend to join him. He didn’t, and two weeks later the 16-year-old was shot to death in a drive-by.
“I would have been with him if I wasn’t here,” he told the group. “And I love doing what I do now because it’s what Jesus wants. I plan to always be a man of God.”
It’s 10:30 a.m. and the team goes home. Golliher’s day will end after the afternoon services in two resident programs for parolees. Another team will be back in Hollywood Saturday night at midnight to give roses to transsexual prostitutes.
For the Hollywood outreach, Golliher records eight conversions. None of the eight people come back with him. He isn’t deterred.
“You know,” he says grinning, “I feel the presence of Jesus Christ more at night on the streets than I do in the best of church services.”
