Several months ago WORLD Magazine reporter Sophia Lee  joined me and our Hope Chapel evangelism team on the campus of El Camino College in Torrance, California to ask me about my thoughts on evangelism as well as observe my method. She also interviewed Tony Miano, and GULP!, Ruben Israel. Read the article and let me know if it was fair and balanced. (The photo below is at the Martin Luther King Jr. Parade from about five years ago. Yes, those are my two little distracted daughters.)

Here’s an excerpt:

LOS ANGELES—I am deeply conflicted about street evangelists. I’m a Christian, a missionary’s kid, a pastor’s daughter. I attend a church where the conclusion to every sermon emphasizes the need to evangelize. We have “Evangelism 101” seminars, mass street evangelism march-outs, mission groups, prayer sessions—anything to save more souls. 

So I’m pro-evangelism—and yet, I cringe when I hear street evangelists blow horns, interrupt public events, thrust tracts into the hands of passersby, and yell, “Repent or go to hell!” In my multiethnic, church-peppered neighborhood in Los Angeles, a walk down to the supermarket means running a gauntlet of well-meaning evangelists shoving gospel tracts and CDs into shoppers’ hands. 

What can be wrong with that?

People call Los Angeles many names, most of them tongue-in-cheek, with unmasked condescension: La-La Land, Tinseltown, a city “100 miles wide and 2 inches deep,” a city of commercialized sin and sinful commercialization. I respect sincere communities of Christians in this sinful, superficial city who are doing what they believe is God’s ultimate commission: to be Christ’s “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria … to the ends of the earth.”

STILL, I AND MANY OTHERS wonder if such confrontational street evangelism is effective. Read the rest by clicking here.