I came across the below excerpt here. I found the story interesting as it shows one of the cons of confrontational evangelism–follow-up.
Looking for a semester of “cross-cultural” experience, non-Christian college student Kevin Roose transferred to Liberty University. As an undercover unbeliever, Roose’s goal was to understand how Christians think and get a sense of the evangelical culture from a firsthand “insider” perspective.
As part of his cultural experiment, Kevin decided to go on a weeklong outreach adventure over Spring Break with a group of 13 other Liberty students. Their mission? To bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the beer-guzzling, body-baring, sand-loving sinners on Daytona Beach. The team was trained to share the gospel and then unleashed to comb the beach on a spiritual search and rescue mission.
After a solid week of almost constant rejections, the group consoled themselves that they had planted spiritual seeds that would sprout later. Roose concluded that these well-intentioned street evangelists had really not made any converts. Even the few who had ostensibly said “yes” to Jesus were not followed up on or plugged into local churches. In his words,
“The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we’d be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any – guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there’s no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn’t), Martina would have led him through the Sinner’s Prayer (“Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior” or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion – which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.” (Source: salon.com).
