Last weekend, Hubby and I observed a clever and (I think) effective episode of personal evangelism. Take notes.
The up-escalator was out at the Dupont Circle Metro station, so we waited with a small crowd at the elevator, some of whom had been there a couple of minutes. Two women — who had a visiting conventioneer poise and manner — one of whom was talking about a sustainable and spiritually meaningful approach to the difficulties of modern living to the other. Or so I gather from a young man who volunteered that he agreed with her. We boarded the elevator.
The non-speaking woman addressed the young man enthusiastically (but not manically or invasively) that the speaker practiced Small Slightly-Controversial Global Religion (SS-CGR), and that the young man might find it helpful, too. She repeated the SS-CGR’s unusual name, and encouraged him to visit its website. Then the two woman tried to scare up a pen and a slip of paper to write the URL on.
I don’t think the two women were trolling the transit system deliberately to ensnare strangers into their fold. Rather, they found the SS-CGR to be a valuable, meaningful spiritual path and wanted to guide a possible fellow-traveler towards the truth. I mention it because it’s certainly a more attractive evangelism technique than the pamphleteering for “personality tests” a far more toxic group practices in the same neighborhood. Unitarian Universalism can be known by those who live it, rather than its slogans. And the URL is easy to recall.
(Later I did see that there was a SS-CGR conference in town that day.)