As college freshmen, my friends and I spent many Friday evenings wandering around Walmarts in southwest Ohio. We paced the tile floors, squinted under fluorescent lights, smelled the bread wafting in from the Subway in the foyer. We strolled up and down the aisles, passing unloaded palettes and abandoned carts. But we weren’t there for groceries. We were there to ask shoppers how we could pray for them.

Our method was simple: Identify a shopper, approach that person slowly, and introduce yourself. Be warm, concise. State your purpose. Hi! My name is Heidie, and this is my friend Leah. We’re Christians, and we were wondering if there was any way we could pray for you today. Then we would smile and wait until the person we were speaking to no longer looked startled.

Many people said no thank you and hurried away, the way one does when cornered by a Girl Scout during cookie season. Some ignored us, continuing to reach for canned goods and check items off their lists. Some responded with open derision, emitting unfriendly grunts or mumbling things like you fundamentalists. But occasionally, a person would say sure, we’d inquire what about, and then we’d start to pray.

Our prayer offer was genuine, though perhaps a sort of front. What we really wanted was to evangelize. We wanted to present the gospel message beginning to end, creation to consummation, and invite people to respond. So we prayed informative prayers. We situated requests inside the story of biblical history, defining terms and quoting Scripture along the way. The social conventions surrounding prayer—namely, that you remain buckled in until someone says amen—made our presentations possible.

This was the evangelistic strategy we’d learned from students earning their master of divinity at our devout Baptist college. The MDiv students took a course titled Introduction to Evangelism, so our campus had a constant supply of pastors-in-training looking to lead outings and confer tips. If all you can do is pray for someone, I heard many MDiv students explain, then pray the gospel. So we did. I prayed the gospel in the produce aisle of a superstore. My friend Zoe opted for the coffee shops in “Hippie Village.” My friend Andrew preferred a nearby mall. My roommate, Alina, visited public universities.

The MDiv students weren’t driving our school’s emphasis on evangelism—more so responding to it. In our daily campus-wide chapel services, speakers regularly preached that all Christians are called to live on mission and that we are in a cosmic battle for souls. My group’s Walmart outreach may have been a caricature of these principles—something I credit to the clumsiness of freshman fervor—but we were working from our chaplains’ exhortations. Tell the story. Name the stakes. Make clear the route to salvation.

Sure, we’d get backlash. But the gospel was offensive to nonbelievers. A “stumbling block,” in Paul’s words (1 Cor. 1:23). Backlash was to be expected. Our job was to “shake the dust off [our] feet” and carry on (Matt. 10:14). One chapel speaker quoted Charles Spurgeon on the subject. “If sinners be damned,” Spurgeon had written, “at least let them leap to hell over our dead bodies.” The speaker enunciated hard on dead bodies. Harrowed amens echoed from our chapel audience.

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My Walmart evangelism faded midway through my sophomore year, when most of the MDiv students I knew had finished Introduction to Evangelism and moved on to Biblical Greek. Quiet Friday evenings gave me an opportunity to take stock. I was glad to have an answer when chapel speakers asked the room, How are you responding to the Great Commission? I was grateful, also, for my hardened spiritual calluses, for the dying to self I’d experienced in the face of derision and side-eyes.

My efforts had come from an earnest place. One of the most common encouragements my friends and I would offer each other after a difficult exchange with a shopper was, strangely, a reminder of hell’s reality. Real people were actually facing eternal condemnation. Constantly. A shot at saving someone from that fate was worth rejection.

And yet I still wasn’t satisfied with our approach. People rarely agreed to pray with us, and even those who did hurried away after “amen.” No questions, no conversations. I knew the typical consolation of We just plant the seed, and God will give growth if he wills (1 Cor. 3:6), but I’d started to lose confidence that we were really “planting seeds.” The difficulties we faced seemed prior to “planting,” and prior, even to the “rock of offense” (1 Pet. 2:8, ESV). As I replayed memories of botched approaches in my head, it occurred to me that maybe the gospel hadn’t been what offended our Walmart shoppers; maybe the gall of two strange, Pollyanna-ish teenagers demanding their attention in the chip aisle had.

My reflections were helped along by my upper-level writing courses. Our classes featured loads of discussions about literature’s devotional potential and the duty of the Christian writer, but there wasn’t pressure to sneak sermons into our stories, nor was there any subtext that our writing would be better if we did. Instead, my professors wanted us to approach storytelling with nuance. We discussed books that overtly proclaimed the gospel, like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but we also discussed works that were more subtly—if even detectably—Christian, like Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and T. S. Eliot’s poetry.

Whatever we read, we focused on craft. We were just as concerned with what an author was saying as we were with how the author was saying it. Good writers, my professors emphasized, care about presentation. They connect with their readers. They build rapport. They use humor, tone, narrative, tact, which is why people feel so affected by their words. These were important breakthroughs for me. They taught me a lesson I desperately needed to learn, with applications far beyond the classroom: One could have a great message but deliver it terribly.

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I spent the first half of my senior year applying to MFA programs in creative writing, and by the spring, I had been accepted to one at the University of Iowa. UIowa was the kind of place that chapel speakers referred to as “the world.” My university president had recently written an article in which he criticized educational systems teaching “secular humanism, evolutionary theory, and a Godless atheism.” I was headed for one of those.

And with no semblance of an evangelistic strategy, might I add. My Walmart reflections had persuaded me away from the cold-call approach, but they hadn’t squelched my obligation to the Great Commission. I wanted to lead people to the light, to snatch souls out of the fire (Jude v. 23). But it felt upside-down to show up at a university declaring that I had something to teach everyone else. And I didn’t want to reduce my soon-to-be classmates to a sort of faceless evangelistic cause before even meeting them.

Get-to-know-you questions filled my first weeks at Iowa. Classmates asked me, What was your college like? What do you write about? On repeat, I answered: small Baptist college, very devout, Christian art, conversion. I expected my peers to produce the same look of stunned discomfort that my Walmart targets typically had. Instead, they asked more questions.

My answers opened new conversations: about my high-school conversion to Christianity, and my junior year discipleship group, and a 62-foot-tall Jesus statue in Ohio. I wondered if all this talk might count as a kind of evangelism. The rubric in my head told me no. I wasn’t “naming the stakes” or inviting them to bow their heads in informative prayer. But I was providing an account of the Christian life. Of my Christian life. And it was the details they seemed most interested in. The earthiness and humor, for example, of my 14-year-old self googling “serious Jesus colleges Midwest” seemed to give my peers something they could latch onto, some sort of example in which they could locate or revise the things they’d heard about religion.

A bit further into the semester, a classmate asked me why I’d chosen the MFA at Iowa. I explained: As newlyweds, my husband and I decided we both wanted to attend graduate programs. We sat down and made a list of every university in the US that offered both a funded MFA in creative nonfiction and a funded PhD in theoretical physics. We applied until we had no more money to cover application fees. Then we prayed for months. He got accepted into Iowa. I got waitlisted. So we continued to pray and asked everyone we knew to pray, and then a few weeks later, on the national graduate-school deadline, four hours before the midnight cutoff, I got an email letting me know that a spot had opened up for me.

“I’ll give it to you,” my classmate said, half smiling. “That sounds … divine.” 

The moment felt significant: an agnostic glimpsing God. But I didn’t want to push the conversation toward some cosmic ultimatum. Maybe that was my cowardice. Maybe it was something like tact.

I’ve heard all kinds of objections to evangelistic finesse: that God works through broken vessels, that we aren’t to conform to the patterns of the world, that the beauty of the gospel is shared through stumbling lips. I understand the sentiments, and I’m grateful for the ways they encourage Christians who, with Moses, say, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent” (Ex. 4:10). It’s a prayer we all pray at times.

But I wonder if our familiarity with that prayer has led us to expect bumpy deliveries—or to prefer them, even, misinterpreting a lack of discretion as evangelistic seriousness. It’s easy to cast the plight of a Walmart evangelist in the same light as the apostles’ persecution. It’s harder to admit that confronting strangers with the gospel in the street, a park, or a store might produce an affront that’s more social than theological. Harder to accept that people don’t like being dragged into intimate conversations with strangers. We find ideas more compelling when they’re delivered through the lips of those we know—that is, when there’s a connection, or a relationship, or context.

To be fair, some are hostile toward evangelism regardless of its delivery, even among friends. In one of my first-semester seminars at Iowa, I listened in on a conversation about proselytizing. I didn’t know the word, but I could identify the sour tone in which it was spoken. One classmate called it condescending. Another used the word fanatical. My professor said it was an act of colonialism. People nodded. It wasn’t until someone explicitly said religion that I understood what we were talking about. They weren’t decrying the “stumbling block” (1 Cor. 1:23) of the gospel; they were wholesale decrying the evangelistic act. They were angered by the overt persuasion of it, by the thought that someone might try to convert them.

Two weeks later, the Gideons came to Iowa City. They stood on high-traffic sidewalks and passed out pocket-sized New Testaments. I accepted one as a small act of solidarity, despite having six Bibles at home, and then retreated to a nearby academic building to watch from a window. I winced when students waved the Gideons off, glared, or accepted a pocket New Testament only to throw it in the trashcan at the corner. I watched many New Testaments topple into the trash. I saw the Gideons see it, too.

These were the scenes I held in my head as I worked on my first workshop essay—a personal piece of writing I’d submit to my classmates for feedback. I feared being accused of proselytizing, and I hated that fear, so I mustered the courage I could and wrote about it indirectly. I wrote about the Bible lessons I’d delivered to third graders during my summers working at a Christian camp, and about my time as a public relations writer for my Baptist college’s marketing division, and about my run-in with the Gideons, all situated between my abstract ponderings about religious outreach—about “proselytizing.” It was an unwieldy collage of an essay that I submitted in a panic.

On the day of my workshop, I heard two clear notes from the room. One, the abstract sections were muddled and unnecessary. Two, they loved the moments when I presented religion through personal stories.

One classmate told me the essay “came alive” in the summer-camp scenes. Another said the narrative details made her feel that she was seeing inside Christianity. A third said the personal anecdotes helped her access the essay’s ideas. It wasn’t the reaction I expected, especially with an essay so clearly about religious people sharing their religion. But somehow the narratives created more engagement. A different professor of mine would state it succinctly in a conference with me a couple semesters later: “I’m not interested in talking about Christianity. But I do like your stories.”

Her words called to mind something Paul wrote of his own evangelistic appeal: “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law. … To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Cor. 9:20–22). And perhaps we could add: To the writers I became a writer.

The storyteller and the evangelist alike bring listeners to the brink of a new world. They invite them in, the refrain Come and see on their lips. C. S. Lewis, the gospel allegorist I read in my undergrad literature courses—the writer also responsible for some of the 20th century’s most winsome spiritual essays—described stories, sermonic or not, as windows and doors. That is, access points. Portals. Things people can peer into and step through to “see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts.” I can’t think of a better description of what evangelism hopes to accomplish in its hearers.

Of course, this is not a foolproof method; there isn’t one. But I’m convinced evangelists would do well to stash some stories in their pockets, especially for an audience whose greatest need is not airtight doctrinal presentation but a better narrative and a new set of eyes to see it. Again, in Lewis’s words: “One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in.’”

After the workshop, one of my classmates texted me that she was appointing me her “spiritual consultant.” Her words contained some hyperbole, but she wasn’t lying. She began sending her questions my way. How were saints canonized in the Catholic church? How many Marys were in Jesus’ friend group? What did liturgy mean?

Other classmates have joined in, too. Since my first workshop, I’ve been asked, “What are the classes of relics? Why did Saint Nicholas and Arius fight? Why do Christians rub ashes on their foreheads in February? Are songbooks the same as hymnals? Is hell a metaphor? Why do Christians get married so young?” And, ever so nonchalantly—“How does the Incarnation work?”

I love these questions. I love them because they’re meaty, and because they expect answers, and because they bid me to discuss the things of God with seekers and skeptics and friends, which is what I craved and never found in a year’s worth of Walmart aisles.

Heidie Senseman is an MFA candidate in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have previously appeared in Vita Poetica, Dappled Things, Plough, Ekstasis, and other publications.