Back when I was in college, there was a prison ministry program which I was very involved in. Our main focus was a weekend retreat we put on three times a year for groups of teen boys at a juvenile detention center not far from our school. This may be surprising to you, but spending a weekend talking about God with juvenile delinquents isn’t a popular college past time. So we often struggled to maintain a large enough group of volunteers to keep the program going. At some point we reached out to Wheaton College which was just a few miles away to help fill the gap. It turned out that spending weekends with young criminals wasn’t any more popular among Wheaton College kids than it was at my school, but we did get a few volunteers to help us out. They were very gracious and didn’t say a word about our swearing, dirty jokes and the way we’d crank up the Violent Femmes and dance around like crazy people to blow off steam after a long day in juvi. There was a slight conflict one summer when an interpretive dance major from Hope Bible College joined us while home for summer break. She saw her dancing as a gift from and to God and took offense at Wheaton’s taliban-like ban on dancing. Civil disagreement ensued.

As amusing as that was, the only real problem we had with our Wheaton volunteers was when it came to witnessing. You see, the retreat we put on was a common Catholic model in which each member of the leadership team would give a talk centered on a particular topic using their own story as an illustration. So we were witnessing. The problem was that there’s a strong “script” among evangelicals for witnessing which basically goes, “I used to be bad, then I met God and now I’m much better (if not actually good) and you can be too.” Which resulted in on particularly memorable (to me) talk in which a very nice guy from Wheaton stood up and told a room full of criminals – including a couple who had killed or tried to kill someone – about how as a degenerate youth he used to pick on his sister and ridicule her until she went crying to mommy. Hair tugging may have been involved. But then his mom convinced him to accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior and he learned to cherish rather than harass her. Fortunately the boys on the retreat were so in awe of the fact that real, live college students were spending a weekend with them rather than spending it drinking and banging that they took it in the spirit it was intended. Continue reading “Learning By Witnessing”