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Goodbye Jesus

Leading People To Christ


Mythra

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I was wondering something. Were any of you successful when you were xians in "leading others to Christ" ? And, if so, did you do anything about it once you deconverted?

 

I was a good christian soldier and made many attempts. (including one or two that could have gotten me in deep shit at work).

 

But, thankfully, I can't say that I ever actually had someone convert to xianity because of me. I'm not quite sure what I'd do about it today if I had. It would be awkward at best dealing with it.

 

Were any of you successful SOUL WINNERS for Jesus?

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I didn't "win" anybody to Christdom. But then, I can't say I am or have ever been the most outgoing individual. I've only recently progressed just enough to get along with my co-workers and deal with the public. The only thing I sell nowadays anyway is 1-hour photo development.

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Sadly yes, I had "won a sould for christ". But only one, I was very shy as a child and early teenager (time period i was "christian), so I didn't like to talk to people about jeebus. But one of my friends was really into Wicca, and I being the ignorant christian thought she was going to go to hell for it. I loved my friend and the thought of her burning in hell scared me to death, I talked to my pastor about it and he encouraged me to "do what you have to" to win her over to christ. I made two failed attempts and went back to the pastor, he sat me down and told me word for word what to say to her, he even told me to lie and make up "experiences" with god, to scare her into believing. Being an impressionable 13 year old, I did exactly what he said, and it worked! She was so scared by the "experience" my pastor had told me to tell her, she converted!

 

Years later when I deconverted I brought up christianity to her, she is still a very liberal christian. I apologized and told her the whole story, she wasn't angry but she still holds onto the idea of bible god and jesus. I still feel completely stupid for falling for what the pastor did, and feel like an ass for brainwashing my friend into this religion.

 

At least it was only one person though, I don't know if i could handle it if i was responsible for 20 or 30 or more ppl "coming to christ" because of me.

 

Dakota

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I tried to proselytize to my friends. Most of them were, fortunately, too smart to fall for it.

 

The only individual I know of who actually converted was my now-ex husband. I put serious pressure on him while we were dating and at some point he went for it. To this day he remains a Christian. He's very active in the Presbyterian church we used to attend. He's a deacon, sings in the choir, and goes to Bible study regularly. He's semi-conservative about it - last I heard, he still considered the two of us married in the eyes of his God, despite my leaving him. But that was awhile ago; I don't know if he still thinks that nowadays.

 

Oddly enough I have no idea how or why he fell for it all. Out of all the people I've known in life he falls among the top 5 most intelligent, with a genius IQ and a mind like a steel trap. I have to wonder if he didn't join up because of how socially and emotionally inept he was, if perhaps being Xian gives him some kind of way of relating to people on something other than an intellectual, left-brain level.

 

But I don't really know. It's been over 6 years since we split, and we prettu much stay out of each others' lives now. (I don't think he even knows I've remarried.) If he wants to stick with Xianity, more power to him. I feel no guilt because I know he has a smart enough mind to get out of it again if he wanted to.

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Years later when I deconverted I brought up christianity to her, she is still a very liberal christian.

 

Well, at least she isn't a flaming fundy, seeing demons around every corner and organizing rallies against Harry Potter books.

 

I think the pressure to evangelize was one of the worst things about being a christian. It weighed on me more than the pressure to be sinless or the pressure to share your money with the LORD.

 

You could never do enough. People were going to hell because you didn't open your mouth. All eternity depended on you. The Keith Green song "Asleep in the Light" used to always get me.

 

Just another layer of guilt which was piled on to the whole trip.

 

I really can't see for the life of me how christianity can be construed as some kind of freedom.

 

To me, it was a load.

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Yeah, 5 or 6. One of them refuses to talk to me now that I'm an atheist. The others I've lost contact with many years ago.

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Can't say I ever "won" anybody for Jeezus or "led anybody" to salvation. I never was much good at selling defective wares.

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Not *specifically*. I was never pushy about it. I used to be one of those "show by example" types. You know, one of those xtians that sort of ignored the wrathful, vengeful stuff and focused more on the love, forgiveness, etc. I've always hated the fundie types even when I was a christian.

 

That hasn't changed about me. I am still a loving, forgiving type person. However, I just no longer follow a *god* or any doctrines.

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You could never do enough. People were going to hell because you didn't open your mouth. All eternity depended on you.

 

Same for me Mythra. I used to go to my local town thinking about all the lost souls going to hell. Thinking that I was somehow responsible for getting the message to them was almost too much to bare. I heard a preacher once say that their blood was on my hands if I failed to talk to someone when I had the chance......talk about GUILT!!

 

I remember chasing after this woman once on a countryside walk and giving her a tract. She had passed me earlier and I felt I should have said something. She must have thought I was absolutely mad!!

 

I did lead someone to Christ years ago. I feel guilty now. And if I could talk to her I would. I just hope she didn,t get as messed up as me.

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I did have a catholic friend, that came to me to a lot of my pentecostal church events with me and I did get a letter when I was in college that she had become a born again christian and was going to the local pentecostal assemblies of canada bible school...at the time I cried because I was so happy and was so glad that I had been able to plant the seed that someone else had waterred and nutured.

 

Yup kind of embarressed to admit that, but I really did that that back then.

 

But I could bever go out and actually convert someone, just too shy and was never a good debater I did try with some friends in highschool and ended up feeling like a bad defender of the faith,and then used the verse not to throw your pearls infront of the swine, so I wouldn't feel as guility for not proseltyizing to thease people.... :Doh:

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Not to my knowledge. Despite having a desire to see people "saved", I was too shy and too hesitant and really, deep down, I didn't want to push my views down other people's throats.

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At my old church the pastor used to tell us that when we got to heaven each of us would get a crown, and for every person we had "led to christ" there would be a jewel on the crown. As a little kid attending church and hearing that I used to worry about getting to heaven and only have one jewel and everybody else laughing at me. Seems so utterly silly now, but try telling that to a 12 year old.

 

I think its bullshit how they try to make their believers feel like shit because they are too shy or to polite to preach at other people.

 

stupid christians :loser:

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I was a preachy scumbag for a full year, before I toned down. It was just downright nonsensical believing that souls couldn't be won due to convincement alone. It was as if I had to give the credit to "God" for saying that he led the soul to him. What the hell? I've been used by people many times in my life, but now I had a "God" using me for his will and I was supposed to feel good about that? What's this whole servanthood crap about? That baffled me a lot at times. Anyway, I did have a close friend who was an Atheist and I tried "converting" him by being kind and explaining why I believed in what I believed. I tried to argue that all inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible were a result of misinterpretations, but at night I would often rethink about the contents of the Bible.

 

I was lying to myself that I was believing in "God" with utmost faith and that I wasn't in doubt, but the more I thought about that, the more I doubted. My friend said he wanted nothing to do with religion, but that he believed in "God." Well, that's as far as it went with a "conversion." Thankfully, he was the one that told me after a while that "God" didn't do anything and that praying did nothing for him. At the time, I was discouraged, appalled, confused and angry, but now it makes all the more sense how crazy I must've sounded back then when I emailed him with a lengthy explanation of the fall of mankind. I'm laughing at my absurdity. It was Christianity that destroyed this friendship, because it brainwashed me when I was so close to leaving. I had that strong sense of guilt, which I confused with and took literally as being the "tug" from the "Holy Spirit." Bad company was the Christians and the Christians weren't good people either. They were all control freaks trying to manipulate the way I did things and how I lived my life. Being a Christian was not only a pain, but it was a 24/7 mind-numbing, psychologically draining torture. I can't believe that I was succumbing to such erroneous behaviour. Well, now with my sanity back intact, I only have regrets about the broken friendship. I'm damn glad that he's not a Christian at least, as with all my other former friends.

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I deconverted just after high school, so I didn't have as much time to try and be successful as some of ya. I wasn't much the preachy type anyway.

I did however, occasionally try to win my agnostic high school boyfriend to Christ, but was unsuccessful. He probably didn't take my faith seriously, since I was always sucking his dick, regardless of how "wrong" it was. Hahahaha! :D

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No - I tried but I sucked at it. At least my bad luck streak came in handy for once :)

 

BTW, nice avatar, Dakota :jerkoff:

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No, but then I was always introverted anyway. And when you go to a Lutheran school, you don't exactly have many opportunities to witness, since everyone believes pretty much the same as you (or at least says they do). And by the time I got to high school, I was very much of the live and let live philosophy.

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Sadly, yes. I have led some people into Christianity.

 

And no, I haven't done anything about it. :shrug:

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Mythra there was at least one young woman that I "led to Christ". I'm not really sure how to feel about it now though. I guess that I'm hoping that she will gain whatever benefits there are to be gleaned from Christianity and then I hope that she'll grow out of it.

 

The worst part of it though is that she gravitated towards a speaking-in-tongues, spirit-filled, rolling-on-the-ground type of church. I never had much time for that kind of Christian even when I was a Christian myself.

 

I hope that she was the only one that I "led to Christ".

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My friends are pretty intellectual so I always seemed to be on the defensive growing up. But like Mythra said, it was a huge burden for me. I get really anxious talking to people and that's without the Jesus part. It just piled on the guilt.

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I don't think I ever converted an honest to Darwin non-believer. But I did gather up quite a few lost sheep from among those that had gone to pasture from those other godless denominations, especially Lutherans and Catholics. At the time I considered the process leading people to Christ, because as a evangelist from the TrueChurch™ I knew that there was no salvation without immersion for the forgiveness of sin of an understanding believer. Getting sprinkled as a kid didn't count.

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I retreated from Xianity at the age of 15, except for the social reward hypocrisy part which I kept up for a few years and returned to when it suited me, but I was never a proselyte. I didn't believe it, so I didn't try to get anyone else to. But I pretended a lot, until I became self-realized and strong in myself. In fact, I didn't "declare" my atheism, or come out of the closet as it were, until 1992.

 

After I stopped "waffling," like many other atheists my disbelief in gods and anything supernatural grew enormously and quickly. Living in a hotbed of fake religious enthusiasm as I now do, it is very difficult to keep my mouth shut...I hear many and varied kinds of religious claptrap every day.

 

I used one of my worst (if not THE worst) putdowns this very day. There is a recorded loop of religious Xmas-type messages on loudspeakers outside the store where I buy my groceries, and somebody I know was giving this stuff a few "amens." I said to him "you and I both know that you don't believe that shit, so why do you repeat it and amen it to try to make people think that you do?"

 

He answered me "aw, come on, now."

 

Since I know him very well, I concluded my chastisement with "you just want to keep on doing business with these fogheads, you hypocrite."

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I was raised in the American South. To be honest, there aren't that many people out there who needed to be converted. :P A few Jews, one or two Hindus...small town.

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I just wanted to put a lightly different slant on this ...

 

and this relates to adult decisions - not childhood 'choices' ...

 

When we 'converted' - irrespective of what others said to us -we did that to ourselves ... and when other people 'converted', irrespective of what we might have said to them - they did that to themselves.

 

I guess around 15 people would have mentioned me as being 'key' in their path to finding christianity. I didn't ever 'pray the prayer' with someone else though, because I was never into that kind of evangelism and felt most at home in churches where 'relationship evangelism' was valued and taught.

 

I have come clean with all but one of the people I influenced. Her faith is fragile but important to her and when I first expressed some doubt to her, she came back with 'oh no - not you, please no, you can't doubt' ... and the words were spoken with distress so I don't think it would be fair to continue the discussion unless she indicates she wants to.

 

About six have questioned and left, another four have shifted their positions to a more liberal and almost deist outlook - not that I'm claiming this was my influence - many were asking their own questions. Four are still fully paid up fundamentalists and praying for me to come back to the fold with touching fevour.

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I wasn't successful in converting anyone. I'm happy I didn't cause top of my list was my husband...so glad that he was having none of it.

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I was a very evangelical fundie Christian. I regularly prayed for everyone who lived at my apartment complex and did spiritual warfare in their behalf, claiming the entire place "for Jesus" many times. I passed out those ridiculous Chick tracts to total strangers at convenience stores and toll booths. I wrote long evangelistic letters to members of my family. Thankfully, none of them ever converted. I recall giving a working friend a ride home years ago and preaching to him the whole way. We prayed for him to receive Kryasst when we got to his house, but I'm sure now that he prayed with me just to get me to shut the fuck up rather than out of any sincere desire to convert to xtianity. So, no jewels are in my glorious crown! Glory!

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