Instant Evangelism

Photographer: Monomov.com

In the age of instant oatmeal, tv dinners, digital photography, Shaw on demand, flash hard drives, and self serve checkouts, patience is a thing of the past. Our patience is so thin that to wait for a web page to load or for our friend to pick up the phone is a tiresome and burdensome task. I am an impatient person. I struggle to wait in grocery lines without becoming irritated. 

To practice patience I have recently taken up Polaroid photography. Instant analog photography may seem like an odd direction to turn to practice patience but Polaroid pictures, while instant in comparison to roll film, are like long grocery lines in comparison to the digital photography we have grown accustom to. I also got a camera app on my phone that makes the digital camera feel more analog. No instant picture or results. I am required to wait about thirty second before I am able to view the picture. A Polaroid in contrast takes 2-4 minutes to develop and depending on the temperature requires my attention during that time. These minimal lengths of time can be frustrating for friends, who complain, wanting to see the picture I took right away. These minimal lengths of time mean that if the picture was not successful I may be unable to retake it because the moment or subject is no longer available. But this required wait time also adds the magical quality of anticipation to my life as I wait for each picture and somehow make the pictures more valuable. 

 My reflections on our instant culture and my foray into practicing patience through pictures have led me to consider if our lack of patience is a primary hindrance to evangelism. Does our need and expectation of instant results lead us in odd and unhelpful directions? We want to be able reach our quotas and demonstrate effective input output ratios. We want to be certain that the time we are putting in is yielding the results we are after. Can we expect 5 conversions in 5 minutes? Are we more effective by witnessing in large quantity through sermons, or online ministry or books?

Does the reality that you are probably not going to experience many people giving their life to Jesus within the first 30 minutes of meeting and talking to them mean that we don’t bother meeting people or talking about Jesus? Has our instant culture destroyed our ability or willingness to patiently walk and talk with people? Have instant and digital results created unhelpful and unrealistic evangelical expectations?