"Would you mind if I asked you a question?"

Last week, I was traveling for work. While it’s never fun being away from my wife and the comforts of home, I do enjoy my co-workers a lot, and I love the work that I do. We do technical training workshops, and sped a lot of time explaining relatively arcane geekery and making it accessible to newcomers.

Around 7:00 in the evening, after the training sessions for the day were over, I was standing in the hotel lobby, talking shop with one of the attendees. I was halfway through a nice imported lager when a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked youth walked up to us wearing a spiky haircut and holding a pad of paper.

“I don’t mean to interrupt, but would you mind answering a few questions for a survey about spiritual beliefs I’m doing?”

Street evangelism. Or, in this case, hotel lobby evangelism. It’s funny how long I spent reading books about how to start conversations like that, how to kick off an evangelistic cold-call. I’ve never been very good at it, whether the product was Christianity, consulting services, or web site hosting contracts. Being on the other side of the question, though, I recognized the format. I glanced over at the guy I’d been chatting with, brows raised, and he nodded assent to the would-be pollster.

“If you were to die tonight, are you absolutely certain you would go to Heaven?”

The pad of paper in his hand didn’t have any questions printed on it, and there weren’t any answers written down. The statistical validity of his survey was probably questionable, but I was curious than anything else. Time for evangelism aikido.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Are you?”

I smiled, genuinely curious how he’d respond. This kind of exchange is the bread and butter of a million evangelism tutorials, intended to rattle the folks who’ve grown up accustomed to a Christian cultural consensus without committing to the religion itself. There are predictable branches, like a telemarketing call script, and responses like “I don’t believe in God” or “I’m a Hindu” have optimized conversation paths already charted out. Having read the script, though, I didn’t think there were any FAQs down this road. He looked a little startled but soldiered on.

“Yes, yes I am. Would you like to know how you can be certain, too?”

I considered for a moment. “Well. Would you mind if I asked you a question, first?” He nodded, prepping. “If God desires a leap of faith from us — a step of trust to believe in and worship Him — and faith is the only way to be saved, does pursuing the kind of certainty you’re talking about bring us closer to God? Or does it just keep us from taking that genuine leap of faith?”

Blinking followed for a few moments. He didn’t seem bothered by it, just a bit confused, unsure of how to proceed. The guy I’d been chatting with before the evangelism encounter chuckled, and nodded thoughtfully, while the younger kid complimented me on having thought about the question quite a bit. I thanked him, and he asked us if we’d mind if he prayed with us: it’s how the script says these conversations are supposed to end, whether the listener bites or not. I said I’d be uncomfortable with that, but appreciated his asking. We chatted a bit, and I recommended he check out The Myth Of Certainty, written by a Christian professor at a Christian university for Christians. He wrote it down — the first words on his pad of paper.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll definitely have to take a look at that.”

We watched him as he waved and headed off, and returned to our conversation. The lager was good. As I think back about the evening, I keep returning to the idea of aikido. Its purpose (according to Wikipedia) was to be “an art practitioners could use to defend themselves while also protecting their attacker from injury.” I like that. These kinds of encounters are always loaded in some way, with years of carefully crafted evangelism technique behind them. Kindness and questions, though, feel like a much better response than arguments.