Just over 30 years ago I was introduced to Evangelical Christianity while serving in the Missouri Independence Mission. Jackson County may have been near the locale of the Garden of Eden but, at times, the area was anything but paradisiacal for me. My first day in this county so famous for 19th century persecution of Mormons, my companion and I set out to tract. We knocked a few doors and then approached a home where the owner was cutting wood in the front yard. The man shouted, â??Get the hell off my property!â? and then chased after us with his screaming chain saw . . . we ran. Once safely distanced from the angry Missourian we gathered ourselves and I said to my companion, â??Elder, that is just one more reason that I hate Evangelicals!â?
Hate? Yes, hate. A little background. At that point I had been serving for 18 months. I had been verbally abused by Evangelical Christians almost every day. I did not know if the man wielding a chain saw was an Evangelical but he got credit for being one because Evangelicals were mean. It was the high point of the God Makers and we were the recipients of the bitter fruits of self-identified Evangelicals. They took as fact the contents of that anti-Mormon film. It got so bad that my companion and I knelt in a thicket of trees just outside the townâ??s Assembly of God church, prayed for relief, and blessed the land that the hearts of our harshest enemiesâ??attendees at that Evangelical churchâ??would be softened. We didnâ??t bless our enemiesâ??we really didnâ??t want to talk to them face-to-face. I guess we hoped that the land would somehow transfer love and peace through the souls of their feet and spread from there. Frankly, we were young and naïve but our intentions were fairly pure, albeit misguided.
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