I got a letter in the mail last week. Actually, it didn’t come to my house but to a church with which I consulted in 2019 — I guess that’s the only address he could find for me.
In the envelope: a 10-page, single-spaced, handwritten letter; a “poem” by Calvinist pastor, John Piper; and a card apologizing for the length of the letter. It was signed by “Bobby Michaels” from Peachtree City, Georgia, with a P.O. box as a return address. Based on clues in the letter, the writer is in his mid-50s, like me.
The first half of the letter is his testimony: how his mother committed adultery and then was saved by a door-to-door evangelist, how he shoplifted and “fornacated” [sic] during his teen years. He goes on and on about how much he loved to sin and how he prayed to God to leave him alone. I mean, Bobby really loved sinning. After several conversions and subsequent backsliding, he finally, truly converted at age 23, about 30 years ago.
Then he pivots to me. I follow a god of my imagination, not the God of the Bible:
Mr. Jones, you are free to create your own religion, like Joseph Smith, but please don’t call your faith, or religion, Christianity. That is dishonest. Your Jesus is not the Jesus of the Bible. Once again, your Jesus is a figment of your imagination.
In the next paragraph, he explains how we all will bow before Christ:
Yes, Rob Bell will bow. Bart Campolo will bow. Hitler will bow. Popes will bow. Presidents, pimps, prostitutes, you and I, we will all bow down to the sovereign king.
While some will live in eternal bliss with God, he writes, most will “be tormented with fire and sulfur.” Notwithstanding the utter ridiculousness of equating Rob Bell with Hitler, the letter is less aggressive than letters I’ve gotten in the past, and far gentler than most social media trolling I’ve experienced (like the guy on X (née Twitter) who yesterday tried to get me dropped from speaking at a conference). Bobby regularly tells me that he loves me, that he’s a “blind beggar helping other blind beggars find food and water,” and that it’s not too late for me to embrace the true gospel.
What comes through clearly is that he’s well-intentioned, he’s being genuine and authentic. He really believes what he’s writing, and he really thinks that he’s going to heaven and I’m going to hell.
What’s curious is that he doesn’t indicate the impetus for his writing. Did he read one of my books? See a video of me speaking? Follow me on Twitter? Because of his lack of specificity, I don’t know what, exactly, it is that I believe that dooms me to hell. He proffers no credentials — as far as I can tell, he’s neither a pastor nor a theologian. And he does not offer any specific critiques of my beliefs.
The real question is whether he thinks it will work. It seems like more than a longshot that you’d write a letter to someone with a PhD in theology — a letter that contains no theological reasoning but instead simply asserts, My version of Christianity is right and yours is wrong — and honestly expect to change the mind of your letter’s recipient. If he really thought he’d convert me with this unsolicited correspondence, he’d be delusional.
But he doesn’t seem delusional, so I don’t think that’s it. Instead, I think this is a CYA (cover your ass) move. When he stands at the Pearly Gates, he can say that he tried, that he evangelized a wayward theologian. His conscience is clear.
I was kicked out of Campus Crusade for Christ in January, 1988, by my “discipler,” Perry Seale, for having an “unteachable spirit.” I asked too many questions, like why they all went to churches that didn’t allow women to preach. There wasn’t room for that in Crusade.
One of my big questions was regarding the evangelism techniques they taught us. After the big Wednesday night meeting, once a month they sent us out to knock on dorm room doors. If a fellow student answered, we lied and said we were their to take a survey (there was no survey). “Are you interested in spiritual things?” we asked, which to a college student is like offering candy to a child. Once inside the dorm room, we’d get into the famous tract, the “Four Spiritual Laws” and try to get a quick conversion.
Back at home in Minnesota, I’d been taught “friendship evangelism,” also known as “relational evangelism.” In short, that meant making friends with people and sharing my faith with them over time and within a relationship of trust.
On the eve of getting excommunicated, I asked Perry about Crusade’s method of knocking on doors (and similar methods like “slow-motion football” on the beach in Fort Lauderdale (former Crusaders, can I get an “Amen”?)). He said (and I quote (from memory)):
My job isn’t to tend the orchard. My job is to walk through the orchard, pick the ripe fruit, and then move on to the next orchard.
I think Bobby was working from the same playbook when he wrote me. The efficacy of his letter was not his concern. The work of changing hearts is God’s work, he thinks, so all he has to do is fire off letters. Whether I go to heaven or hell is up to God (but also, somehow, up to my acceptance of his proposal? Calvinism doesn’t hold water, logically).
I have mixed feelings about the letter. On the one hand, the fact that he’d spend the time to write me, by hand, rather than fire off an email or social media post is compelling. But the P.O. box, the pseudonym (I can find no Bobby Michaels in Georgia online other than a Christian singer who died in 2009) makes it seem a bit sketchy — like this correspondent doesn’t really want to correspond. He doesn’t want a conversation, he simply hopes for a conversion. (BTW, the guy who trolled me on X doesn’t want a conversation either, because I reached out to him and got no response.)
“Bobby” and the Twitter troll are the equivalent of drone pilots in war, strafing enemy combatants from thousands of miles without ever having to get blood on their uniforms.
God bless Bobby, whoever he is. I hope he has better luck evangelizing people he actually knows.
That’s disingenuous — I actually don’t hope that. I just hope he finds peace.