During one of our less gratifying fund-raising experiences, the committee reviewing the team lined us up and asked each member how many people we had baptized. I looked self-consciously down at my belt to find not even a hint of a notch. The implication was clear: “You expect us to send you to evangelize in a foreign land when you don’t even do it right here?” It was a question already bouncing around in my own heart, though, causing no little indigestion. I had heard often enough that aspiring missionaries shouldn’t expect the mission field to be the cure for a lifestyle devoid of evangelization.
It was worrisome, to say the least.