Following Manny Pacquiao’s call for Christians to set annual “soul-winning” goals, Tim Yearsley questions whether targets risk turning people into units and evangelists into anxious, urgent performers
Ask most people, Christian or not, what comes to mind when they hear the word ‘evangelism’, and you’ll probably hear some combination of ‘embarrassing’, ‘awkward’, and ‘dreaded by both the intended target and the person speaking’.
This, at least, was my feeling for most of my Christian life. For years I thought of evangelism as I thought of seeing the dentist. Necessary, allegedly good for me, and something I would happily reschedule indefinitely. Not to mention the fear of what would happen when I opened my mouth.
So I had some sympathy when I heard Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino ex-boxer-turned evangelist, urging thousands of Christian leaders to rethink their evangelistic approach.
Well, sympathy at first. Then a rising unease.
The trouble with holy KPIs
Pacquiao’s pitch is: set yourself a target for evangelism. Start modest – two souls this year, five the next. Treat evangelism the way your manager treats sales figures: something to aim at, and thereby prove you’re taking the work seriously.
I get the appeal. Targets turn a vague obligation into something achievable. But turn evangelism into a KPI and, before you know it, you’ll have turned people into units. Two souls a year becomes a bar to clear, and that, even with the best of intentions, makes us hurried, transactional, and pushy.
I’ve lived that way. I have seen others live that way too.
I remember a Christian student bursting into our shared kitchen during a mission week, her hands shaking, demanding, “Quickly! Someone tell me why the Bible is anti-slavery!” She’d been mid-conversation with a coursemate and needed an answer immediately. When I tried, clumsily, to slow her down, she looked at me as if I’d missed the point entirely.
“Don’t you understand it’s his eternal salvation at stake?”
She wasn’t wrong that it mattered. She was wrong that it depended on her ability to produce an airtight defence of church history before the kettle boiled. The better move – perhaps the harder one – would have been to admit she didn’t have the answer either, and keep the conversation open (rather than closing it down with an answer).
That’s the trap in targets: a belief that if someone isn’t visibly moving toward Jesus, then we’re not trying hard enough. But it isn’t true. And it works against us: an urgent approach jars with the character of a God who is famously not in a hurry, per the Apostle Peter:
“[The Lord] is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)
God moves at the pace of relationships, not arbitrary targets. So if the Lord of the universe can hold off the end of all things because He’s still waiting patiently for people to come round, I can resist the urge to close the deal by December.
A more excellent way
Reflecting on my own dentistry-adjacent dread, I looked for a better example and found one, fittingly, in an actual dentist. We’ll call her Jemma.
Dentistry is the UK’s most-sued profession, short on calm and long on stressed practitioners taking it out on those around them. Jemma’s rule is to never take her stress out on her hygienist. Instead, she’s proactively kind.
With patients, she quietly prays as she works and does what she can to ease the real anxiety of the chair. That’s probably why she so often hears, “That was nowhere near as bad as I expected.” She also refuses to soften the truth when a procedure hasn’t gone perfectly, which is partly why she now counts several dentists among her own patients.
God moves at the pace of relationships, not arbitrary targets.
Her faith comes up in conversation the way it does in any working life: in the “How was your weekend?” chats. When Jemma left for a new practice, one colleague was sad enough that she asked Jemma where she went to church, and whether she could come too.
Nobody set Jemma a target or handed her a quota. She was just patient, consistent, and unspectacularly Christian, in front of people who were watching.
What the Christian life is for
There’s intention in Jemma’s approach, yes: to live a faithful life that others will see. So don’t hear this as an argument for passivity in our relationships. We do well to be attentive to the people the Lord has placed around us, curious about their lives, and ready to share the reasons for our hope in Jesus when the moment calls for it.
But intentionality is not the same as urgency. Urgency serves your anxiety. Patience serves the person in front of you.
Ultimately, Pacquiao’s goal-setting masks a deeper problem. Insisting that life is short and evangelism is urgent implies it’s what our lives are for in the first place. If two souls is a good result, presumably five is better, ten better still – and before long, you reach the natural conclusion that anyone who’s truly serious about their faith would quit their job and evangelise full-time. Everything else – the actual work, the actual life – becomes at best a delivery mechanism for the ‘real’ mission at best, and at worst, an insidious distraction.
How ironic, then, that the New Testament vision for ordinary Christian life goes the other way entirely. Paul tells the Thessalonians,
“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands… so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders.” (1 Thessalonians 4:11–12)
So here’s a more modest target than Pacquiao’s: not two souls this year, but one ordinary, unhurried life, lived faithfully enough that people trust you enough to want to know more.
It’s less dramatic. It’s also, I suspect, considerably closer to how this was always supposed to work.
