When a fundamentalist talks about evangelism what they generally mean is “soul winning.” Furthermore, what they mean by soul winning is mostly “giving the gospel one time to a stranger whom I will almost certainly never see again.”

This kind of proselytizing is a strange way for any group to further its goals. The fundamentalist is essentially building an entire method of organizational growth on a policy of asking complete strangers to believe that a person with whom they had a relationship for exactly thirty seconds has the absolute truth about all matters of sin, redemption, and eternity. And what’s more, they do this in a cultural environment where most people won’t even buy a magazine subscription from a door-to-door salesman.

It’s not exactly clear how this came to be the preferred method of fundamentalists for “evangelizing” the lost. I would posit the theory that the average fundy simply doesn’t have relationships with a large number of certified genuine sinner types that he can use as a basis for witnessing. Indeed, having built the castle of Holiness and dug the moat of Separation, fundamentalists are then left with the task of launching raiding parties of two or three hearty Christians soldiers out into the wild to club as many hapless sinners as they can and drag them back into the fold while trying not to be infected with their prey’s immodesty and bad language. Hunt with care, you only get one shot.