Recently, I was out and relaxing on a park bench.
As I was pulling out a book to read, a middle age lady approached me and waved her hand.
I was expecting her to ask for directions or something. But then I looked at her other hand, and she was holding a stack of pamphlets.
At that moment, I knew exactly what I was about to get myself into. The first thing that came out of her mouth was,
“Hello, do you believe in Jesus Christ?”
Before I could answer her question, she immediately went into the usual church missionary speech.
At this point, I’ve already run into at least a dozen of these people, so nothing I heard was new. But at the same time, I didn’t want to hear any of it and just wanted to be left alone with my book.
The troll side of me thought it’d be funny to tell her that I worship the devil and see how she’d react, but that didn’t happen.
Maybe one day I’ll build up the courage to actually try it….
Anyways, moving on.
Before our one-sided conversation ended, she asked for my name, age, and my availability to visit her church, wrote the information and the church address on a piece of paper, asked me to take a picture, then went off.
My immediate thought after the conversation:
Thank goodness she didn’t ask for my phone number. But even if she did and tried to call me on the spot, I had a plan to get around that.
But that was truly the most one-sided conversation I had with a church missionary ever. At least with other missionaries that approached me, they at least had a conversation with me.
If you really think about it, those people are trying to sell me on becoming a churchgoer, which is okay as long as they come from good intentions.
However, what’s not okay is when they go into pitch mode, which is exactly what the lady at the park did to me.
It didn’t do anything but turn me off for a number of reasons, the main one being that she didn’t even try to figure out if I’d even be remotely interested in attending church.
That’s something I like to call “blind selling.” Unless you get lucky, nothing good comes out of that.
It’s the same reason why I refuse to pitch ideas to potential clients when they ask me to, especially when they didn’t even take the time to talk about their own situation. Honestly, I don’t know why they even think to ask that question. It does nothing but set themselves up for disappointment.