Door-to-Door Evangelism Exposed

Do you think that Christians can be hypocritical in their evangelism methods? If you do not understand what I’m getting at, here’s a true story to help explain. As you know, I work for a Fortune 500 company that sells and services products for businesses. I noticed we lost a product opportunity at a large church in the Kansas City area. The explanation intrigued me so I asked the sales rep what the story was. He half-smiled with a touch of disgust as he recounted the experience with this church. This is what I found out:

Our customer contact at the church is frequently involved in door-to-door evangelism. On one occasion, he knocked on the door of one of our team members at work. This ended in our team member asking the church staff member to leave - followed by a cuss word. When that church was experiencing some problems with the product they bought from us, we called in a specialist to fix the problem. This is when two worlds collide. The specialist was the cussing neighbor. The customer contact was the door-to-door evangelist. The customer contact at the church became very difficult to work with and ended up asking us to never come back. He paid tens of thousands of dollars to end the church’s contract with us.

Is door-to-door evangelism a one way street? Do you think this made a positive impression of Christians on my team members? When the church staff member became difficult to deal with, did that just reaffirm the others feelings about church people? If the church staff member would have joked with the specialist about their previous encounter at his doorstep, would that have disarmed any hard feelings and opened him up a little more to the gospel? What would you do in that situation?