Street preacher encounters

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm sure I've never encountered someone preaching on the street. I see them occasionally holding their placards ('He is coming soon!' 'Where will YOU spend eternity?' etc) and waving at passing cars, but I've never I interacted with someone actually pavement-preaching.

Not sure how I'd react, but it'd be interesting to find out.

Boru

[The Valkyrie]

I generally back away or chuckle, and like most British people, pretend they don't even exist.

Last two I encountered in Kiwiland were both frigging Poms.

[brewer]

Never encountered any, just the door knockers.

Back in the day would see the Hari's at the airport but was never approached.

[Pope Markoff Chaney]

My encounters have been mixed.  It depends on the preacher.

Normally I try to avoid confrontation.  I'll take their tract or whatever and then go about my business.  However on one occasion I was attending a local atheist "meet up" group.  After a couple of drinks, the hosts of this group decided to in their own words "bother the god botherers".  So we found the local street preacher and challenged him on his preaching.  In retrospect this was childish, but hey, I'd had a few.  There appeared to be two approaches to his preaching.  Myself and my friends that evening engaged with the preacher in debate and logical reasoning, which was admittedly futile , whereas some of my fellow atheist "meet ups" trolled the guy into saying something ridiculous and then belittled him for it (eg. that the universe is approx 6000 years old).  I'd have to say that neither approach was productive but I found that ridicule was particularly counter-productive and only served to cement theists' baseless prejudices about us atheists.  Since that day I have been more reserved concerning street preachers.  If I'm in the mood I'll ask questions, but I'll rarely challenge them unless they say something that's demonstrably false.  

In fact I have recently befriended a wandering evangelist.  It seems that this guy's purpose in life is to wander the streets of my suburb spreading the word of the lord.  All he seems to say is "god bless you" or "Jesus loves you".  Other than that he has never tried to proselytise or bible bash me or anyone else I know of for that matter.  Perhaps because of this and the fact that I am one of the few people willing to give him the time of day, we have struck up an unlikely friendship.  We talk religion, politics, sport, and some of his evangelist stories can be entertaining.  I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this story is, but I guess that my point is that street preachers may seem condescending in that they think they have all the answers, but they're not all bad.

[Joods]

We have this one guy in the city who stands on the corner of Market St. and George St. with a bible and a bull horn. He's out there daily (or at least on the days I have to go to the city). Most people just ignore him. The cops ignore him. The homeless people sitting on the benches ignore him. Luckily, I'm in my car so I can keep my windows up and ignore him too.

[NaughtyButNice]

We have this one guy in the city who stands on the corner of Market St. and George St. with a bible and a bull horn. He's out there daily (or at least on the days I have to go to the city). Most people just ignore him. The cops ignore him. The homeless people sitting on the benches ignore him. Luckily, I'm in my car so I can keep my windows up and ignore him too.

Most people ignored the guy I saw too, but some of the high school kids shouted things back. One black girl yelled, "Jesus is black!" and got some laughs. Another reminded him that this was a street and not a church.

[FebruaryOfReason]

I managed to shut one up once with Matthew 6:5

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men"
(King James Version)

[drfuzzy]

Oh, I've met quite a few here in Bible Belt hell.  I don't tend to be very polite.  I like to see the look of horror on their face when I insult their church or their tracts or their gawd.

But we had a bunch of fun with one once.  I was taking some teens to a music contest, and the contest was a magnet for preachers.  And oddly enough, all four kids in my group (each adult had a small group to chaperone) were non-believers.  So I found this set of street-preacher BINGO cards . . . we sat in a group around a preacher and started playing.  Zakk and Brandon tended to shout BINGO whenever they heard anything on the card, and after showing the preacher a card and having him tear it up (to the hilarious laughter of the crowd) he stomped off, shouting threats of hell.  HA!  We got swamped with folks wanting to know how to get the cards.

I have the cards saved as a Word file. I'll see if I can get screenshots and post them here.  -- Maybe this evening.

[drfuzzy]

Zealous Preacher Bingo cards (5)

[Jackalope]

I occasionally encounter nutball evangelists in Pioneer Square in Portland. I usually just ignore them and refuse any tracts they're distributing.

The Scientologists are a bit sneakier, oftentimes they'll get the tract into my hand even before I realize what's happening. When that happens it gets dropped in the nearest bin, within sight of the Scientologists whenever possible.