Who the hell is Lee? -or- Evangelism Rant part 3

In response to David Bryan's question regarding the identity of the "Lee" person mentioned in my previous evangelism rant, I have produced this continuation of that same rant. It began simply enough as an explanation of who Lee was, but it has, instead, blossomed in to another component of my ongoing soapbox tirade against what I believe are crappy evangelism techniques. Mr. David Bryan, here is the answer to your question:

The "Lee" in question was the poor student the people running the T-shirt campaign selected as their frontman.

The campaign works like this: Students start wearing the mysterious "I agree with So-and-so" t-shirts around campus on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, they buy out an entire page of the student newspaper and run a massive ad that is basically So-and-so's written testimony and their confession of faith. Suddenly, the campus understand what the t-shirts mean, and supposedly they will start "conversations" that would hopefully "result" in the "conversion" of "many" "people" to "Christianity".

Instead, it just alienated the hell out of everyone and started a bunch of fights.
But anyway, on Friday they have a big get together where So-and-so speaks (wearing a baseball cap that says "I am so-and-so", and they all talk about how they've made a huge impact and changed the campus and the world for the better by wearing t-shirts and starting fights with people.

Oh, they also had a mid-week forum where people could go and ask questions of the t-shirt wearers to learn about their faith. The ministry had the "good" "sense" enough to pick the most combative, hateful, unfriendly Christian on campus (who routinely hopped from ministry to ministry creeping people out, starting lots of fights, making lots of girls cry by badgering them (not an exaggeration), and judging everyone who didn't see things exactly his way) to be the moderator for the "forum" discussion. You can imagine how that wound up going.
The general response from the student body was one of, "who the hell cares," and, "man, Christians are dumb and irritating," and, "why does everyone who's wearing a shirt look like they're the type of people who are a few cards short of a full deck?" That last one is an actual quote I heard from someone concerning the general attitude the shirt wearers seemed to give off.

But the best part is when people started making their own t-shirts, including "I agree with Satan" and "F*** Lee".

So, yes. It wasn't exactly a "smashing success", and in the end just gave the general population another reason to think Christians were both ignorant and irritating.
And yes, I really did get in to a fight with a certain campus minister about the campaign, warning him that it would not go over well with the student body. Why? Because of the first rule of speaker-audience communication: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. The people at The University of Kansas, in general, don't take well to flaky evangelism. Why? Most of them grew up in the bible-belt, and have been more or less inoculated against shallow pseudo-Christian claptrap. Not to mention the fact that Fred Phelps regularly pickets the campus during the school year, traveling preachers frequently get up on Wescoe beach and yell at the students about how they're all going to hell, and the school also just happens to be one of the primary stages for the massive Creationism/Evolution debate, making it a Mecca for pro-Creationist protesters to show up with signs and join Fred and the traveling preachers in yelling at the students. (When I went to see Phillip Johnston speak, for example, a group was actually handing out pamphlets advertising the "fact" that the world was flat. Seriously. They were protesting science because science taught that the world is round. For real.) Sadly, the minister did not see it that way, and chose to ignore the nature of the audience he was trying to reach.

When it all comes down to it, people aren't looking for you to give them a slogan or a formula or a new t-shirt to buy. Instead, shock of all shocks, people are looking for hope, friendship, kindness, encouragement, comfort, honesty, intelligence, and a sense of humor. Basically, they're looking for you to be a real human being to them. They crave it, in fact, as many people have only ever known others to be selfish, deceptive, dangerous, hurtful, abusive, liars, and thieves. And when you show them a little of what real honesty and love is like, well, they tend to snap to attention. Well, more than that, they look at you as a person because you've already shown them that they are a person to you.

And finally, between people, the Gospel can be shared in a way where the person will have to deal with the truly offensive subject matter that should really make people not like Christians: Jesus Himself.