I grew up in an evangelical Southern Baptist church in rural Illinois during the 1990s. From a young age, it was made clear to me that I should quickly come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and my next task was to share the Good News with everyone around me. I attended church camp every year, and I specifically remember one experience where I earned my team more points in the weekly contest by memorizing the Roman Road to Salvation. By the way, I can still recall most of those verses word for word, even twenty-five years later. So, that sort of stuff really does manage to lodge deeply in the minds of impressionable youth.
However, from a purely social science perspective, evangelism may be one of the most significant metrics for tracking the growth or decline of a religious tradition. There are only a couple of ways for
