Scott shouts to be heard over the crowd.

"FATHER GOD , standing here, we know how you must have felt watching SODOM AND GOMORRAH. We know how your APOSTLE PAUL must have felt watching the DEPRAVITY AT CORINTH. Heavenly Father, help us drive SATAN FROM THIS PLACE!"

We un-bow our heads and our mouths hang open as the twin sights of Spring Break: Daytona Beach come into view.

On the right, it's a sea of leather. This is the tail end of Daytona Bike Week, and over the last six days, half a million motorcycle enthusiasts have made the pilgrimage to these beaches, bringing with them an insatiable thirst for domestic beer and a staggering quantity of Hulk Hogan mustaches. Their t-shirts say things like, "You can ride my bike if I can ride your bitch!" and "Welcome to America. Now speak English or get out!"

On the left, a more traditional Spring Break scene unfolds. Hundreds of rowdy coeds are packed into Froggy's Saloon, where a waifish, nubile blonde gyrates seductively on top of the bar, her belly button ring shimmering like a bass jig in the sun. Motley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls" plays to wild cheers as the blonde fishes bills out of the empty beer pitcher marked "Tips for Tits."

When the blonde - who is maybe eighteen - removes her tube top to reveal a pair of star-shaped nipple shields, Brandon a short, demure Liberty sophomore from New Hampshire, holds his beach towel over his eyes. On his wrist sits a white "LivePure" bracelet. Scott, our group leader, rubs Brandon's back. "Satan is strong here," he says. "But remember: every person is a person for whom Christ died, whether they're wearing a lot of clothes or no clothes at all."

I guess I should explain myself. Back in February, on a lark, I attended the Mission Fair, a large meeting for Liberty students interested in going on evangelism trips around the world. Missionary evangelism, the act of proselytizing in non-Christian communities, is an integral part of the Liberty experience. Some Liberty students will become full-time missionaries after graduation, but many more will dabble in missions, going on one or two short-term trips during their four years of college. This year, teams from Liberty are slated to go to Haiti, China, and Indonesia, among others.

During the Mission Fair, I heard a pitch for Daytona Beach, the only domestic mission trip Liberty offers. I was confused. Evangelizing to secular spring breakers in Florida struck me as an enormous waste of time. Why not go somewhere where Jesus would be an easier sell? Like Islamabad? Or a Christopher Hitchens dinner party?

I understood better when the Liberty mission coordinator explained that Daytona's bacchanalian atmosphere is part of the allure - it's what's called "battleground evangelism."

"If you want to go to Florida," he said, "Be warned: This is going to be 24/7 spiritual warfare. We're talking about Satan's home turf here."

As he spoke, I felt that familiar intrigue, the one that brought me to Liberty in the first place. I knew I had to go. After all, one of the things I haven't seen yet is Liberty students outside their insular safe space, in real-world settings where they have to interact with people like, well, me. Or at least the old me. So a short application, two weeks, and a $600 trip fee later, I was in a white Ford panel van, making my way down I-95 with fourteen Liberty students and two group leaders.

Scott, a sprightly fifty-eight-year-old with a high-pitched Carolina twang and a full head of silver hair, is by all appearances the LeBron James of evangelism. Twenty minutes after our van pulled out of campus, he stopped at a gas station to fuel up, and spent five minutes telling the cashiers about Jesus with amphetaminic enthusiasm. Later in the ride, he proselytized two waitresses, a parking lot attendant, and a Georgia tollbooth worker.

On the twelve-hour van ride to Daytona, I had a chance to meet the other members of the team. There's James, a Baltimorean with mutton-chop sideburns; Aaron, a quiet black guy who speaks in a low rumble; Valentina, an Italian girl from New York City with lips on loan from Angelina Jolie; and a gaggle of vaguely attractive All-American girls, none of whose names I remembered five minutes after our introduction.

After our first traumatic stroll on the beach, we climb back into our white panel van (which Scott has dubbed the "Jesusmobile"), and head to the First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, our Daytona headquarters. By special dispensation of the FBCDB staff, we'll be eating meals and sleeping on air mattresses in the church's Sunday School wing for the next eight days.

Scott and his wife Martina, a friendly, Jamie Lee Curtis-looking woman who came along as the trip's co-leader, guide us through an all-morning training session on the whys and hows of evangelism. We sit on folding chairs in the Sunday School room and eat snack-size bags of pretzels while Scott recites the "Great Commission," the verse that serves as the architectural frame for all missionary work. It's found in Matthew 28:19, when Jesus says to his disciples, "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

"The first thing you should think when you meet anyone," Scott says, "is 'Are they saved?'" It's safe to assume that almost everyone coming to Daytona for Spring Break is unsaved, he says, adding, "It's a very dark place out there."

Before we take our evangelical Delta Force to the beach, though, we need to learn how to witness.

First, a few words on lingo. There are several words for what, exactly, will be transpiring here. "Spreading the gospel," "sharing the faith," and "evangelizing" are all common terms for the act of attempting to convert non-believers, but "witnessing" seems to be the most all-purpose. From what I understand, you can "be a witness," you can "witness to" someone, or you can "witness" generally, like on a streetcorner. "Fishing," a more insidery term, refers to Jesus' claim that he would make his disciples "fishers of men." (When we arrived at our host church, the pastor thanked us for coming to fish in his pond.)

I should say, also, that what we're doing would strike many Christians as odd. Proselytizing to strangers, which one Christian I know calls "cold-turkey evangelism," is a dying art, and many evangelicals prefer less confrontational methods of proselytizing. There's friendship evangelism, which means spending time with a non-believer, establishing rapport for months or even years before you bring up the subject of God. There's lifestyle evangelism, in which you do Jesus-like good deeds in the hope that non-believers will be so impressed that they'll begin to link moral goodness with Christianity. There are doubtless others, but on this trip, we'll only be using the cold-turkey method. All strangers, all confrontation, all day.

The best witnessing tactic, Scott says, is beginning conversations subtly, so strangers don't grasp your intent immediately. Then, they'll be less likely to walk away. He suggests opening with: "Hi, I'm taking opinions today. Would you be willing to help me out?" Then, he suggests following up with a weed-out question, like, "Who's the greatest person you know?" or "What's the greatest thing that has ever happened to you?"

Unless the person answers "Jesus Christ" or "Getting saved," Scott says, you can be fairly sure you're talking to a non-evangelical. Then, you transition to a more direct question:

"Do you ever think about spiritual things, like Heaven and Hell?"

"What do you think happens to us when we die?"

"Would you consider yourself a good person?"

This last one -- "Would you consider yourself a good person?" -- is the first step in the "Way of the Master" evangelism program, Scott's favorite technique. The Way of the Master, which was formulated by a New Zealand pastor named Ray Comfort and marketed by Growing Pains actor and evangelical pitchman Kirk Cameron, is based on a four-question sequence designed to demonstrate systematically to a non-believer that he or she is not, in fact, a good person - that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

The four questions, Scott says, can be remembered with the mnemonic "WDJD." ("What Did Jesus Do?")

W - "Would you consider yourself to be a good person?"

Usually, Scott says, a non-believer will say "yes" or "generally," at which point you move on to:

D - "Do you think you've kept the Ten Commandments?"

Again, a non-believer will typically say "for the most part" or "usually." If so, Scott says, we should lead the non-believer through some of the commandments. ("Have you ever disobeyed your parents? Taken the Lord's name in vain? Stolen?") Any honest person will agree that he or she has broken some or all. "The Commandments act as a mirror for our sins," he says.

J (Judgment) - "If God judged you by the Ten Commandments, would you be innocent or guilty?"

Most people who have stuck around this long will answer "guilty," Scott says. Then, you hit them with the kicker:

D (Destiny) - "If you're guilty, where do you think you will spend eternity - Heaven or Hell?"

"This step is where people realize they're Hell-bound, and they make decisions for Christ to save themselves."

A sophomore named Samantha raises her hand nervously and asks the question we've all been considering.

"But what if they don't?"

"Good point," Scott says. "These people may not be ready to accept Christ, but we can plead with them to consider it, because Hell is a real place. So just ask them two or three times: Why would you NOT consider this? Why would you think it DOESN'T matter?" As Scott says this, fourteen skeptical faces stare back at him. Team Daytona seems to have realized en masse that these conversations will only remain hypothetically awkward for a few more minutes.

"Never forget, guys," he says, "What we're doing is kind! Many Christians don't share Christ because they feel like they're bothering people. But we're sharing the information that will help them avoid God's wrath and go to Heaven! We're doing something better than the best Christmas present they'll ever get!"

Before we go, we pray.

"Lord, prepare the hearts of the Spring Breakers," says Scott. "Make the issues at stake clear to people, Lord, and draw them to yourself. Let us turn them from their ways."

Five minutes later, as Scott steers the Jesusmobile to the beach, he swivels to face us.

"Oh, and don't forget, guys: keep a journal of your witnessing experiences, so you can remember who you talked to."

Yes, sir.

1300h: Reece

Today, we will be doing our beach evangelism in pairs. The fortunate part of this is that I'll be able to see other members of my group in action. The unfortunate part: I'll probably be expected to participate. Luckily, my first partner, a sophomore named Claire, is what the cognoscenti call a "bold witness." Claire, a brown-haired bombshell who wears those trendy drink-coaster-sized sunglasses, agrees to let me watch the first few times, since I hinted when we started that I was new at this.

Here's what they don't tell you in evangelism training: being a bold witness doesn't matter if no one is listening. Claire approaches two dozen people in five minutes, none of whom stay with her past the first question. Spring Breakers don't like to be interrupted, and when she tries a more direct approach, saying "Excuse me, I'd like to talk to you about God," it's not pretty. Sorority girls laugh in her face. Bikers stare at her chest, then laugh in her face.

When Claire finally gets someone to hear her out, it's a Rastafarian-looking guy sitting on a bench, wearing parachute pants and a green-and-yellow basketball jersey. He introduces himself as Reece.

"Reece, would you consider yourself a good person?" she asks.

"Yeah, I guess."

Reece answers the WDJD questions nonchalantly. "Yeah I've stolen. Yeah I've disobeyed my parents. Yeah, I'm probably guilty." When Claire gets to D, the one about Heaven and Hell, Reece rubs his eye with the back of his hand.

"I'm gonna live forever," he says. "Heaven is a state of mind, you know? You ever watch the Matrix? When Neo went to the Oracle, and he's like 'Am I the one?' and she's like 'No you're not, because you don't know.' It's like that. You gotta know, you know?"

"No, I don't know," Claire says.

Reece tells us he's sorry, but he has to go meet some friends at a different part of the beach. Claire prays for him quickly, and Reece goes on his way. As we continue down the boardwalk, Claire turns to me.

"I think that man was on drugs."

1315h: Janice

Two failed approaches later -- an old lady who shooed us away, and a biker who was "rushing to meet some buddies" -- Claire tells me it's my turn.

When Scott started schooling us on the Way of the Master method, it became clear that, over the course of the week, I'd be expected to push Christianity to strangers. This made my conscience's usual swampy morass a little swampier. At Liberty, see, no one asks me about my faith anymore, so to blend in, I rarely have to do anything more proactive than keep up my Christian signifiers - going to Bible study, praying before meals, being on time to church. This is what passes for ethical conduct in my world. It probably wouldn't pass muster in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but it's how I sleep at night.

Evangelism to strangers, though -- that doesn't sit nearly as well with me. So while Scott was talking, I set some guidelines for my Daytona mission that made me a little more comfortable. First, I would distance myself reasonably from evangelical theology. If I told someone about Jesus, I'd begin, "Well, according to one reading of the Bible…" or "Some Christians think…". Second, I wouldn't condemn anyone. And third, if things ever got to a point where I was doing too well, where someone was on the verge of converting, I'd find a way to get out of the conversation quickly, no matter how out of character it was.

I may never have to put these rules into effect, though, because I'm too scared to make my first approach. I wander the sand with Claire for five or ten minutes looking for a suitable target. The two middle-aged men checking their BlackBerrys? The preteen boys stomping on a sand castle? No, won't do. I almost approach a pack of hot, bikini-clad girls, but I stop short due to my irrational fear that all hot, bikini-clad girls are linked by some sort of high-tech underground network, and blowing it with one group of them will permanently ink my name on the blacklist.

Claire points to a guy in a beach chair. "How about him?"

"It looks like he's about to leave. Doesn't it?"

"Okay, the guy next to him."

"He's tanning. We probably shouldn't disrupt him."

After a dozen of these, Claire looks a little irritated. "You know, you shouldn't be afraid," she says. "You have Holy Spirit boldness inside you."

Finally, I see a thirty-something brunette sitting on the flatbed of her pickup truck, legs dangling over the end. I look at Claire, who nods. She'll do. I steel myself and walk towards her, feeling my palms moisten.

"Hello there."

"Uh, hi." She's a Hispanic woman wearing a pink bikini, drinking Rolling Rock with a foam koozie. I introduce myself, and she tells me her name is Janice.

"Janice, I was, uh, wondering if I could ask you a question."

"Sure, go ahead."

"Would you consider yourself a good person?"

She pulls off her sunglasses and looks at me queerly. "Yeah, I guess I'm good."

"Do you think you've kept the Ten Commandments?"

"Probably not."

"Have you ever told a lie?"

"Of course. I've committed a whole bunch of sins."

"So where do you think you'd…" I realize I'm about to ask the questions out of order - D instead of J - so I self-correct. "…Uh, I mean…if God judged you by the Ten Commandments, do you think you'd be innocent or guilty?"

She leans forward. "Are you trying to convert me?"

I look back at Claire, who nods. "Well, yeah, but…"

"Listen," she snaps, "this is pretty rude of you. I'm out here trying to enjoy my day at the beach, and you're coming over here telling me that I need Jesus. Or are you with the Mormons?"

I squeak out, "No ma'am, not with the Mormons."

She smiles snidely, puts her sunglasses back on.

"Well, I don't want to hear it, thanks very much. Man, the Bible-thumpers are the ones you gotta watch out for. They're some sick assholes - no offense."

As we turn and walk away, Claire sighs. "Well, I think her soul is hardened, but at least we got to tell her about Hell. That's a start, right?"

Even before this trip, I hated confronting strangers. I had a summer job once at a Manhattan juice bar. Every day, my boss would stick me on a SoHo street corner handing out coupons for raspberry smoothies. It was miserable. I'd spend five hours a day waving coupons at passersby, and when they didn't completely ignore me, they'd look at me like I was trying to stab them with a dirty syringe. One middle-aged lady swung her purse at me.

But this was worse. I haven't really processed Janice's rejection yet, so I don't know whether to brush it off or feel personally offended. Even though I don't believe in my product, as they say in business, it's still not fun being the target of a stranger's wrath.

1430h, Rick

Claire has decided that I'm not a very competent evangelist, so she took on the next dozen approaches. So far, she's doing better, but I suspect there are other factors in play. Every few minutes, Claire walks up to a group of guys and engages them in small-talk. The guys - and it's always the smarmy, sleeveless-shirt-and-hair-gel types - take this to be some kind of coy flirtation ritual. They sidle up to her, tossing each other looks of smug satisfaction that say: Dude, that girl is totally into me. No freakin' way, dude, she talked to me first.

I want to warn the guys telepathically, but it's too late. They smile and nod and answer Claire's initial questions, and then she drops the hammer:

"If a holy and righteous God judged you on the Ten Commandments, would He find you innocent or guilty?"

I've noticed a range of reactions to Claire's hammer-drops so far:

-- Some people give the hidden-camera-show look. The guys let out a small chuckle, perhaps thinking Claire has just mastered the practice of deadpan irony. Then, when they see her waiting unblinkingly for a response, they sweep the landscape, looking for a tech crew.

-- A few people get genuinely angry. One biker said, "If I wanted to hear I was going to Hell, I'd call my ex-wife."

-- Then there's the you-poor-things response, which thus far has come exclusively from old ladies. When Claire begins her spiel about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, these ladies' faces soften into sympathetic smiles. They listen patiently, like a grandmother hearing a Girl Scout sputter through her cookie pitch -- then they turn Claire down as politely as possible. One woman, who looked like Mrs. Butterworth in a one-piece, asked us, "Now, who put you two up to this?"

Needless to say, Daytona is not the world's easiest place to make disciples. Trucks drive up and down the beach with thousand-watt speakers in the flatbeds blasting Jay-Z. There's an ongoing Best Buns contest at Spanky's Tiki Bar ($50 cash prize). Claire and I cut a sharp contrast to the bikinied, board-shorted masses in our polo shirts and backpacks stuffed with gospel tracts. So our failure, if not totally expected, at least is understandable.

Claire's other problem is total linguistic isolation. She, like many other Liberty students, speaks in long, flowery strings of opaque Christian-speak. When a twenty-something guy named Rick tells Claire he doesn't believe in God, Claire sighs and says:

"Listen, Rick. There's a man named Jesus Christ, and He came into my heart and changed me radically. And there is a God who loves you, and who sent His Son to die on the cross for you, to take away your sins and my sins, and God shows himself to me every day. When I don't have hope for tomorrow, Jesus never fails. His love is never-ending."

While she's speaking, my eyes never leave Rick. I recognize his confused expression as what mine must have been on my first-ever visit to Thomas Road - the same sense that two people, both speaking English, are not exactly communicating. Rick listens to her prattle on for several minutes, and then apologizes.

"Not interested," he says. "But thanks."

Claire thanks Rick and walks away downtrodden, kicking up sand with each step.

1520h, names unknown

I approach three girls tanning on beach towels. They're good-looking girls, maybe a year or two out of college. One is reading a Patricia Cornwell mystery, and the other two are on their stomachs, listening to their iPods.

"Hi there," I say, trying to sound as peppy as possible. The Cornwell reader looks up from her book, eyebrows raised, and one of the iPod girls takes out her earbuds.

"I was just wondering if I could give you guys a million dollars."

When Scott was teaching us to evangelize, he gave us several gimmicky ice-breakers to use when beginning conversations. This one is a fake million-dollar bill with a message printed in tiny letters on the back:

The million-dollar question: Will you go to Heaven? Here's a quick test. Have you ever told a lie, stolen anything, or used God's name in vain? Jesus said, "Whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her has committed adultery already with her in his heart." Have you looked with lust? Will you be guilty on Judgment Day? If you have done those things God sees you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterer at heart. The Bible warns that if you are guilty you will end up in Hell. That's not God's will. He sent His Son to suffer and die on the cross for you…Please, repent (turn from sin) today and trust in Jesus, and God will grant you everlasting life.

"Sure," Cornwall girl says. "I'll take one."

"But first," I say, "I have to ask you the million-dollar question."

"Shoot."

I take a deep breath. "Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?"

iPod girl's eyes bulge. "Excuse me?" She pokes her friend, who turns over onto her back, takes out her earbuds, and stares at me.

"Um…do you guys know Jesus…as your Savior?"

Cornwall girl says pointedly, "We're Jewish."

"I'll take that as a no?" I say. They don't laugh. Not even the faintest trace of a smile. I turn and walk away, mumbling thanks under my breath.

As I go, I hear them talking: "What a creep," one says.

After this rejection, I start to get angry. How could Scott make evangelism seem so easy? Doesn't he see that this is torture? When Claire and I return to the Jesusmobile for our appointed meeting time, the rest of the group looks a little shellshocked. Faces are sullen, postures slumped.

"That was the hardest day of my life," says Samantha.

"Any decisions for Christ today?" Scott asks. No hands go up.

"Well, that's okay," he says. "Decisions or not, we're planting seeds the Lord will water in time!"

Back at the host church, Scott explains that beach witnessing is just half of our agenda. Tonight, we'll get another chance at the nightclubs. We spend half an hour in prayer before dinner. It is, I suspect, the saddest prayer circle ever convened.

"I lift Emmanuel and William up to you, Lord" says James from Baltimore. "They didn't seem interested when I told them about you today, but I pray that they'll think about what I told them, and that they'll come to a saving knowledge of your son, Jesus Christ."

"Lord, I pray for the medical student I met today," says Scott's wife Martina. "Being a hotshot doctor at a big hospital is not going to help her when she has to face you, Lord. Even though she brushed me off, I pray she'll reconsider later."

"I pray, Lord, for the old man who spit on me," says Charlotte, a blonde from Arkansas. "Satan had such a strong grip on him, and I just want to see him know you, Lord."

Claire is the last to pray: "Lord, let them be nicer to us tonight."

2310h, Jason

Around 11:00, the Jesusmobile pulls up to Razzle's. Razzle's is a Wal-Mart-size nightclub with a squadron of earpieced bouncers manning the velvet rope and a set of revolving laser lights that overflow onto the sidewalk. We won't be going inside, Scott says, but we'll stand just outside the rope, witnessing to people waiting in line.

The first surprise is that are at least two other groups of Christian evangelists here. One group, a youth team from a Florida church, has set up a shaved-ice machine on the sidewalk. They're making sno-cones for the Razzle's patrons, which almost seems like cheating. (Some Christians call this "gastro-evangelism") The other group, which is affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ, has done something truly brilliant. A well-funded national organization, Campus Crusade rented the ballroom at a hotel next to Razzle's and set up a fake party inside, complete with strobe lights, a security team, and attractive models paid to stand outside the hotel and gossip loudly about the great party inside. When would-be clubbers enter the room, they quickly realize they've been duped - instead of bar specials and trance music, they get gospel tracts and a salvation message.

Our group has no such Trojan horse, just the same Way of the Master routine we used on the beach. (Though at one point, a film crew working on a Girls Gone Wild-style documentary sets up their equipment next to us, so we get a nice little assembly line going.) Witnessing at Razzle's, where everyone we meet is either drunk or well on the way, makes communication a little harder. Two conversations I had in the first ten minutes:

"Excuse me, miss. Do you ever think about spiritual things, like Heaven and Hell?"

"Woooo!!! I love to party!!!"

"Excuse me, sir. Would you help me with an opinion poll?"

"Sure, go ahead."

"Who is the greatest person you know?"

"Hmm…gayest person I know…I'd have to say Richard Simmons."

We have an odd number of evangelists tonight, and I managed to snag the solo spot. Without Claire watching me, I no longer have to be pushy. I'm just asking people about their religious beliefs and letting them speak if they wish - which clears my conscience a little, and also makes me the worst evangelist in history. One guy I talked to actually said, "You must be new at this."

Meanwhile, others in my group are having more success. I walk over to another part of the sidewalk and catch Scott's wife Martina deep in conversation with a large, muscled man.

"Jason," Martina says as she sees me approach. "Meet my friend Kevin." We shake hands. Jason is slurring his speech and leaning against a palm tree for support, clearly many drinks into his night. But, perhaps because of this, he's really opening up to Martina.

"Listen, Martina," he says. "I just met you, and I like you a lot."

"That's very sweet," she says. "Listen to me, though."

He slumps back against the tree, a little maudlin, eyes sloshing around in his head.

"Jason. Are you able to focus on me?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Jason, if you died tonight, without the blood of Jesus covering you..."

"He's all over me."

"Well how do you know? You don't read the Bible."

"I don't, you're right."

"And you've never been born again."

"No, I haven't. But I still feel…"

"Jason, you need to be born again."

"So what if I am? Then tomorrow, I come back out here and go drinking again, and nothing's changed. What good is that?"

"You won't come back out here tomorrow if you get born again. You'll have the Holy Spirit guiding you."

The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. Claire raised it earlier tonight. "What happens when these people go back home?" she asked Scott over dinner. "Witnessing is great, but I don't want to just look at them as a number."

"If somebody's truly born again," Scott responded, "the Holy Spirit is going to lead them. The most important thing is that they get Jesus."

I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we'd be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any - guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there's no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn't), Martina would have led him through the Sinner's Prayer ("Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior" or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion - which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.

If the new believer backslides, though, like Jason was suggesting he might, Christians are likely to believe that he wasn't really saved. False conversions are a glaring wart on the face of Christian evangelism. In the book that accompanies our Way of the Master program, I found several sobering statistics about the percentage of apparent converts who stay involved with the church in the long term, including one from Peter Wagner, a seminary professor in California who estimated that only 3 to 16 percent of the converts at Christian crusades stay involved.

Those are good statistics for me - they means that even if I did manage to convert someone with my bad evangelism, there's only a 3 to 16 percent chance it would matter in the long run. But the false conversion rate is profoundly depressing if you believe in this stuff. After all, if we get ten converts during this week - an optimistic number - and our false conversion numbers are consistent with the average, this group has spent a week's worth of twelve-hour days, thousands of dollars, and suffered massive amounts of emotional trauma for what? One more Christian? Two?

There must be an easier way.

1015h, Andrew

On the third day of the trip, my witnessing partner is Caitlin, a blonde sophomore from Oklahoma. She's a sparkly, bubbly girl, which makes her first encounter of the day all the more surprising. She approaches a small Asian man outside a Starbucks.

"Excuse me, sir. If you got hit by a bus today and died and had to stand before God's judgment seat, why would you tell him you deserve to go to Heaven?"

Caitlin, I've learned, is a bulldog witness. Last night at our post-club debrief, she castigated the rest of us for being too easy on the people we met.

"It's really great to tell people that Jesus loves them," she snapped, "But you guys need to show them their sinfulness, too. The Bible says that people who are not saved are children of wrath. We can't forget that."

Apparently, success and tact don't go hand in hand in evangelism. Caitlin is the most experienced evangelist in our group. While at Liberty, she started a small student team that goes out to Lynchburg malls and trailer parks to convert the locals. Since her freshman year, by her count, she has converted 235 people.

She certainly doesn't take rejection well. When the Asian man tries to walk away from Caitlin, she follows him down the street.

"In Revelation 21:8, God says that all murderers, fornicators, and liars will have their part on the lake of fire!" Caitlin shouts behind him.

"I don't think I'm going to Hell," the man replies, turning to face her.

"Why not?"

"I do good things for people."

"But we're going by God's standards, not yours."

"Yes, but…"

"Sir, have you ever been wrong about anything?"

"Yes, but…"

"Do you think you could be wrong about this?"

Three hours later, Caitlin and I (mostly Caitlin - she got frustrated with my forbearance after two or three approaches) have gotten maybe fifty walkaways. Seeing her confront people so coarsely never gets less shocking. Still, I've got to admit, if you have to evangelize, Caitlin is a great partner. After her introductions, nothing I add can offend anybody.

Later in the day, I ask Caitlin why she's so harsh when she evangelizes, especially since she's such an even-tempered girl otherwise.

"Well," she says, "I want to save as many people as possible. So I don't get into arguments about the facts, or about evolution or anything. People can look that stuff up. But if I spend twenty minutes arguing with someone, that's four more people I could have approached."

I'm trying to treat Daytona as a weeklong thought experiment. For one, a little mental distance is the only way I can keep myself from feeling like the Grinch Who Stole Spring Break. But more than that, it's the only way I've found to place myself into the moral space of aggressive evangelism, to try to understand how well-intentioned Christian kids - some of the nicest people I've met all semester - can end up on streetcorners in Florida, shouting hellfire and damnation to the masses.

Part of it, I'm sure, is that these students are convinced that their actions are compassionate and altruistic. All week, we've heard pep talks like this one from Scott at last night's post-Razzle's debrief: "To me, here's the motivation to evangelize: if I'm a doctor, and I find the cure for a terminal illness, and if I care about people, I'm going to spread that cure as widely as possible. If I don't, people are going to die."

Leave the comparison in place for a second. If Scott had indeed found the cure to a terminal illness, and if this Daytona mission were a vaccination campaign instead of an evangelism crusade, my group members would be acting with an unusually large portion of mercy - much more, certainly, than their friends who spent the break playing Xbox in their sweatpants. And if you had gone on this immunization trip, giving up your Spring Break for the greater good, and had found the sick Spring Breakers unwilling to be vaccinated, what would you do? If a terminally ill man said he was "late for a meeting," you might let him walk away. But - and I'm really stretching here - if you really believed your syringe held his only hope of survival, and you really cared about him, would you ignore the rules of social propriety and try every convincement method you knew?

Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't. For these students, the choice is clear: the risk of being loathed and humiliated by strangers is far outweighed by the possibility that even one person will see the light and be saved.

Of course, just because the choice is clear doesn't mean it's easy. Tonight, at Razzle's, I see Valentina, the Italian girl from Manhattan, sitting on a curb with a homeless military veteran, her arm slung around his shoulder. It's pouring rain, a real torrential storm, and both of them are being pounded by the thick drops. Valentina is witnessing to the bearded, ragged veteran, and she looks frankly miserable. Her hair is dripping, and she has to wipe the water from her face every few seconds. After a few minutes, she stops telling the veteran about God's love and just sits there, holding him. And from across the street, I see her start to cry.

Later, back at the host church, Valentina tells the group about her breakdown.

"I was just sitting there on the curb, and I started thinking about how sad this all is. How sad it is that billions and billions of people are just dying without Christ, and how much I wish it wasn't true. I hate it. I hate that Hell is a real place, and I hate that sin came into the world through Adam, and most of all, I hate thinking about how all we can do - all anyone can do - is try to tell these people that there's hope out there. They might not want to listen, but we have to keep telling them. For the rest of our lives, guys, we have to keep telling them."

###

On the last day of our trip, group morale is mixed. On one hand, we've had a pretty good time by ourselves. Between beach crusades and trips to Razzle's, we played beach volleyball, conducted piano sing-alongs, even went swimming for a spell. Everyone on the trip gets along really well, and it's been a faint approximation of a vacation.

On the other hand, our nets are far from full. Caitlin led a high school boy to Christ yesterday, and one woman we spoke to later visited the Daytona host church and got saved under the care of one of their pastors, but that's it. Two people. We've been cheering each other up, saying things in prayer circles like, "Lord, we know we've done a good work here this week, and we trust that you'll follow up in these people's hearts."

Then again, maybe this trip was never all about the Spring Breakers. Battleground evangelism, it turns out, can be just as useful for the evangelists as for the non-believers. For these Liberty students, going to Daytona is a tool for self-anaesthetization, a way to get used to the feeling of being an outcast in the secular world. The first forty times someone blows you off, it feels awful. The second forty times, you start reassuring yourself that all of this must serve a higher purpose. By the end of the week, you get the point - you are going to be mocked and scorned for your faith, and this is the way it's supposed to be.

Today, after a hard day of witnessing, Brandon marked off with Post-Its all the verses in his Bible that describe early Christian responses to mockery (like 1 Peter 4:14, "If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you"). Sitting at the dinner table, he read them aloud to all of us. Amber, a shy brunette from Virginia, looked around the table after Brandon was finished.

"Guys, I realized this week that I'm going to be laughed at for being a Christian for the rest of my life," she said.

"I am too," Brandon said. "We all are."

"Christians have always been laughed at," added Valentina. "We're in good company."

"I love the part in Romans," Brandon said, "where it says we take up Christ's cross, and we bear His suffering. I like that a lot."

###

Around 8:00 AM on Sunday, eight days after arriving, we pack our suitcases, deflate our air mattresses, and shove it all in the back of the Jesusmobile for the twelve-hour trip back to Liberty. To the last, Scott remains upbeat.

"Sharing Christ is so exciting!" he says as we pull away. "It's a way of life! Man, it's just such a thrill to introduce people to Christ!"

As we cross the Daytona city limits, Brandon turns to me in the backseat.

"Was this a productive trip?" he whispers.

I shrug.

"Unless I go on another missions trip," he says, "I probably won't evangelize like this again."

"Do you think we made a difference?" I whisper back.

"I mean, anything can happen when the Lord is involved. But personally, I don't think us being here was very productive."

Scott looks back from the driver's seat. Seeing us whispering, he smiles warmly.

"Boys and their secrets…"

He turns back to face the road, the Jesusmobile presses on, and we never look back, not once, not even to remember the effort.