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Below is a small exceprt from an interview with Leonard Sweet. The entire interview can be found at Relevant Magazine. [RM:] Does it freak people out when you start talking like that? [LS:] (laughter) I don't know. (pause) I don't know. I'm very conservative about some things. For example: For me, the Gospel is literally oxygen. There's a world out there that needs the breath of life, the Gospel. My job is to get out there to a world that's choking on pollution. But oxygen has to come in a tank! It has to be brought in a container. So, the most important thing for me is to get oxygen out to these people who are panting, dying for the oxygen. I don't care how you get it to them. I don't care what container you use! We've got a lot of churches fighting over whether or not the oxygen's got to come in an iron lung! That's the mystery for me: Why is the church spending its time fighting over what kind of canisters you put the oxygen in? This is the only breath of life there is! [RM:] I want to know about the "wussification" of the church, as you call it ... [LS:] I'll give you one example of it: Street evangelism. You think about a typical street evangelist on a soapbox, with some kind of megaphone and he's handing out tracts. I mean, Wesley and some early Methodists in the late 18th, early 19th century invented street evangelism and they would attract these huge crowds; people were getting converted and there were these huge revivals! We do it today and it drives people away! It's not turning people to Christ, it's driving them away from Christ. Why? It's the wussification of the church, and the wussification of the church's mind and mission. In the 1790's, a book was equivalent to one month's salary, so people didn't have books. And they didn't have literature in their homes. So pamphlets and tracts were the cutting edge hardware of the 18th century. Literally, a book is one month's salary, and you're on a street evangelism team giving out books and tracts and pamphlets. Well, hello! In the 1990's the computer was equivalent to one month's salary! And here we are still giving out tracts, which our ancestor's did, but if we were doing what they did, we'd be standing on street corners passing out Palm Pilots, PCs. You want to talk about crowds that would wait in line and listen to what we have to say? Now, of course, that hardware would have to come with spiritual software. The early street evangelists just didn't have pamphlets, they had chapters from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, or Fox's Book of Martyrs, or Thomas A Kempis' Imitation of Christ. So you just don't pass out Palm Pilots, you put Bible software on them, if you're passing out PCs, you put the whole Scriptures in there! We're such wusses! We're still passing out tracts. I mean, in the men's room they put tracts on the urinals. And this is evangelism?! Who's gonna pick it up? It's the wussification of the church's mind and mission, and it's embarrassing. Let's do for our day what our ancestors did for their day � is that too much to ask? [RM:] Yeah, there's also the idea in there that Jesus raised people from the dead and we're just barely hanging on. [LS:] Oh, absolutely. We're fighting over the five points of Calvinism or something. But the big Achilles heel of the church is the practice of attractional Christianity, which is how you get people to come to church. It's all "come and see," it's not "go and be." The whole Great Commission is not about "come and see," it's "go and be." We're all trying to figure out how to bring more people into the church and it shouldn't be about coming to church. It should be about coming to Christ. And then when those people come to Christ, the church's job is to send them out.