This is part of a multi-post series on the week I spent in Uganda doing door to door evangelism. Click here to read all posts in this series.

I had numerous issues with my time spent doing door to door evangelism and they continue to influence me today.

One thing that annoyed me was the apparent desire of our sponsoring organization to convert as many people as possible. We were asked to keep a count of how many people converted and basically everything seemed to revolve around the numbers. I feel that evangelism should be relationship centered, so the idea of jumping into a foreign country, converting as many people as possible, then leaving seems so wrong to me.

Having our testimonies altered completely devalued them. It felt like someone took my faith story, my personal experience, and turned it into a sales pitch. "How can we sell this even better?" must have been the question they were asking themselves when printing our testimonies. It caused me to lose all my trust in the organization that was sponsoring the evangelism.

The biggest issue I faced was based in the sheer number of people who converted. As a rough guess, ninety percent of people I talked to converted to Christianity. This number is so huge that I struggled daily with wondering what these people were thinking.

Religion is a big deal and not something to be entered into lightly. Why so many people would decide to take up Christianity after only a fifteen minute conversion with me was a complete mystery. It didn't feel like the people I met knew the weight of their decision or what it implied and entailed. I felt like I was just shoving my religion down people's throats without any concern to their preexisting belief systems.

The questions dogged me. Perhaps people thought that if they converted, they would become wealthy like me. What if they were simply being polite and this was the most expedient way of getting rid of me? I'll never really know.

The few people that still stand out and I remember are those that seemed sincere in their interest in Christianity. Those few people greatly helped me get through the day. I also really enjoyed encountering Muslims since I could actually have a reasoned discussion with them about faith. I never converted any Muslims, but it was a relief to finally find someone who would question my beliefs and decide to keep their own.

Another minor issue I had was the required attire. It is my personal belief that you can be Christian regardless of what clothing you wear, but in Uganda we were asked to wear shirts with collars and no t-shirts. This was because good Christians wear nice clothing and have a conservative haircut in Uganda. This failed to impress me to say the least.

The times I was asked to perform a healing and exorcism had their own issues.

The healing I was okay with since you just need to have faith, pray, and wait and see. The person had chronic malaria and really needed to see a doctor, but I suppose some prayer can't hurt.

For the exorcism I really struggled with what everyone was expecting me to do. I was called on to exorcise a young boy who had apparently been disrespectful to his parents. To me this is a sign of adolescence, not demonic possession.

I had the feeling that everyone was expecting a big show, but I don't think that yelling and shouting is required or even justified. What I ended up doing was praying quietly over the boy, but in truth my prayer was more about his being headstrong than casting out any demons.

Overall this week raised a lot of good questions in my mind about Christianity and how I feel about it. I disagreed with nearly everything I was called upon to do that week, but it helped me get to a place where I could starting thinking issues through for myself.

This story will be continued in two days time, stay tuned.