Evangelicals are becoming a public nuisance.

Like the lowrider Chevy that pulls up next to you, rattling your windows with a hip-hop wall of decibels from Public Enemy, channeled through 800-watt amps that are meant to say, "I have ARRIVED, buddy, and whatever you're doing or thinking or listening to has got to give way to MY agenda."

Everybody hates those guys.

And everybody is starting to feel the same way about Christians.

The momentum has been growing for years. Back in the '90s, the book What America Believes asked the public to rank hundreds of societal groups.

Televangelists ranked next to last, beating out only drug dealers. Now a recent Barna poll reports the public image of evangelicals as a whole ranks next to last, beating out only prostitutes and just behind lesbians.

Of course, the world will always be offended by the true gospel. But that's not happening. Instead, people are being offended by the hypocrisy, self-importance and desperate sales gimmicks Christians display through their evangelistic efforts. The real gospel gets lost behind all the ear-splitting dissonance in the background.

So what do real missions and evangelism look like?

It might be easier to first explain what they're not.

• Televangelism is not evangelism. With its worldwide electronic reach, the cotton-candy gimme-gospel of the televangelists is what most people associate with the word "Christian." The name-it-and-claim-it, gain-is-godliness philosophy behind these programs is the opposite of the gospel Jesus expressed on the cross. This might fill stadiums, but so does Britney Spears.

• Motivational thinking and sales techniques cannot substitute for preaching the cross. Getting psyched up is not the same thing as zeal. You can't sell God the same way you sell cornflakes. In fact, motivational methododology might just be a way to disguise one's own lack of faith.

• Appeals to maximize self-interest won't bring anyone to faith in Christ. Parading happy, successful, celebrities and athletes to entice people to get what these people have will never bring anyone to face their own sinfulness.

Orthodox Jews, in dealing with people who want to adopt their faith, still use Naomi's example (Ruth 1:8-18) of three times telling her daughters-in-law to return to their own people when they wanted to follow her to Israel. Rabbis rebuff potential proselytes three times, says scholar Jacob Neusner, "lest becoming part of holy Israel become cheap and trivial."

Jesus called it counting the cost.

The command of the "Great Commission" is to make disciples. The more accurate translation is, "As you are going into all the world, make disciples." The biblical process, Jesus said, whether it is near or far, is to "fall into the ground and die," which in turn brings forth much fruit.

Complicated mission strategies, evangelistic campaigns, crusade gimmicks - all these can only obscure that simple process, if it's going on at all.

One misunderstood evangelistic metaphor is being a "fisher of men." We see it in terms of dangling bait to "lure" someone in so we can "hook" them with the gospel.

But in the Mediterranean and Middle East, the most common form of fishing is a community activity using a net, not a fishing pole. Several boats circle an area of water, a net is tossed out, and then comes the tedious job of pulling in the net together, in rhythm. Soon the fish are visible, churning the water into foam. Several men jump in and start grappling fish into the boats, sometimes knocking them in the head. It is chaos for a while.

The fish don't want to be caught. In fact, they end up dead. In the same way, believers must embrace their own death before experiencing Christ's resurrection.

Basically, the fishermen just do what they do. They're not focusing on an individual fish. It's their daily way of life. Sometimes fish get caught. Sometimes the net comes up empty. It's not glamorous.

It reminds me of Bill Koehn, the Southern Baptist mission worker who was murdered in December along with two others at the Baptist Hospital in Jibla, Yemen. In a tribute to him at his memorial service, his son-in-law said Koehn was a grocer from Kansas - a "nobody" that God placed "on the backside of nowhere" to be Christ to one of the poorest countries in the Middle East.

Stopped at a military checkpoint, a soldier would peer in Koehn's car window and announce, "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet." Without batting an eye, Koehn would reply, "And Jesus is his Son!" They would wave him through without incident. With no other legal way to publicly tell the gospel story in that Muslim country, he was a witness for 27 years by doing the daily drudgery of keeping the hospital functioning.

Thousands of people were treated and healed because of his faithfulness. Many of them lined the streets to honor him and his co-workers as their bodies were taken away.

His son-in-law summed up his ministry: "He didn't preach. He didn't evangelize. He lived. He shone like a bonfire in the darkest night."

Had he not become a martyr, the wider world would not have heard of him at all.

If there is a crisis in evangelism, it's that so few are able to respond to Peter's exhortation in I Peter 3:15: "But sanctify the Lord in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear."

The problem is not a lack of apologetical reasoning or polemical tracts. The problem is there's not enough humilty, meekness and fear. The problem is that no one is seeing the hope in our hearts - we're not living His resurrection life - so they're not asking us about it. Instead, we're forcing our political agendas, our moral standards and theological ideas on people who think we're a nuisance.

And the solution is not more organization or structure. As always, it's simply more and deeper repentance.