Facts rarely bring someone to faith on their own because the person hearing them has to trust the one speaking before the facts can land. That does not make facts unimportant. Kori Porter, now a campus minister at Princeton University, was a teenager who could not be reached by a shocking film. Months after a lonely night in a Cleveland snowstorm, she was reached by two campus ministers who asked her a question, invited her in, and then explained the gospel plainly. The truth was the same both times. The difference was who stood beside it.
The question deserves a careful answer, because many Christians quietly assume that evangelism is mostly a delivery problem. Find the right argument, the right book, the right video, and a reasonable person will follow it to belief. Porter’s story pushes back on that assumption. It also refuses the easy opposite, where kindness replaces content altogether.
Isn’t evangelism mostly a matter of getting the right information to people?
At sixteen, Porter thought she was pregnant. She went to a center offering free tests, not realizing at first that it was a Christian ministry. While she waited, a worker asked whether she would get an abortion. Porter said yes. The worker showed her a film, left her alone in the room without conversation, and came back to ask the question again. Porter’s answer did not change.
Looking back, she does not argue that the film was false or that the worker’s convictions were wrong. Her complaint is narrower and sharper: “the point was, she didn’t minister to my pain. What she did was just put this bandaid over and hope that it would like shock me into the reality.”
The film was built on a guess about the problem: a scared sixteen-year-old simply had not yet seen the facts clearly. But she was not short on facts. She was in despair, and nobody had asked about it. Information aimed at a mind that is busy surviving tends to get pushed off. In Porter’s case it produced a grim new resolve rather than a changed heart.
Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, connects this directly to how Christians often equip themselves. She describes the habit of handing someone a resource and hoping it sticks: a person drawn toward Hebrew Israelite teaching gets an article, a person who says Christianity is a white man’s religion gets a book on early African Christianity. Fields is not dismissing those resources. Her concern is that the tool becomes a substitute for the harder work of listening. “When people are dealing with real pain, the tools assist, but presence comes first,” she says. She frames the order simply: “You have to connect with their heart first and then connect with their head.”
What is the person actually asking for?
Porter’s drift had a cause. She grew up in an old Mississippi church beside a grandmother whose worship stayed with her. Then her grandmother died at 59, and her stepfather died not long after. Those losses, she says, opened a void she needed people to fill, and she found them among drug dealers, dropouts and ex-felons who made her feel accepted. Her summary of that season is blunt: “If the church doesn’t disciple, if the church doesn’t reach out, then the world will, and I found my place in the world.”
Fields draws out the implication for anyone trying to share their faith. People far from God are not usually doing wrong for its own sake. Many are looking for acceptance, validation and identity. So the first task is to find what Fields calls the pain point and ask how the gospel meets it. A response that skips that step is answering a question the person has not asked. The clinic film answered a question about what abortion is. Porter’s question was whether anyone would stay.
Porter still speaks of the people from that season with affection and says she wants them to know Christ. The people who filled the void gave her something the church had not, and honest evangelism has to reckon with that rather than treat the lost as simply rebellious.
Then do the facts matter at all?
They do, and Porter’s own story shows why. At eighteen, homeless after a fight with her father, she slept in a car in the snow. In the early morning she called her mother and some pastors. No one answered. So she prayed the way her grandmother had, calling on the name of Jesus and admitting she needed him, including her struggle with suicidal thoughts. “There would be no reason to have peace at that moment. But calling upon his name, it gave me peace,” she says. She is careful not to treat the words as magic: “I don’t think it was just the name itself.”
(If you are carrying thoughts like the ones Porter describes, please talk to someone today. In the US you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any time.)
Porter believes God began giving her a new heart that night. Yet she still could not have explained the gospel. That gap is the answer to our question. Months later, she says, God sent “someone along to explain the gospel flat out.” That someone was two campus ministers, Steven Taylor and Thomas Campbell.
The first conversation was not promising. Porter was arguing with Thomas about whether a fan of a certain rapper could be a Christian. Steve stayed out of the argument. He introduced himself and asked about her faith. Porter remembers it this way: “So he actually credited me, my Christianity, he didn’t try to argue with me about Christianity.” Then he asked a series of simple questions ending with this one: if she died that night, what would let her enter heaven?
She had nothing to offer beyond a past experience and her grandmother’s faith, and she noticed the gap herself. “I internally felt like, man, this man may know more,” she says. He did not press the advantage with a lecture. In her words, “what he did was he invited me to a Bible study.”
Afterward, the two ministers walked her through the whole story: humanity with God in the garden, the separation sin caused, human attempts to get back that can never succeed, and the death of Christ in her place. Porter came to see the drugs and the relationships as coverings like the fig leaves of Genesis 3, attempts to hide from God that could not make her righteous before him. The detail that broke through was one she had never understood: that on the cross Christ bore the wrath of God that was due to her. That truth, she says, floored her.
So both the film and the Bible study delivered information. One came from a stranger who left the room. The other came from people who had already shown they were for her, in a setting she had been invited into, in answer to a question she now knew she could not answer. The facts were never the problem. Facts handed over by someone who would not stay were.
What does Scripture say about how truth travels?
Porter grounds her view in the incarnation. John 1:14 says, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” God’s message came in person and lived among the people it was for. Porter draws the line to her own conversion: “Christ sent people to be incarnate in my life, to be people who dwelled amongst me, to show me a different path in a different way.”
That is an application of John 1, not its primary teaching. John is making a claim about who Jesus is, the eternal Word taking on flesh, and Christians cannot become incarnate as he was. But the pattern of God coming near before he is understood is a fair thing to learn from, and Porter learns it as someone who lived it.
She also points to the woman at the well in John 4. Jesus begins with what is in front of the woman, water, and moves from there to himself as living water. She then tells her town about him. The ending is instructive. In John 4:42, the townspeople tell her, “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” Her testimony brought them to Jesus, and their faith came to rest on Jesus himself. Porter reads the story the same way: telling what God has done for you makes people want to come and hear for themselves.
Isn’t this just being nice instead of telling the truth?
This is the strongest objection, and Porter answers it herself. “You can oppose a sin. That’s not the question,” she says. The question is whether the person knows where you stand toward them. In her words, “you still need to be able to show that person that you’re for them and that the gospel is for them.”
Her conversion bears this out. The campus ministers told her she could not pray or attend church enough to reach God, and they described the crucifixion in detail. They did not water anything down. What changed was that she trusted the people saying it.
There is a real limit here as well. Porter is describing her story and her ministry, not a law every conversion follows. Some people do come to faith through a book read alone, and Fields keeps that door open when she says tools are helpful. Porter makes a similar concession: Scripture references and articles should sit in the background of your own mind so you know when you have gone too far. Her claim is about what leads: “I don’t think those should be our leading conversational points when we’re trying to minister and connect with people.” That is a claim about order and emphasis, and it is more modest, and more defensible, than saying facts never persuade.
She applied the same instinct outside evangelism. As a freshman at the University of Mississippi, she set out to replace the Colonel Reb mascot, and her first step was conversation, not a demand. When she had enough signatures to push a new mascot through, she insisted on a student vote instead. Fields names the wisdom in that choice: Porter saw that “I have the vote, but I don’t have the heart of the people yet.” A mascot campaign is not a conversion, and the parallel should not be stretched. But it shows that for Porter, waiting for people to come along is a conviction, not a technique she saves for religious conversations.
What does staying look like?
Presence can go wrong in its own way. A minister who is always available can end up making people depend on her. Porter, who now disciples students at Princeton, says plainly that as an introvert she cannot offer constant contact, and that it would not help if she did. Her aim is for students to understand their identity in Christ: “I definitely want them to be able to sit on their own in the gospel.”
That is why she can say, “I’m not trying to make mini mes.” She wants to “create disciples that create disciples that can impact the world for the Lord.” The ministers who reached her did the same. They stayed long enough to explain the cross, then pointed her to Christ rather than to themselves. Porter is now doing for students what those two men did for her.
The facts about Jesus were true when a frightened sixteen-year-old sat alone with a film, and they were true when an eighteen-year-old slept in a car in the snow. What changed was that someone finally stayed long enough for her to hear them.