activities, and we hoped for precisely such a mistake. Such a bending of language was the manifestation of the larger evangelical impulse to make Christianity more contemporary and appealing, unafraid of lingo and rock music and computers, embracing the forms of modern culture while simultaneously dissenting from its values. The contradiction bothered me, for it seemed to promise what it could give and ignore the fact that for two-thousand years Christians have not sought to mimic the secular world, but to stand apart from it. Calling a Bible study a small group rather than a Bible study sounded a little like trickery. However, we operated on the principle that though some people knew nothing about Jesus, most knew enough to have developed assumptions about what it meant to be a Christian, and to be scared off by the presence of missionaries, by the idea of answering the door to a person holding a Bible in his hands. So we moved in secret, festooned in our emblazoned surfer wear, jamming to mainstream music, our hair sculpted with gel, convinced we were here to be cool, to be attractive, to infiltrate and affect. Unlike many Christian groups who worked in foreign countries, we did not come under the pretense of service or charity. We were not there to build homes or clothe and shelter the weak. We were there to spread the Word. Our second night in Toowong, Eric passed around the tract we would use on campus. It was the Australian version of the tract the ministry organization used in America, and was titled Knowing God PersoMl1y. In our addiction to acronyms and coded language, we immediately took to calling it the KGP. We were divided into three teams and dispatched to campuses in different sections of Brisbane. While the other two teams went to the satellite campuses in the remote Brisbane suburbs, I was relieved to be on the team assigned to the flagship campus of the Queensland UniversityofTechnology(QUT), nested on the south end ofdowntown against the Brisbane River. Each morning Steve, Amber, Hannah, Josh and I set out for campus with our pockets and backpacks stuffed with KGPs rubber-banded together in stacks of fifty. We rode the bus into the city, climbed the stairs from the underground depot and emerged
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DAVID MCGLYNN