Why the Holiest Men Hide From Us

From Cicero to Billy Graham, we’ve mistaken eloquence for holiness. John the Baptist proves otherwise

On Friday nights in my town the boardwalk fills up with tourists, teenagers, and the smell of fried dough. If you walk it long enough, you’re bound to meet a certain cast of characters. Over by the Ferris wheel there’s usually a man holding a giant wooden cross taller than himself, shuffling through the crowd like a misplaced extra from The Passion of the Christ. A block later you’ll find a young man barely out of high school, standing on a plastic milk crate with a megaphone, shouting at strangers that “the kingdom of God is near!” His voice cracks somewhere between adolescence and prophecy. A few steps on, kindhearted men and women are handing out Chick tracts by the hundreds, their brief cartoon sermons shoved into the hands of people who politely take them before dropping them into the nearest trash can.

And it isn’t just the local color. Every Saturday the Jehovah’s Witnesses set up in the airport and downtown squares with their sandwich-board displays, smiling bravely as crowds stream past without so much as eye contact. Their cousins, the Mormon missionaries, ride bicycles through neighborhoods in white shirts and ties, gamely knocking on doors and rehearsing conversations with strangers. Out west, you’ll find the Apologia Church men with cameras in tow, descending on Mormon towns with street debates designed for YouTube clicks. Meanwhile, the old-school Baptists in nearly every town still have their Thursday night “visitation,” gamely knocking on doors, repeating the same worn scripts they’ve practiced for decades.

It’s a strange kind of parade, isn’t it? All of them are well-intentioned. Most are sincere. But one can’t help feeling that the whole affair is—if not comic—at least slightly tragic. Evangelism in the West has become a spectacle, a kind of theatrical performance where we are more interested in doing something visible for God than in asking what evangelism truly is.

If you had asked Jesus, He might have given you a surprising answer. He once called John the Baptist “the greatest man born of women.” Now here is a curious thing: the greatest evangelist in history was not Billy Graham before a stadium crowd, nor a fire-eyed revivalist pacing the stage at a megachurch. He wasn’t even a street preacher in Jerusalem or Capernaum. John never rented a hall, never bought a microphone, never stapled a tract to a bulletin board. The greatest herald of the Messiah lived as a monk in the wilderness, far away from everyone.

And yet all of Jerusalem went out to him.

This is what undoes our tidy Western categories. We have been taught to believe evangelism is fundamentally about oratory. The best preacher, the sharpest debater, the most persuasive communicator—that is the person who will win souls. We believe this so firmly that we have built our churches, our conferences, even our denominations around the charisma of particular speakers. Evangelism has been reduced to the art of rhetoric.

But John the Baptist did not master rhetoric. He mastered prayer. His evangelism was not a performance—it was the fragrance of holiness. People did not flock to him because of his polished words but because the Spirit of God rested on him.

This is the secret modern Christianity keeps forgetting: true evangelism begins not with our eloquence, but with our closeness to God.

Think of the Desert Fathers. Saint Anthony fled into the wilderness to escape the noise of society. He had no plan, no pamphlets, no evangelistic method. Yet the more he prayed, the more the Holy Spirit sent people to him. They came in droves—disciples, pilgrims, the sick, the despairing—because holiness cannot remain hidden. It draws souls the way a lamp draws moths in the night. Saint Paisios on Mount Athos lived most of his life in obscurity, yet thousands made pilgrimages to see him, not because he had a marketing plan but because God had filled him with grace. Saint Porphyrios, who wished only to be hidden, became a spiritual father to multitudes. None of them courted the crowds. The crowds came anyway.

Contrast this with the methods of our modern age. We take our cues from the Greeks and Romans, who exalted the orator above all men. In Athens, rhetoric was a fine art; in the Roman Republic, the best lawyer was not the one with the most truth but the one with the most eloquence. Cicero could sway entire assemblies with the cadence of his voice, while justice itself bent to the prettier speech. Facts became secondary; the golden tongue ruled all.

It is no accident that as Rome slid into corruption, the courtroom became theater. The crowds flocked not for justice but for the show. The more polished the performance, the more convincing the lie. The West has inherited this same disease. We still believe that if only we craft the perfect sermon, the ideal debate, the airtight argument, then souls will be saved. The evangelist has become, in effect, a performer.

But performance does not save. Holiness does.

And this is why John the Baptist matters. He turns our expectations upside down. The greatest evangelist did not go looking for an audience; the audience found him. He did not manipulate with words; he pointed simply to the Lamb of God. His power came not from persuasion but from purity.

If this is true, then perhaps we must admit a painful possibility: much of what passes for evangelism today is little more than noise. Stadium crusades, viral YouTube debates, door-to-door campaigns, street preaching with megaphones—all of these may make us feel busy, but busyness is not fruit. The question is not whether we are doing something, but whether what we do flows from actual communion with God.

The irony is that people are starving for authenticity. They are not impressed by our clever arguments or glossy tracts. They want to meet someone who has actually been transformed, someone who radiates peace and joy and humility. They are not looking for orators—they are looking for saints.

And saints, as it happens, are often hiding from us.

They are in caves, on mountains, in monasteries, or in the hidden corners of our cities. They are praying for us even now, begging God to have mercy on our world, pleading for our salvation. They are not selling tickets to conferences. They are not livestreaming their sermons. They are not collecting subscribers. But they are evangelizing in the truest sense—because holiness itself is evangelism. The closer they draw to God, the more people God sends to them.

Saint Paisios once said, “When someone sanctifies himself, then a portion of the overflow of his holiness falls on his fellow men.” That is the logic of true evangelism. Holiness is contagious. You need not shout it through a megaphone. It is enough to become holy, and God Himself will do the advertising.

The myth of modernity is that the world will be changed by the loudest voice. The truth is that the world has always been changed by the quietest prayers.

John the Baptist did not stand on a milk crate in the market. He did not distribute pamphlets. He did not hold a revival meeting. And yet Christ called him the greatest man born of women.

We should take the hint.

If you go looking for the true evangelists of our age, you will not find them on the stage at your local Christian conference. You will not find them holding microphones in stadiums. They are not the men who trend on YouTube. You will find them, if you are fortunate, in chapels that smell of candle wax, in small monasteries far from the city, in prayer cells where the only sermon is tears.

And if you cannot find them, do not be discouraged. They are praying for you all the same.

Kenneth

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