Christianity now should be about preaching to secularists, not foreigners off in an entirely different belief context. If you do not understand what faith is, what the substance of belief is, it’s very difficult to understand the heritage of the modern world.
There’s a tendency for non-Christians to see Christianity as a unified religion, but that isn’t the case. If you think of it the other way, Christians sometimes have the tendency to look at irreligious people as a monolith too.
Why preach to anyone?
The only reason to is because you want immoral persons to become moral persons and Christianity is not about morality, it is not about ‘heritage’ it is not even about faith.
If you did not grow up understanding what a jew is or what Israel is or what happened to them you cannot just condense thousands of years of history into “Jesus loves you” and think you can convert people. You are trying to make people into one culture and that is not right. It is not even what the original “Christians” had in mind.
The gospel is not: Jesus loves you… It is that your death is not something to worry about. Jews in Jesus’ time were not a monolith either. Some thought spirits existed and some did not. They had a whole section of the temple devoted to those who did not believe in spirits, the secularists and Judaism is very secularised.
It is only the fanatics that take hold of this religion and spread it and that is why it has not died. The Jews were dispersed and they came back again and again. They as a people (the chosen people) cannot be destroyed. The book they have is what tells them who they are, a people who were persecuted and always returned.
What does Christianity have to do with this then? Jesus was resurrected and people early on told others they too would be resurrected. But this then was corrupted into that you must believe in Jesus or you would go to hell. Jews don’t even believe in hell. Hell is a metaphor for persecution. And the Greeks and Romans view the underworld as the unconscious or the unknown dark places.
It is only because Christians were persecuted that converts happened where people saw that it was wrong and then listened and then believed. Not that they believed in hell, they believed in resurrection.
And what happens after that is not what most believe, Jesus will not be on earth as a human. He will not live in a cube two thousand miles across. What will happen is that the wars will cease. Peace will be on earth, sickness and death will be gone. Not because of people preaching or anything but because of the metaphase that brought the earth to that point where the dominant kingdom rose up.
When the earth is full there can’t be war and violence. Destruction cannot happen. Simply because everything will be monitored. There will be no place to hide. Not a single thing will go unseen. Some call this technology antichrist, but it will stop the murders and the rape and the hunger. And those who were dead will come back, just not in the way people ignorantly thought they would.