The GODISNOWHERE Ministry

Founded 1995: An Evangelical Ministry

GODISNOWHERE began in 1995 as an explicitly evangelical Christian ministry. The mission was straightforward and confrontational: challenge people, spiritually, philosophically, and theologically, at the point of maximum resistance. Not behind church walls. In public. At fairs, festivals, city squares, and anywhere else people gathered.

The primary venue was the People's Fair in Denver, an annual event held in the heart of the city, drawing tens of thousands of attendees across every political, spiritual, and cultural position imaginable. For years, the team set up a tent, staffed it with literature and conversations, and engaged anyone and everyone. I used to always say, come Saturday or Sunday as we will have 300 thousand of our closest friends meeting us in downtown Denver.

Thousands of conversations over more than two decades. Some pleasant. Some hostile. Some that changed people on the spot. And many of these engagements changed us as well.

Mission: Equipping Believers, Engaging Skeptics

The ministry had a dual mandate from the beginning. First: equip believers. Most Christians in 1995, and today, had not been trained to engage the strongest secular objections to their faith. The arguments from religious diversity, from the problem of evil, from the history of Christian violence, from the silence of God, these were not rhetorical tricks. They were serious. GODISNOWHERE treated them seriously and built responses that held up under pressure.

Second: engage skeptics honestly, with the actual argument rather than bait-and-switch tactics, emotional manipulation, or selective evidence. The secular objections were always stated as their best advocates state them, then answered. Anything less was a disservice to both the skeptic and the truth.

The tent was an argument, not a conversation machine. Some people walked away more skeptical than when they arrived, and that was fine. The goal was always clarity rather than compliance.

Typical Fair Weekend: Friday to Sunday

This schedule reflects the operational rhythm of a typical summer fair weekend deployment. Logistics were minimal by design: speed and reliability over comfort.

The Year 2000: Millennial Tension and Open Questions

The year 2000 People's Fair arrived in a cultural climate already charged. Y2K fears had dissolved, but the millennial transition had surfaced latent questions about meaning, time, and ultimate significance that the culture hadn't fully processed. Attendance at the booth was measurably higher than prior years, not because of any change in our approach, but because people were already asking questions they hadn't known how to articulate.

The most common unsolicited comment that summer: "I used to believe, but I stopped. I don't know why." Not hostility. Not intellectual objection. Something quieter, a drift that had happened without a decision. These were the most significant conversations of the year. Not the aggressive atheists (there were plenty), not the theological arguments (those came too), but the quiet leavers who had walked away from faith without ever confronting it directly.

Literature distributed that weekend included early drafts of what would later become the NO track articles: the first systematic attempt to present the secular objections in full, in the open, with a crowd watching. Several of those conversations directly shaped the final form of the arguments now published on this site.

Total estimated foot traffic past the booth: 4,000+ over the weekend. Sustained conversations (15 min or more): approximately 140. Literature distributed: 320 pieces. Notable conversions or significant shifts recorded: 7, a number that sounds small until you understand what it cost each of those seven people to change their position in public.

Setup Day: The First Sign

The People's Fair 2001 began like every other year: truck loaded before dawn, a 10×10 canopy tent folded into its bag, two folding tables, a literature box, and a 4-foot banner with the name. The goal was to be operational before the first pedestrian wave hit the fairgrounds.

Tent setup: 30 minutes solo. With a second pair of hands: 10 minutes. This had been the rhythm for years. What had also become a consistent observation, notable enough to record, was this: approximately 70% of the people who stopped to help set up the tent were people who, once the conversation started, turned out to be skeptics, atheists, or from traditions actively opposed to the message. A Catholic woman. A man who identified himself as a card-carrying member of the American Humanist Association. A young man who said he didn't believe in anything but couldn't walk past someone struggling with a tent pole.

This was not coincidence. It was a pattern repeated fair after fair, year after year. The people most likely to offer help setting up a tent for a ministry they disagreed with were the people who took seriously the simple human obligation of helping someone in need, regardless of what the sign above the tent said. This was noted at the time as quietly remarkable. It has not been forgotten.

The Catholic Woman

She was in her mid-fifties, walking with a group of family members who drifted ahead while she stopped. She had seen the banner, GODISNOWHERE, and read it the first way. She assumed she was walking into something she agreed with.

She helped set one of the tent weights, introduced herself, asked what denomination we were. When told the ministry was non-denominational and evangelical, not Catholic, the conversation shifted. She was not hostile, but she was sharp. She had theological objections to the evangelical framing of salvation. She believed the Catholic tradition's understanding of sacramental grace was the more coherent account of how God worked in the world. She was probably right that most evangelicals she had met couldn't articulate why they disagreed.

The conversation lasted forty-five minutes. What she said at the end has stayed: "You actually listened. Most people with a tent like this just want to win." She took a copy of the literature. She did not convert. She was not asked to. She was asked to keep thinking, and she said she would.

The insight she left behind was this: the categories "enemy" and "ally" were not operating at the level of theology. They were operating at the level of character. She helped set up the tent of a ministry she disagreed with because she was the kind of person who helped. That is a data point about something more fundamental than doctrine.

The American Humanist

He announced himself before he said anything else: "I'm a humanist. American Humanist Association." He said it the way someone says it when they've had to defend the position before and wanted to get the declaration out of the way first.

He had helped with the other side of the tent while the Catholic woman was still there, both of them, from opposing traditions, helping set up something neither of them believed in. He thought this was funny. So did we.

His objections were precise: the problem of evil (well-formed version, not the bumper-sticker version), the hiddenness of God, and the ethical record of institutional Christianity. He was not interested in emotional appeals. He wanted the argument. He got it.

The conversation that followed was one of the longest on record from any fair: two hours and twenty minutes. No raised voices. No concessions made on either side, but also no dishonesty. At the end, he said something that has been quoted internally ever since: "I don't believe what you believe. But I think you actually believe it, and I think that matters."

He left with a copy of the materials on the minimal facts argument. Whether it changed anything, we don't know. What we know is that two people, holding opposite positions on the most important question either of them had ever considered, sat across a folding table at a public fair and talked to each other for over two hours without either one pretending.

That is what the tent was for.

What 2001 Demonstrated

The People's Fair 2001 was not the most dramatic year, and it was not the year with the largest recorded conversions. It was the year that most clearly illustrated the underlying principle of the ministry: the argument belongs in the open. Not in a church where everyone already agrees, not in an academic journal where the stakes feel theoretical, but in the middle of a city fair, with 40,000 people walking past, in the heat, with a tent that took 30 minutes to set up and produced conversations that lasted for years.

The team set up that tent under threats as well. Not every year, not every venue, but often enough that it was part of the calculation before showing up. Other vendors had objected. Some fair organizers had questioned the permit. Individuals had walked up to the table specifically to intimidate rather than engage. We kept showing up.

We kept showing up because the alternative, staying comfortable, staying quiet, leaving the question to people who were not willing to be challenged by it, was not acceptable. The Great Commission is not a suggestion. It is a command: "and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." That promise was not abstract. It was the reason the tent went up, year after year, in the middle of a city that was largely indifferent or openly hostile to the message.

The ministry has changed form over three decades: from tent to website, from oral argument to written argument, from face-to-face to a reader anywhere in the world. The question is the same. The commitment is the same. The command is the same.