The Evangelism of Presence

And why feeling uncomfortable is a good thing.

In my years working on community development projects, I’ve noticed a recurring challenge: nothing meaningful gets off the ground without a first mover. I can plan, advocate, speak at events—but unless someone else with a bit of skin in the game steps forward too, the momentum fades. One distraction, one competing initiative, and the fragile energy you’ve built slips away.

The irony is that many of the most important civic goods—trust, connection, shared purpose—depend on things too diffuse, too slow-moving, or too “obvious” for most people to champion. Who’s going to go to bat for neighborly small talk? For running into someone unexpectedly at the coffee shop and letting it derail your afternoon? For simply being available as we talked about last week?

These feel too minor to defend—until you realize what’s replacing them. If no one makes the case for attention, presence, and interstitial time, something else will fill the gap. And increasingly, that something is the screen.

It’s why I’ve started to think about attention as something that now requires evangelists—people willing to go first, to break the norm, to risk awkwardness for the sake of something better.

From Tracts to Presence

I grew up around a particular form of evangelism: memorized scripts, gospel tracts, and front porches. The kind of thing that now gets parodied or buried under layers of ironic distance. But here’s the thing—it took nerve. You had to step out of your routine and into someone else’s. You had to believe that there was something better on offer, and that you might be the one to offer it.

That’s how I feel about presence today.

In a world where disengagement is the norm, where everyone is “somewhere else” via headphones or screens, being truly attentive—really showing up—feels strange. Maybe even disruptive. But it’s also powerful.

When we are disengaged, we’re signaling that we don’t care about where we are. That this moment, this place, these people aren’t quite worth our attention. We are, in effect, teleporting—mentally relocating to a curated feed, a news cycle, a podcast, a game. None of these are bad in themselves. But they all come at a cost: the subtle but steady erosion of our availability to each other.

And in a culture so shaped by what’s memetic—what’s shared, imitated, amplified—it’s not surprising that attention, too, has to be modeled. Evangelized. Lived out in ways that help others see its value again.

We often talk about attention as a personal discipline. A way to manage our time, increase focus, or improve productivity. But I’m increasingly convinced that attention is also a public good—something we all benefit from when it’s practiced, and something we lose when it’s neglected.

When someone is fully present with us, we notice. It’s not neutral—it’s arresting. It affirms that we matter. And in turn, it invites us to do the same.

That’s why I think of this as a kind of evangelism—not a message shouted, but a posture lived. Not coercion, but invitation. Not a pitch, but a presence.

The problem, of course, is that being the only person looking up in a sea of people looking down can feel lonely. And there’s a collective action trap baked in: if no one else is paying attention, what does my attention accomplish?

The answer is: a lot. And also, not much.

A lot—because it always takes a first mover. A noticer. A person who risks being interruptible. And not much—because if we stop there, if we assume our individual posture is enough, we miss the larger call. If we believe this is worthwhile, we’ll have to become something more like evangelists for it. Witnesses to a way of life that feels increasingly strange, but deeply needed.

Scripts and the Loss of Spontaneity

We’ve lost a lot of the basic social scripts that used to guide ordinary interaction. Things like: how to greet someone you don’t know. How to make small talk with the person behind the counter. How to be just bored enough to notice someone else nearby and ask them a question.

These scripts are like protocols—little pieces of social code we don’t think about until they disappear. And while they can’t be taught centrally or enforced top-down, they can be practiced. Re-learned. Modeled.

We recover them by doing them.

I think of my friend Andy. I ran into him at a coffee shop a few months ago. He was there working but was still alert, engaged. We talked for nearly an hour. I walked away not just grateful for the conversation, but for the way he paid attention. That interaction reminded me how rare—and how restorative—it is to be truly seen in the ordinary course of a day.

That’s the kind of moment I want to create more often. And that starts with me.

Now that I have a son, I see how much he watches me. Not just in the big moments, but in the micro-habits: the hand motions, the attention shifts, the way I interact with the world when we’re just sitting around.

And I know—if I’m not intentional, he’ll pick up the same fragmented attention that’s been trained into me by two decades of digital convenience. He’ll learn to check out by default. To fill every gap. To turn away from the people closest to him because something else might be more interesting.

That’s not what I want for him.

So I’m trying to go first. Not because I’m especially good at this—but because someone has to go first. Someone has to make presence visible again.

A Quiet Invitation

This isn’t a pitch for some high-minded purity test. It’s not even a critique of technology, really. It’s just a reminder that presence is not the default anymore—and that choosing it might feel awkward at first.

But here’s where you can start:

• Put the phone down during the in-between moments.

• Take the headphones out when you walk through your neighborhood.

• Say hello to someone who might not expect it.

• Engage the barista, the cashier, the neighbor in their yard.

You don’t have to be loud about it. Just willing.

We can’t rebuild public life all at once. But we can become first movers in our own daily spaces.

And in a world built to distract us, that’s a form of evangelism worth practicing.