Spreading the Word

David French, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund who advised InterVarsity during this dispute, said the "haziness" around the policy could still chill evangelicals from speaking about their faith.

"People talk about all kinds of other stuff -- politics, sports, all kinds of contentious things. Then someone bring up Jesus, and suddenly . . . "

But there is a difference when it comes to matters of faith, Borelli said. "You're talking about one's convictions as one relates to God," he said. "So you're talking about something profound to our being, our position of faith, to our relations with God. That would be the qualitative difference."

Robert Smith, director of the spiritual student center at Penn State University, said schools are writing policies like Georgetown's because the U.S. religious climate is changing so quickly. Penn State polls show the percentage of students who call themselves religious or spiritual has been rising, as has the number of religious groups.

Penn State is one of only a few public institutions with an ethics policy for faith organizations, he said. The policy, however, is vaguer than Georgetown's, requiring groups not "to coerce or diminish."

According to the Association for College and University Religious Affairs, a group of chaplains and deans of religious life, policies about evangelizing in the past tended to be less specific and more positive, focusing on respecting one another's beliefs more than laying out what is prohibited.

Nathanael Oakes, who was involved with evangelical student groups at Georgetown until graduating this spring, said many people his age believe that the "broadcasting-your-message" evangelism style of previous generations is an ineffective way to spread the loving word of God.

"The goal isn't the number of Christians -- the goal is to love the people God has placed in your life," he said.

He and Brown cited a term that has become the buzzword of evangelism today for many faiths: relational. That means sharing your faith in the context of a close relationship. Another expression that has become trendy in Christian youth magazines and blogs and on T-shirts is one attributed to 13th century Saint Francis of Assisi: "Preach the gospel; if necessary, use words."

Because Christians feel the need to "self-censor" their talk about God, Brown said, young people now are putting more emphasis on "being more radical in their acts of service," such as in work with the poor and sick.

The debate reaches far beyond campuses to evangelicals like Hugh Holmes, a 42-year-old government auditor from Bowie who sees shying from straight talk about salvation as akin to strolling past a burning house. After work or on weekends, he goes to popular outdoor spots to evangelize. He believes that "yelling" doesn't work, so he uses a sketchboard and magic tricks to attract people.

On a D.C. sidewalk recently, Holmes reenacted a few faith-sharing approaches he uses. One involves three pieces of rope that at first appear to be of different lengths but when flipped around in Holmes' hands become equal. As he did this trick, he explained that while some people believe there's such a thing as a "small sin" that won't keep them from heaven, God sees all sin as being of the same size.

"People are much more visual; they don't want to hear [about] hellfire and brimstone. . . . But what's important to me is eternal life, salvation," he said. "If they don't want to hear it, walk away. At the end of the day, there is no real difference between proselytizing and evangelizing."

In writing the new policy, Georgetown looked at previous major efforts, including a 1989 statement by the World Evangelical Fellowship that condemned "deceptive proselytizing" to Jews and a 1997 statement by a Catholic-Pentecostal summit saying the term "proselytism . . . has come to carry a negative meaning associated with an illicit form of evangelism."

Borelli said that no specific complaints led to the new policy and that it was written simply to "clarify." However, several professors and students in the evangelical groups said there have been confrontations over the subject for years.

Even with a new policy, the question of what constitutes acceptable evangelizing is "definitely ongoing," said Clyde Wilcox, a government professor at Georgetown whose research focuses on evangelical Americans.

While the younger generation "is much more about quiet witness rather than consigning you to hell," he said, it's not clear if the switch is one of style or substance. "I don't think there is a shift in theological beliefs."