I just have to get this down.

As I walked towards my usual lunch-time haunts on Telegraph Avenue, I was approached by two girls and a boy in their early teen years. One girl, who held a piece of paper, seemed to be the leader and asked me whether I was willing to answer some questions. They happen to be well-groomed, well-spoken white kids. However, I immediately knew what they were probably about.

I said, "Sure, why don't you tell me who you are and where you're from." I don't remember the exact exchange of words, save that they were from a Baptist church and had been sent by their youth pastor to ask these questions. They asked me one question -- which I can't remember exactly, except maybe it was about what my purpose in life was. I immediately asked them for the other questions. The kids obliged me and read off all the questions to me. They were predictable ones and went something like: Do you know where you going in life? What do you think is important? What do you think will happen to you when you die? The last question was "What do you think of Jesus?"

I didn't answer any of the questions. I didn't feel like submitting to a regimen of deep, engaging, powerful and potentially highly personal and charged questions submitted by a group of kids that I knew for 10 seconds, who probably had only the foggiest as to what they were actually asking. Instead, I turned the game around, asking the teens what they were hoping to accomplish through asking me these questions. They said that they didn't know, that they would be informed of the purpose after they finished the exercise. I told them that people don't usually talk about deep stuff like what they are asking, especially to strangers. I asked them how they would feel if they were to ask their friends these exact questions. I thought I saw some squirming.

They thanked me and I told them that I myself was a Christian, a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. I mentioned that I would hope that people would be won to Jesus. But I didn't think that this exercise was terribly helpful.

Now at a moment when I should be sleeping, I ponder what that whole exchange was about. Why was I so adamant in responding to the kids the way that I did? Did I actually perform a service of love to them by sharing my perspective? Or was it an ill-considered deconstruction of some possibly useful but poorly constructed exercise? What was the point of sending kids to ask such deep questions of strangers? Why weren't they told about what they were doing?

Now I wish I had taken down the name of the church and gotten the name of the youth pastor. I'm curious about the motivation. If I were teaching teens, would I do the same? As the creator of The Nexus of Newton and Nietzsche, I was hardly against people talking about deep things. But the evangelistic hook as the last question made me unhappy. (But was my own course evangelistic?)