Evangelism, Sorrow, and The Good Place
A Demon’s Midlife Crisis—and a Glimpse of the Gospel
It starts with a demon having a midlife crisis.
In The Good Place, Season 2, Episode 4, Michael—an immortal architect of the afterlife—spirals into panic when he’s forced to contemplate his own mortality. Cue the flashy car, leather jacket, and existential dread. But beneath the comedy lies a deeply human fear: what does it mean that our lives will end? And could it be that this fear—this sorrow—is actually where transformation begins?
That’s what theologian Andrew Root suggests in his recent book Evangelism in an Age of Despair. And surprisingly, this sitcom gets surprisingly close to the gospel.
Mortality, Meaning, and the Midlife Spiral
In “Existential Crisis,” Chidi is attempting to reform Michael, a semi-repentant demon, but quickly realizes that Michael struggles to change because he’s never faced consequences. Immortality has removed the stakes.
As Chidi puts it:
“Before I can teach Michael to be good, I have to force him to think about what we used to think about—that life has an end, and therefore, our actions have meaning.”
To drive the point home, Chidi explains that Michael’s potential “retirement” would be an end to his existence—a kind of death. This revelation sends Michael into a spiral. He copes by doing what many do: dressing younger, getting a sports car, pretending Janet is his girlfriend. It’s all very cliché. But it’s also revealing.
Michael is afraid—not just of death, but of sorrow.
What Andrew Root Sees in Our Sadness
Reading Root’s book recently, I was struck by how closely it paralleled this storyline. Root argues that in modern society, we are all deeply sad—but we stay distracted to avoid facing that sadness.
“We are uncomfortable with the very fact that sorrow is unavoidable for us all.” (Root, 15)
Michael expresses this idea with comic brilliance:
“Can’t stop moving. If I stop moving, I’ll start thinking. And if I start thinking, I’ll start thinking about things I don’t want to think about… like death.”
Root’s point is that evangelism is not about spiritual salesmanship or personal improvement plans. Evangelism, he says, is entering into another’s sorrow—and discovering that when we do, Christ shows up.
Consolation, Not Conversion
In a recent episode of his podcast When Church Stops Working, Root puts it like this:
“You need a community, you need to walk with someone… if you take the hand of a community of people who will love you and care for you and hold you, you may find a great presence in your sorrow. You may find the great redeeming work of Jesus Christ, who takes what is dead and brings life out of it.”
In The Good Place, that’s exactly what Eleanor, Chidi, and the others do. They become the kind of community that holds Michael through his sorrow. They don’t fix him. They don’t preach at him. They sit with him.
As Root says elsewhere in the podcast episode:
“In the community that shares our sufferings and gives us consolation… we follow Jesus Christ into sorrow. Where there is sorrow, Jesus Christ is present. That’s where a great transformation comes.”
Eleanor points to a deeper wisdom: that sorrow, when embraced, can be formative, or else it will be destructive.
“All humans are aware of death. So we’re all a little bit sad… all the time. That’s just the deal.”
“If you try to ignore your sadness, it just ends up leaking out of you anyway.”
Or, said differently by Andrew Root, “To be human is to be a creature caught in sorrow… [and] we’ll do anything to ignore the sorrow” (188).
Evangelism Through Presence
For Root, evangelism is not primarily about belief—it’s about shared experience. It’s about confessing our sorrow, our limits, our mortality—and discovering, in that sacred space, that God is already there.
“We find that the finite holds the infinite, or the infinite participates in the finite, in the act of saying goodbye, in bearing each other’s burdens… Blessed are those who mourn, for they'll know my presence.”
In that way, The Good Place offers a surprisingly biblical vision: evangelism is not argument; it's accompaniment.
A Story from Rita Nakashima Brock
This idea came up again for me when I was listening back on conversation I had with theologian Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock on my podcast. She shared how a Baptist pastor showed up for her family when her stepfather was deployed to Vietnam:
“I had a friend in high school whose father was a Baptist minister. And so she invited me to church one day. And this was a fundamentalist conservative Baptist church. And I believed in evolution and other things like that. But her father was just a good minister.”
“He actually, I think, sort of took over helping my family because my dad was gone for two years. So I sort of was semi-adopted… I was going to the beach and surfing in the summertime and doing a lot of fun stuff with his family and attending his church.”
“At some point… I realized that to be sort of fully inside that circle of care that he had, I should join the church. So I asked him to baptize me.”
“When he asked me if I believed that Jesus Christ was my personal Lord and Savior, I said yes, even though I had no idea what that meant.”
“The reason I got baptized was so I could be a full-fledged member of his church — in particular because he was such a great minister.”
She wasn’t evangelized by dogma. She was evangelized by a minister.
God Is a Minister
In The Pastor in a Secular Age, Andrew Root writes:
“God is so deeply a minister that He’s willing to make death part of His identity… so that death can never separate us from His love.” (Root, 255)
That’s exactly what Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock experienced. Her pastor didn’t evangelize her through argument or theology—he ministered to her family in their sorrow (when her step-father was away at war). He showed up. He cared. He embodied the presence of Christ.
He wasn’t selling salvation. He was being a minister.
And that, Root argues, is the very heart of the church’s calling. As he puts it in Faith Formation in a Secular Age:
“The church has no life outside the receiving and giving of ministry.” (Root, 201)
If we want to truly reach people with the gospel, then we must minister like God does—by showing up in love, especially in sorrow. That is evangelism.
The Gospel in Our Sorrow
So, to put it plainly:
Evangelism is ministry.
Because God is a minister.
And God is in our ministry.
And where real ministry happens—where sorrow is shared and burdens are borne—the good news of Jesus Christ is already there.
But what does that actually look like?
What does it mean to step into someone else's sorrow?
In my next post, I’ll explore what this kind of evangelism looks like in real life—not as a script or a strategy, but quite literally moving toward another person.