June 11 - Perversion Conversion

Brother Elijah licked his lips and scanned the 'man seeking man' section of the personals.
SWM seeks father figure for lunchtime bonding.
Nice, but not quite what he was looking for.
DWM seeks hung partners unafraid to play dirty.
Getting closer, but still not what he was after.
18-year-old stud seeks older men to manhandle.
Pay dirt.
He circled it, contacted the guy, and set up a date.
At about the same time, a loose network of equally pious men and women made similar arrangements all across the city.
They called their movement Perversion Conversion, and the philosophy they followed was simple: If you are going to save the sinners, you have to go to where the sinners are.
It was the core mission of www.churchofthepiouslife.com, Brother Elijah's online church, which boasted a citywide congregation numbering in the hundreds. Although the church had no physical location and the members of its congregation had never actually met, it was a devoted bunch, comprising people from all walks of life who came together in the belief that the path to eternal salvation was a life free of sin, particularly sins of the flesh. This point was reinforced every week during Brother Elijah's passionate web sermons in which he told his congregation to find the sinners of the city, sit down with them, and give them the Good News.
Their targets were the legions of sex maniacs that lurked like unseen roaches in every crack and fold in the city: bondage freaks, dominatrices, homosexuals, adulterers, fetishists, prostitutes, hustlers, all of them. To the congregation of www.churchofthepiouslife.com their online personal ads were really cries for help. They, Perversion Conversion, would answer their calls and help them change their sinful ways.
Most of the time they failed miserably.
During almost every rendezvous of Perversion Conversion, the Brothers and Sisters of www.churchofthepiouslife.com found themselves on the receiving end of spectacular verbal, and sometimes even physical abuse. Almost every target demanded they pay for whatever skeezy hotel room they'd booked. Most also demanded cab fare, and many got it.
Their success rate was abysmal. Typically, for every 100 "dates" Perversion Conversion went on, fewer than five would lead to a conversation that progressed beyond angry words and threats of violence. Of those, almost none led to anyone actually joining the church. During the first six months of Perversion Conversion, only three sinners repented. Not a great success rate, especially when you consider that roughly one in 50 appointments actually ended with the Brother or Sister who'd responded to the ad willfully participating in whatever sex act had been solicited and then quietly pretending nothing had ever happened.
It continued this way for several months.
Gradually, those seeking sex got wise to the game and stopped placing those kinds of ads. Soon it got to the point where far more often than not, a Brother or Sister would show up to a hotel room only to discover they'd actually set up a date with another Brother or Sister. Once they figured out the mistake, they would laugh about it and then go hang out platonically for the rest of the evening. Almost always they would exchange contact information and become friends.
Meanwhile, those who'd been seeking sex continued to do so, but they went about it in more circumspect ways. Personal ads seeking "Bible study partners", "Bible study groups", "spiritual counselors," and "someone to give me communion" became much more common.
In time, the Perversion Conversion campaign came to an end, as did www.churchofthepiouslife.com. Their online community had been replaced by several pockets of Brothers and Sisters who met face to face rather than on the Internet to discuss matters of faith. And even though they'd managed to convert very few people, most of them looked upon Perversion Conversion as a success. Through it, in a very roundabout way, they'd managed to connect with other people who had the same values and beliefs they had. Which was really why they'd gone looking for a church to join in the first place.