mission inadvisable

It's an excellent idea to step back from time to time and approach a belief as a total outsider would. Otherwise, there's a strong tendency to slip into thinking a belief is reasonable merely due to comfort and familiarity. "Common sense" is often no more than a label for "the culture I grew up in". Unexamined assumptions invade and settle into someone like plant roots tunneling into cracks in rocks.

In the religious environment I emerged from, one of these assumptions was the mission to evangelize. Every follower had this mission, at least theoretically. Followers were expected to try their hardest to turn more people into followers. And this mission was for everyone's benefit: newly turned followers received transformed lives and afterlives, but they were also useful additions to the existing group of followers too. The whole concept seemed like a quite natural consequence of being a follower.

Yet now, after both literally and figuratively removing myself from that setting, I can look at this mission with fresh eyes. Through my present viewpoint, it appears...just...poorly thought-out. Its reliance on religious followers is so very inadvisable. If one doesn't assume upfront that it's their mission, then there's a truckload of superior alternative strategies for gathering new followers.

To be more specific: after granting the point that it's necessary for people to be followers before a god may show mercy to them, then using existing followers is an awful option for that god to take. It has vast powers and it would (supposedly) be overjoyed to have more followers to show mercy to. What could it be doing instead to lure more people into following?

• Distributing some more recent holy writings would be a good start. The current set has become overshadowed by insolvable controversies over the intended modern meaning of numerous sections. At the same time, debates have arisen over what to do with the sections that "appear" to suffer from the incorrect perspectives and barbaric social mores that were in effect at the time of writing. For that matter, the simple project of translating the writings into other languages has had its own share of controversies. Publishing an updated edition of the existing set of holy writings, and clearing up which writings in the set probably shouldn't have been included in the first place, would be good at a minimum.
• A god could speak out more frequently to prospective followers and even to self-admitted enemies. "Speak" refers to expressing audible words to multiple people at once, rather than popping up in hazily-remembered dreams or nonverbal impulses to attend a service. Although some wouldn't welcome the message, a lot of them would probably relish hearing from the one actual god—the experience would give them a solid reason to believe rather than keep them in undecided, half-hearted suspense.
• It could carry out undeniable, inexplicable acts of goodness in the world. What route to popularity could be more endearing? What could possibly be easier for announcing that it cares for people? Of course the good acts will need to be claimed so nobody blames any other gods that they have ideas about.
• A less showy but still deeply appreciated gesture would be for it to communicate its staggering knowledge to a wide variety of domains. At this point in human history, people who have expertise in domains other than theology have somehow gotten the strong impression that neither this god nor any other is involved in any way in their domains. Some have stated that their expertise indicates that no god of any real relevance can exist at all. It should resolve such conflicts and patiently go into detail about at what point their expertise went astray. Its sharing of knowledge would also have the side effect of immediately advancing society as a whole; who knows what inventive people could manage to do with the new knowledge.
• Most obviously, it could dispatch evangelizing beings who are far better suited than fallible finite followers. It created everything from scratch, so creating such beings would be no obstacle. They could have abilities to teleport, project loudly enough to reach entire crowds, shrug off dangers of all kinds, execute the occasional miracle, know every language, memorize the entire set of holy writings. Furthermore, they could complete the mission without the weight of a long history of self-righteousness and hypocrisy, which followers need to try to deflect in order to get in the door. Some people won't have a conversation on the topic until they get a sincere answer to the question, "Why has a good god been represented on Earth by people like that?"