Serving Bread

Southern California Region InterVarsity is about to gather for our annual staff conference out at Catalina Island. The speaker this year is [tag]Rick Richardson[/tag], former IV Staff, author, and professor at Wheaton College. His recent book [tag]Reimagining Evangelism[/tag] was assigned to read for the conference.

We all want to boil down the [tag]gospel[/tag] to a simple phrase—it makes doing and teaching evangelism a lot easier, and it gives the person being presented the “gospel” a digestible spiritual snack (high in fat and low in content). This type of gospel robs us of actually having to relate and share life with non-believers, and to invite them on the journey of knowing who Jesus is.

Richardson hopes to recapture this journey with Jesus (this book should have been part of the reading for my recent conversion class). Another thing (this is more on the socio-theological bent) that Richardson points us to is to have a value for recognizing a couple things about Jesus and about being Christians: Jesus is on the move and as followers or ones who want to follow Jesus, we are also on the move.

If this became a model of knowing Jesus, all people (whether believers or not) will always be having stories of what it means to follow Jesus. Our testimony would no longer be a static narrative, frozen in time.

Non-believers need to have encounters with Jesus, not just to hear about Jesus, and Richardson’s book challenges us to do that.

There are a few areas where I felt the book was a bit on the lacking side. The book is clearly written to believers (the title alone would give that one away), but on one occasion, he seems to change audiences and begins speaking to non-believers, challenging them to get to know the real Jesus. Also, though I love his stories and am inspired to take risks in conversing with people, I was waiting so see more transformation in the lives of the people about whom he is writing. (Did that person keep studying the life of Jesus? Did she continue to pray? Is he still curious? Are they believers yet?)

Most people do not read any books on evangelism. I hung out with a pastor friend of mine to whom I gave Richardson’s previous book, Evangelism Outside the Box, as a gift. My friend replied, “Thank you! I really don’t read that many books on evangelism.” If Bill Hybels is right that vision for evangelism will always be lost, and if my experience is right that I can lose motivation to do [tag]evangelism[/tag] a lot quicker than most other values, then we need to be regularly reading evangelism books and being mentored by evangelists (through their writings or sermons). If you haven’t read a book on evangelism, lately, pick this one up!

-----
If you enjoyed this post, be sure to grab the RSS feed. Also, please take a moment to submit this post through "Share This" above.
-----