Author: Paul E. Little
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Copyright: 1966
Genre: Evangelism
Recommended: Yes, with a minor qualification
Paul Little says in the preface that he wrote this book “with the prayer that many may learn a ‘more excellent way’ of introducing others to our Lord.” The main emphasis in the book is practical instruction and Mr. Little says many of these “ideas…have come out of face to face interaction with Christian and non-Christian students on secular campuses and in Christian schools in the USA and abroad.” (Let me remind my readers that Mr. Little published this book in 1966). The emphasis on his interactions with students as being one of the chief inspirations of the ideas/suggestions presented in his book is important and I think the cause for the one area in which I disagreed with him. But first a little (get it?) more about the book.
Paul includes nine chapters:
- The Essential Foundation
- How to Witness
- Hurdling Social Barriers
- What is our Message?
- Why we Believe
- Christ is Relevant Today
- Worldliness: External or Internal?
- Faith is the Key
- Feeding the Spring
My favorite chapters were the chapters that focused on the larger Christian life: chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. I thought his two weakest chapters were the two chapters where he discussed evangelistic techniques (though they were not very weak, only weaker).
Some of the highlights:
In chapter one Paul emphasizes our need to have a real, true, and personal relationship with Christ. Christianity cannot be a mere environmental happenstance (born into it or supported by others around us), we cannot just ooze into it, and it is NOT merely a list of facts. It must be real and alive, we must be born again, we must love God as our Father. Awesome.
In chapters two and three Paul describes practical actions we can take to be better evangels. He says evangelism is one of “the keys” to a healthy relationship with Jesus Christ, it is “vital” to our spiritual health. Awesome. Sing it brother. He then goes on to mention seven steps we can take to do evangelism well (he seems to take more than a few ideas from Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Dale, coincidentally, took some of his own ideas from Scripture). I did not like this section much, because it seemed to be divorced from scripture to a certain extent, divorced from the “whys” and “hows” in scripture and instead seemed to focus on pragmatism as a guiding light. This is shown when he says about a couple he and his wife were attempting to share Christ with, “we didn’t fit their stereotype of Christianity.” This was in a section in which he was emphasizing that we should be careful not to offend non-Christians with our behaviors. This is true (we should, within bounds, not offend), however he also seemed to be falling into the trap of worrying too much about what non-Christians think about us as we engage with them and I think this is because he had previously (in life, not the book) focused on spewing forth the message and not on caring about the individuals he was evangelizing to. His past error causes him to over correct and, I think, causes him in this section to rely on whether or not non-Christians find certain behaviors or messages offensive to show him how to do evangelism. But as Christians we must always put God’s judgements above the judgements of others. He seems to flip it here, a little, but thankfully he does not follow that mistake through the entire book. We do need to be inoffensive in our actions and to be careful in what we say, but we should be careful not to run into falsehood when we are running away from another falsehood. We need to love Christ as our God and not our neighbors as our gods. Love for our neighbors will come when we love Christ rightly, we must not attempt to love our neighbors before we love Christ. That is humanism, not Christianity. And it will not be true love if we put the neighbors before the God.
Nevertheless, Paul emphasizes on centering our message on the Gospel, who is Christ. In chapter four Paul emphasizes that we need to believe in Christ and enter into a committed relationship with Him. Paul uses marriage as a metaphor: we can believe in a girl or boy, but until we actually marry the girl or boy we will not be married. We must be in a devoted relationship with our LORD, not merely believe in Him (because even the demons believe in the true Christ).
Paul goes on in subsequent chapters to say: our focus must always be on Christ, Christ is our foundation for believing (death and resurrection specifically), only God can save us and make us who He wants us to be, we must glorify God in all our life (we cannot compartmentalize Him), in Christian liberty we must always be wary of our motives, we must not flaunt our Christian liberty in front of weaker Christians, and etc. Good exhortations all.
In the final chapter Paul encourages Christians to develop their inner lives by reading the word and spending time in prayer. Solid. These are the two foundational concepts that when lived consistently with the aim of building a stronger relationship with our Father will do what it sets out to do. We must not be legalistic about these practices (doing them to try to earn salvation or make ourselves look good in the eyes of men). We must do it for our joy in God. We must do it because we want to grow closer to God. There will be times when we don’t want to, but we can still read and pray just so long as we do not do it for the eyes of men or to somehow earn our salvation.
All in all a pretty good primer on evangelism for the newbies. If you’re looking for a more in-depth look at evangelism and a more explicitly rooted-in-scripture expository on evangelism then you will need to look somewhere else. His book is rooted in scripture, to a great extent, but it is not exhaustive. It is a book for Christians who are just beginning to grow in the knowledge of their faith. But it can still be a good and refreshing read for the more mature in knowledge. A read that will encourage you to once again put yourself out there, meet non-Christians, befriend non-Christians, and then hopefully create opportunities to engage them with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Author Bio: Paul Little worked for InterVarsity and was an associate professor of evangelism at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He died in 1975.
http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3421
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