Author: Larimore, Walt, Peal, William Carr
Genre: Theology - Soteriology
Tags: Evangelism / Outreach, Methodology
Series:
Rick Shrader‘s Review:
I finished this book with a real 50/50 attitude. It is a Zondervan book but done by Focus on the Family with which the authors have close connections. I appreciated the emphasis on evangelism in the world, not just in the church. I believe our churches have to realize that people aren’t getting saved just by coming to church and that the church must again go into the highways and hedges and win them. But that is where my positive feelings ended with the book. In typical para-church fashion, the local church (especially fundamental churches) is continually demeaned and blamed for all the failures in today’s evangelism. Examples are given in caricature of people being driven away from Christ because of some silly thing done in the church. Besides this typical (and by now, old hat) blame game, the authors present common sense approaches to reaching out to lost people, but do it as if no conservative person ever considered building bridges with the lost. Frankly, I have much of this material in my Personal Evangelism 101 notes from 1968 (in a fundamental Baptist school no less!). Of course, the authors would never consider their point of view to be judgmental or one-sided.