by Brian D. McLaren

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review by Orville Winters

I HAD ALWAYS ASSUMED that my gift of evangelism was pretty far off the bottom end of the charts. I discovered, however, after reading this book that I was "more ready than I had realized" to do evangelism.

Are we really selling God?

A couple of years ago, More Ready Than You Realize was my first introduction to Brian McLaren. I have been a fan ever since. McLaren notes that on the street, evangelism is equated with pressure—as if God were vinyl siding, or replacement windows. It means shoving your ideas down someone's throat, threatening him/her with hell if they do not capitulate to your logic or Scripture-quoting. And then McLaren offers a better vision of good evangelism. "Good evangelists are people who engage others in good conversation about important and profound topics such as faith, values, meaning, purpose, goodness, beauty, truth, life after death, life before death, and God."

I thought to myself, I can do this in spite of what my latest spiritual gifts test said. "Good evangelism,” says McLaren, "is the process of being friendly without discrimination and influencing all of one's friends toward better living, through good deeds and good conversation." I really am more ready for this than I realized.

An e-mail dialogue

The format of the book is consistent with the author's view that evangelism is the process of listening to someone's story then sharing your story and God's. "Alice," a harpist, supplied background music during a book-signing event. McLaren met her when he assisted in loading her harp into her car after the event. The body of the book is the true story of their friendship nurtured by her e-mails with questions, feelings, and thoughts about the Christian faith. Following each e-mail, McLaren analyzes (for us) “Alice's” real message and deep questions, and then shares his response with readers. The e-mail conversation takes place over a period of about two years.

At this point readers of books about evangelism would expect the storyteller to say that "Alice" prayed the "Sinners Prayer" and received Christ into her heart. McLaren, however, writes: "…I am not saying that Alice was 'born again' and I am not saying she wasn't. I used to worry a lot about this kind of spiritual diagnosis (Is he in yet? Is she one of us yet?), but my experience in evangelism and my reflections on the Scriptures have pushed me away from needing to have everything nailed down and everyone properly categorized and sorted."

Evangelism as many of us know it

Early on in the book McLaren pens some generalized thoughts regarding twentieth-century evangelism. "The Christian gospel really has become an argument and evangelism has located itself rhetorically somewhere between courtroom prosecution and door-to-door sales." He then notes that "trying to convert" someone is inconsistent with a relationship. It is wrestling, not dancing. Next he makes three observations about the people we might befriend:

1. Many people want to talk about God, but not just anybody is safe to talk to.
2. You have to see, like, approach, and serve people if you want to become their spiritual friend.
3. Many people have stayed away from Christianity for good reasons, mostly having to do with our tendency to produce easy answers and systematic explanations rather than presenting a window into unfathomable mystery and awesome adventure.

One of the fascinating features of the book is that the author takes us on some surprising side trips that make us gasp, smile, and wonder. He tells the story of "George" who once asked him, "Why did Jesus have to die? Why couldn't God simply have said, I forgive?" Brian McLaren checked out all of his theology books, considered the Garden of Gethsemane scene, and concluded that even Jesus didn't know the answer to that question. (Jesus prayed that if there were any other way for him to accomplish his mission, he hoped God would spare him from dying.) Maybe we don't have to understand it all. Yet, not having an acceptable answer to serious questions is uncomfortable for us. We tend to live with the dream of being able to achieve "a bombproof certainty, a state of faith where all our beliefs are at rest, where everything is proven logically, where there is no dynamic tension, where everything is clear and clean and unwrinkled and in its place, like pressed shirts in a suitcase."

The development of modern evangelism

I was fascinated by McLaren's review of modern evangelism. Much of what we consider modern evangelism flowed out of the revivalism of the American frontier in the 1800s. It worked then because most of the listeners were steeped in the truth of the gospel but often failed to live up to what they knew. Evangelists were effective in scolding them for not doing so. By the mid-1900s, the situation had changed (although much preaching was not changing) and people wanted sermons that reflected cool logic along with a good performance from their preachers. After two world wars the language of "campaigns" often described our evangelistic efforts. We held evangelistic "crusades." In more recent years we have begun to use legal language to describe evangelistic activity. We present "cases for Christ" and submit "evidence" in order to achieve a "verdict".

McLaren raises the issue—after acknowledging the validity of the above approaches—that maybe we have squeezed out the wonder of the gospel. Perhaps the best way for us to rediscover the gospel, wonder and all, he suggests, is through the kind of spiritual friendship discussed in this book. He quotes Gregory of Nyssa as saying that concepts become idols. Only wonder understands. He concludes, "This is why I believe that in the end, the most important thing you can communicate to anyone is something beyond your logic and arguments—your own humbled sense of wonder, passion and love—the very things that canned formulas have a way of squeezing out."

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