I recently finished reading Sam Chan’s Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News About Jesus More Believable. If you’ve read Tim Keller’s Center Church or Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s Every Day Theology you’ll be familiar with Chan’s concepts and efforts to make the gospel intelligible to unbelievers. Chan calls out the unfortunate tendency of Christians to evangelize the way they were evangelized. Instead, Chan insists, we must be eager and equipped to craft our gospel presentations to most effectively connect with our hearers. His book aims to give a theological justification and practical help for doing just that.

For me, the practical parts were most helpful. Chan walks his readers through a method for “storytelling the gospel,” giving a “topical evangelistic talk,” or an “expository evangelistic talk.” (The day after I read it, I used his method of storytelling when I taught a group of teens.) These chapters alone are worth the price of the book. On the other hand, I found myself cringing at some other parts. Attempts to contextualize the gospel (which we all must do when witnessing) always run the risk of melting the jagged edges of Christianity into smooth metaphors. On the road of evangelism, firm guardrails must be on two sides: one keeps the evangelist from speaking the gospel in a way that is foreign to his audience, and the other keeps the evangelist from speaking to his audience in a way that is foreign to the gospel. Some repair of the latter guardrail, I think, would make this good book even better.