Evangelism Outside the Box: New Ways to Help People Experience the Good News

Rick Richardson brings his experience in campus ministry and understanding of the current culture and helps readers come to a new understanding of how to communicate the message of the Gospel in relevant and meaningful ways. Key to Richardson's assessment is the fact that culture and society is changing. Many Evangelical Christians assume that there has always been one of way of presenting the Good News of Jesus. However, Richardson demonstrates that as culture changes, the delivery and presentation does as well. This does not mean that the content changes. Rather, the content remains the same... but it must be communicated in a relevant manner. This book is a very helpful book in taking a fresh look at the issues surrounding Christian witness in a postmodern world. Rick makes use of comparisons between the kind of questions university students used to ask in generations past to the sort of questions being asked today. It is not that the old questions are never asked anymore. Rather, to get to those questions, Christians must first address the questions that people are asking today. I highly recommend this book for anyone seeking to adjust how we relate and communicate the Gospel to postmoderns.

It is the author's premise that if the church is going to reach the postmodern generation it will have to use new methods of evangelism. He contends, and rightly so, that may of the forms, structures and practices that may have been effective in the past, are no longer so. The author does an effective job in defining the postmodern mindset. His discussion on classical, medieval, modern and postmodern thinking is excellent, it helps the reader put postmodernism in the larger context of the history of thought. I have to admit, I liked this book. Unlike Reid's Radically Unchurched, this book was a gripper for me. Perhaps those who are familiar with postmodernism may have found this book a little redundant, but for aging boomers, it was excellent. I liked Richardson's discussion on John Wesley's methodology and how it can be of use in reaching postmodern generation. Also pertinent was his discussion on St. Patrick and the Celtic mind vs. the Roman mind in evangelism. These discussions move the reader past ethereal theory to the actual nuts and bolts practice of evangelism. I have to admit that the evangelistic model given at the end of the book seemed a little confusing to me. But I accepted it as a challenge to get to know the postmodern mindset.

I'm just finishing up this book, and I'm already excited about its implications in my own style of evangelism. Richardson seems to articulate what anyone who has been involved in evangelism has probably already suspected... that something is radically changing in our culture which should change the way we approach evangelism. Richardson isn't saying anything totally new, but his synthesis of the information is what makes this a valuable book. He describes well the characteristics of a postmodern generation and then outlines the implications for effective outreach.A striking point in the book is the observation that eloquent arguments for the resurrection and the existence of God are often not as compelling as they used to be to a "pre-Christian". The urgent questions being asked by postmoderns are not about what is objectively true and verifiable. Rather they are asking questions of identity and belonging, and Richardson explains how Christianity can answer those questions in a meaningful way to this generation.Richardson's application of Wesley's approach to outreach is also tremendous. Again he is synthesizing the observations of other brilliant Christian writers, but his application is excellent. He has adapted Wesley's "Four Steps into God's Kingdom" to be relevant to outreach today. In Richardson's approach these steps are: "Soul Awakening, Community, Conversion, and Transformation". The key points here are that people's interest in spirituality can be awakened by strategic events and encounters, and that "belonging comes before believing". I have been strongly recommending this book to the evangelism ministry at our church, and they are going to use it. They are already using Mark Mittleberg's "Building a Contagious Church", so this should be a valuable supplement to that approach.

After reading several books on outreach to the 'postmodern' church, Rick Richardson's book finally described the post-modern culture, and approaches that the church might use to reach the post-modern culture, in ways that make sense to me. Its straight to the point, has lots of application, and is an easy read. I highly recommend this to those that are striving to understand the role of the church in today's post-modern culture.

We all sense that the culture is changing rapidly, and we grope for answers as to how that affects our ability to fulfill the Great Commission. The word most used to describe this shifting context is "postmodernism," but few can agree fully on what the term means. With even the definition of postmodernism being such a moving target, defining church outreach strategies seems even more difficult.Reaching this new generation requires that we learn to evangelize an increasingly secularized culture. In his book, Evangelism Outside the Box, Rick Richardson leans into past movements of God for valuable lessons, and then combines them with striking insight into today's culture which flow out of his vast experience of reaching university students through his ministry with InterVarsity. The resulting conclusions could dramatically improve church leaders' efforts to reach spiritually lost people - including the many who currently don't consider the local church a viable option in their search for God.In Axis, Willow Creek Community Church's ministry to Gen-X, we have leaned into Rick's learnings and reconsidered some of our approaches to reaching a postmodern generation. That process has given us increased clarity and impact in our own unique setting. Evangelism Outside the Box avoids the trap of presenting simplistic steps for reaching the world. Instead, a process is proposed that helps churches build relevant and effective ministries for postmoderns.Daniel Hill, Evangelism Leader for the Axis Ministry