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Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness | 
 enlarge | Author: Bryan P., Stone
Publisher: Brazos Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.99
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 39587
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 1587431947
Dewey Decimal Number: 269.2
EAN: 9781587431944
ASIN: 1587431947
Publication Date: March 1, 2007
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Product Description
Most people think of evangelism as something an individual does--one person talking to one or more other people about the gospel. Bryan Stone, however, argues that evangelism is the duty and call of the entire church as a body of witness. Evangelism after Christendom explores what it means to understand and put to work evangelism as a rich practice of the church, grounding evangelism in the stories of Israel, Jesus, and the Apostles. This thorough treatment is marked by an astute sensitivity to the ways in which Christian evangelism has in the past been practiced violently, intentionally or unintentionally. Pointing to exemplars both Protestant and Catholic, Stone shows pastors, professors, and students how evangelism can work nonviolently.
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| Customer Reviews:
 If the formerly mainline churches can't learn to evangelize, they're toast. December 3, 2007
For half a century and more there has been a great divide between the churches that call themselves "evangelical" and the churches that flee in terror from that word. Stone is employed by one of the last bastions of peace-and-social-justice Christianity, Boston University. There's a statue honoring an alum, Martin Luther King, Jr., outside of the chapel. He was recruited to be their first and only professor of evangelism because the church he started, "Liberation Community" in Dallas/Fort Worth, was evangelical, interracial, and in solidarity with the poor (he built membership by first getting grants to do effective social service work in a run-down neighborhood).
This book is the fruit of over a decade standing at the divide between those churches that hear God's call for peace and justice, and those that hear God's call to proclaim the Good News, baptize, and make disciples in God's name. Stone is one of the very few that understands it's one and the same God calling two essential and interrelated things. Read the book.
 Not A Sniff Of Predestination, Divine Election And Foreknowledge September 21, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Bryan Stone is good at what he does. He has the intellectual capacity to pursue the biblical instruction of the Great Commission. His theology is mission-centric which typifies the structures incorporated and identifiable with missions. A tad too sociological? Moral reform-ish?
The introduction is short of staggering - it is breathtaking. It convinces and succeeds in its emotional plea for a return to making evangelism a priority again. Stone accurately and scholarly brings the 'North American' mega-churches to their knees, but also knows that it is their hearts that are at fault.
One point that I differ on, would be why Stone chose to use a secular reference in MacIntyre, to lay the biblical foundation of our faithfulness to the Great Commission. It serves no paradigm in the ecclesiology of the church - past, present or future. A preference toward sound biblical greats that support his thesis would have much more informed our theology. Was Wesley such a poor example?
As with most Reformed Evangelicals, I struggle to find the balance when focusing on the lost, and our obedience to the biblical text. The question of Election is one I completely hold, yet the practice of Christian witness is surely intended for the lost primarily, though not exclusively?
So I heartily enjoyed this book, even though it fell beyond the praxis of my own doctrinal beliefs. It was informative to the point that it made me realize that at no time does one person have exclusive rights to the whole truth of God and His plan of Redemption.
The author knows how to challenge these views, and he succeeds only to the degree that we allow him to inter-act with our own, because he never dogmatically lays it on the line. Instead, he prefers to be instructive and informative towards the Ecclesia. The challenge of our mercy toward the lost being divine or human, is superseded by how he brings the topic to be a matter of the heart's response to and guidance by the Holy Spirit. Such is His penetrative ability!
'The church is inevitably a counterpolitics insofar as it is shaped by the politics of God's reign rather than the politics of the city or nation in which it find itself.' pg 179
'To assign the church this sort of centrality is not, however, to reduce God's reign to the church, or to make it identical with the church. It is rather to construe the church as a people whose confession of God as sovereign is embodied in its politics.' pg 189
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