Becoming a Contagious Christian [Paperback]

Someone looking for an academic theology of evangelism will probably not be satisfied with this book. The book is heavily weighted toward practical application and personal empowerment, and this is quite deliberate. The Hybels model stresses individual evangelism both in daily living, and even within the institutional church. The Hybels model, as I've seen it practiced, can turn the entire church top to bottom into an evangelistic enterprise, with lay leaders and volunteers in the church doing most of the heavy lifting. This model naturally tends to work best within the context of churches that shun an extensive ecclesiastical heirarchy, and instead have a pastoral staff that believes in and even welcomes change, adaptability, and flexibility. This intense emphasis on preaching and ministry that are ultimately evangelistic in nature has resulted in astounding church growth in more than a few churches, and in this respect, the Hybels model is to be applauded. But it also comes with dangers as I will discuss below.

This book is loaded with practical application that Christians can almost immediately put into practice. In addition, the book offers helpful tips on sharing your faith in succinct and compelling ways, and really hammers home the theme of 'authenticity' and evangelism as a process, rather than the gospel raid approach that presses immediately for a decision and commitment to Christ without doing much of what is needed to truly resemble authentic and caring evangelism. These contributions are welcome and are things that evangelicals of all theological stripes should pay attention to and generally adopt. Hybels calls for flexibility in evangelism that is person and even situation specific, and while this might rub some people the wrong way, I do think a good case can be made that effective evangelism cannot be reduced to a standardized approach that refuses to interact with the uniqueness of each person we encounter.

Now for the bad stuff. Tops on this list is Hybels egregious paraphrasing of Scripture throughout much of the book. Hybels is blatantly guilty in here of recasting and rewording the Bible to make it fit the points he wants to make. I have long said that the tendency of evangelical preachers to minimize the importance of the actual words in Scripture through reworded paraphrases that may or may not be Biblically faithful is a direct assault on the notion that the Bible was divinely inspired not just in the ideas presented, but in the words used to express those ideas. It is impossible for me to understand how Hybels could so thoroughly engage in this practice if he affirms verbal plenary level inspiration. Either he doesn't affirm this, which is a big problem, or he does and he doesn't take it seriously, which is also a big problem. Either way, the reader should be extremely discerning when Hybels makes his arguments from Scripture by rewording what the Bible says so radically, and also speculating on what the Bible does not say and then uses these speculations as an integral part of his argument. Bad theology, bad hermeneutics, bad teaching.

The other major problem is the fact that Hybels, more then once, seems to imply that evangelism is at root, an activity powered more by human effort than the power of the Holy Spirit. Any book on evangelism that talks in great length about human action while giving the power of the Holy Spirit a passing nod is one that employs a theology that severely flirts with work-based religion. This is particularly dubious in Hybels' case since in his gospel summary section, he states (very correctly) that religion is about what people do to try to gain God's favor, while Christianity is about what God has already done that we could not do. In my view, what Hybels gets right here, he gets wrong throughout most of the rest of the book.

So it is a mixed bag, but as I stated at the beginning, because the book deals heavily with application, and since many of his application points are valid and very good, the book is more good than bad. However, I would strongly urge the reader to employ a heavy dose of discernment when reading this.