More resources for Facing the Challenge session 1: Why do we need to understand the challenge?

Fit Bodies, Fat Minds

Os Guinness, Hourglass 1994
Subtitled: 'Why Evangelicals Don't Think, and what to do about it.'
Followers of Christ are sometimes accused of having happy hearts and empty brains. Unfortunately this accusation can have more than a grain of truth in it. We are in danger of failing to love God with our minds as well as our hearts. Guinness examines different kinds of failure to think Biblically:

• Polarization
• Pietism
• Primitivism
• Populism
• Pluralism
• Pragmatism
• Philistinism
• Premillenialism

He also evaluates how our culture is driving us, through the influence of the mass media, consumerism, postmodernism etc.

Dr Os Guinness is director of the Trinity Forum, and the author of a number of books.
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Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult

Nick Pollard, IVP 1997
For most of us, personal evangelism is never going to be easy. But we sometimes make it seem more difficult than it need be. Based on many years' experience with school and college students, Nick Pollard recommends an approach he calls 'Positive Deconstruction'. This just means trying to understand someone's beliefs, and recognize what's true, and what's false.

By affirming what is true and rejecting what is false, we can find starting points to share the Good News with them. We can help them begin to see how the Good News is relevant to their lives, and to consider the claims of Christ for themselves.

Nick Pollard is director of Damaris, and a well known writer and speaker in colleges and universities.
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