Featured Good Books on Evangelism

I hope you can find it, if you have the time. It would be a help for a book I'm planning to write about his theology.

 

Ahem. To get back to the OP, Robert "Bob" Sumner is an old friend of my family, and the first to write a biography of John R. Rice, Man Sent from God (well worth the reading). His textbook on the subject of evangelism is excellent: Biblical Evangelism in Action. It's 344 pages of both theology and practical advice, and I recommend it highly. Bob Sumner is one of the last of the old time evangelists of the 20th century. Befriended and mentored by JRR, he wrote some good books down through the years, and edits his own paper, The Biblical Evangelist, back issues of which (including his expose of Jack Hyles) which may be read here: http://www.biblicalevangelist.org/.

According to Wikipedia, he went on to glory on Dec. 5, 2016. Rest in peace in Heaven, old friend and warrior for Christ.

 

Since this thread is not about you, but simply about good books on evangelism, you are welcome to ignore the thread and go elsewhere.

 

I have a great book by an old school SBC writer, How to Have a Soul Winning Church. He has an excellent program that will do just that using the Romans Road. You can buy a used paperback fairly cheaply on Amazon.

 

No, not really. I have a book on that, Friendship Evangelism, by Arthur McPhee. This is not a good book; he opposes almost all other kinds of direct and indirect evangelism, including tracts, the Romans Road, Evangelism Explosion, 4 Spiritual Laws, etc.

 

Remember Arthur Blessitt? He’s the hippie type who back in the day walked across America—and then across the world—dragging a cross with a wheel on the end of it. He got quite a bit of attention with this effort, and a lot of Christians, including me, thought he was nuts. However, his book on soul winning, Arthur Blessitt’s Street University, shows that far from being a nut, he did everything with the goal of winning folks to Christ.

I hadn’t read it in many years, so I took a look at it on Saturday and ended up reading the whole thing over the weekend. It is well written and very interesting, with plenty of stories of people being saved and various adventures in Africa, N. Ireland and other places where he dragged his cross.

Blessitt is a street evangelist. His greatest joy was winning souls on the streets of Hollywood, and in bars, night clubs, even places that sell dirty books. Obviously very few of us are ever going to have a ministry like that, but anyone who has ever done street evangelism, or any other kind of soul winning, will be blessed by this book.

The best chapters IMO are: “God’s Power to Change Lives,” “Jesus in Your Neighborhood,” “Leading a Person to Christ,” and “The Holy Spirit in Witnessing.” He believed strongly in the power of God through the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and saw wonderful results with his “Jesus stickers,” tracts, and personal witness.

To give you an idea of the adventures, Billy Graham once accompanied Blessitt across N. Ireland when the “troubles” were going on. He told Billy he had to go alone with him—no staff, no bodyguards. When they got there, he gave Billy some of his “Jesus Stickers,” and this is what happened: “I gave Billy a roll of stickers, and I told him to put one on his jacket. He stuck it down a little low, so I told him, ‘No, no, up here on your chest.’ He asked, ‘Why there?’ And I said, ‘Well, if one of the snipers decides to kill you and he sights on the sticker, you’ll die right away. If you have the sticker on your stomach, it’ll take you all day to die.’ He put the sticker over his heart and never took it off” (pp. 173-174).

This book may be bought second hand on Amazon. Blessitt has a website where you can buy his "Jesus stickers" and other material at: http://www.blessitt.com.