Tice, Rico. Honest Evangelism: How to Talk About Jesus Even When it’s Tough. The Good Book Company, 2014.

This short volume may best be thought of as an encouragement to do evangelism. Tice freely acknowledges that evangelism is hard (an acknowledgment that contributes the ‘honest’ in the book’s title). I was personally challenged by Tice’s approach to 1 Peter 3:15. For many years, I have been one of those with a ‘passive’ approach to evangelism, based largely on this verse. Yet Tice correctly points out that 1 Peter sets out a context of Christians suffering for being Christians. We ought to be prepared to share the gospel even in the face of opposition and suffering.

Yet, he says, opposition is only half the story, for there is also a hunger for the gospel.

We must be honest about the hostility, or we’ll have wrong expectations and give up on evangelism. But we must also be excited about the hunger, or we’ll have no expectations at all, and never start evangelism.
Chapter 1

That hunger ought to motivate us. But the hunger must also exist within us – a desire for Jesus as our greatest love.

So for as long as Jesus is not my greatest love, I will keep quiet about him in order to serve my greatest love, my idol. I will keep quiet about him because I am afraid of losing my greatest love, my idol.
Chapter 3

Having outlined some of the motivations for why Christians ought to evangelise, Tice devotes the balance of the book to practical discussions of how to evangelise. He explores the content and presentation of the gospel, giving many practical tips on how to communicate with clarity and honesty. These chapters will prove helpful to newcomers to the work of evangelism. At times, however, I found the material sacrificing depth for the sake of clarity. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but some footnotes highlighting related resources might have been helpful. For example chapter 7 gives a cursory overview of issues of contextualisation, and it would have been good to see this developed further (how do I work out how to approach my culture?) or at least some pointers on other resources which could be used to go further. Similarly, some of the mnemonic schemes (Identity/Mission/Call, Character/Conviction/Competence/Courage) could have been fleshed out a bit further, particularly with respect to how they are grounded in Scripture.

In all, Rico Tice has offered an accessible primer on evangelism that helps us to have correct expectations about both the challenges and joys of the task. I pray that it will be used by the Holy Spirit to prompt and encourage more and more ‘lay’ Christians to share the gospel in their own context.