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Thomas Paul Johnston. Examining Billy Graham's Theology of Evangelism. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2003.486 pp. $36.00.
This monograph by Thomas Johnston is an expanded Ph.D. dissertation written at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2001 ("The Work of an Evangelist: The Evangelistic Theology and Methodology of Billy Graham"). Two chapters not found in the dissertation are "Authority" (ch. 2 in this study) and "Cooperation" (ch. 5). There are five chapters in the present study, including "Context," "Parameters," "Message," and "Conclusion." Additionally there are five appendices, a bibliography, and lists of tables and illustrations. The author is the son of a former missionary to France who served as professor of missions at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
The title of the original dissertation has biblical and historical origins. The apostle Paul exhorted Timothy to "do the work of an evangelist" (2 Tim 4:5). The International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam (1983) used this biblical injunction as its theme. Curiously, Paul's encouragement to Timothy was given to a young pastor-in-training who most probably did not have the gift of evangelism, and those invited to Amsterdam (some 4000) were identified as "gifted evangelists" in their respective national contexts. Normally, those with obvious spiritual gifts do not need exhortations to exercise their gifts. In any case, this book is an insightful study of one who obviously possesses the strong gift of evangelism. And as most readers of this journal would agree, when asked to identify persons with the gift of evangelism, the name of Billy Graham is usually found at the top, even outside the cultural context of North America. Our first order of business, then, is to alert the reader to the book's contents and to summarize them in a way that does justice to author's intent and conception of his material.
Chapter 1 ("Context") provides a history of Billy Graham's ministry, methodology, and the challenges facing the evangelist relative to culture, cooperation, and choosing a successor. After defining a definition of "a theology of evangelism" the author jars the reader with an academic disjunction: "statement of the problem," "research to date," and "research methodology." How all of this fits under the rubric of "context" is left to the reader to discover.
Chapter 2 is titled "authority" and...