Gospel Witness: Evangelism in Word and Deed, David M.Gustafson, Eerdmans, 2019 (ISBN 978‐0‐8028‐7680‐5), xii + 308 pp., pb $32
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When describing the socio-religious climate of the contemporary Western world, terms such as 'post-Christendom' and 'post-Christian' have become well-known and well-worn.The decline of the political and cultural influence of Christianity in the West has been almost universally acknowledged by scholars and laity alike for some time now, and many books have been written about how and why the church of the early twenty-first century must view the West as a mission field just as needful of the gospel of Christ as traditional mission fields outside the Christian West.This reevangelization of the West is a daunting task for the contemporary church, and it is to this issue that seasoned evangelist David Gustafson writes this book.Gustafson has spent decades as a campus evangelist and pastor of evangelism and is now a professor of evangelism in the United States.This book, however, is not merely a socio-religious diagnosis of the current state of Christianity in the West, but one of prescriptive missional theory and praxis that desires to re-enliven the church to become missional congregations in the mission field of their own backyard.This book is comprised of twelve chapters of mostly equal length.Chapter 1 introduces the book and the current problem of the church in the West in decline from its once prominent position as the de facto religious authority.Chapter 2 rehearses the truth that the triune God is a missional God who seeks out and after a fallen and lost humanity.Gustafson points to the cultural mandate in Genesis 1 and the gospel mandate as revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ.Chapter 3 is concerned with gospel clarity and that the overarching story of scripture is a six-part drama that must be translated by the church into every and all cultural contexts.Chapter 4 looks at the character and ethical integrity needed of all individual Christians as evangelists, from prioritizing love of God and then love of the neighbor, to developing good spiritual habits to live an evangelistic lifestyle.Chapter 5 extends this prior discussion by prescribing five principles for evangelism in word and deed: intentionality, incarnation, presence, identification, and servanthood.These principles are to be lived out in the individual's three 'spaces': home, workplace, and public places.Chapter 6 then sees Gustafson unite and demonstrate the necessity of evangelism in word and deed by providing examples from the major epochs of church history.Chapter 7 discusses the doctrine of conversion as a process and crisis moment.Gustafson also exposits the many different types of questions
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".