EVANGELISM IN AN AGE OF DESPAIR: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness. By Andrew Root. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2025. Xiv + 289 pages.
Mainline Protestants have long struggled with evangelism. It’s not that they don’t want people to join their churches; it’s that they have a problem with what they perceive evangelism involves. This is largely due to experiences with people engaging in hard-sell forms of evangelism that offer a message of “turn or burn.” Although this is not the only way to understand evangelism, it is how many perceive it. This is unfortunate because the word evangelism comes from the Greek word euangelion, which means good news. To evangelize is to share the good news of Jesus with others. As we ponder what this might entail, we would be wise to consider what the church’s message might be in this current age. How do we share the good news of Jesus when many connect Christianity with Christian nationalism and the apparent merger of white evangelicalism with Trumpism? The further question has to do with reaching people in a context of despair.
Robert D. Cornwall
Andrew Root’s latest book is titled Evangelism in an Age of Despair. The subtitle is quite revealing — Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness. One of the messages embedded in the Enlightenment, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is that we deserve to enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It sounds good, but is it an attainable goal? Further, if this is one of our life pursuits, how does the Gospel message fit in? Some preachers have made the pursuit of happiness (and prosperity) the focus of their messages. Robert Schuller turned Jesus’ beatitudes into the “Be Happy Attitudes.” As a recent biography of Schuller reveals, even for Schuller, there was a disconnect between his message and his life (see The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity by Mark Mulder and Gerardo Marti).
If you have read, as I have read, Root’s series of books dealing with ministry in a secular age, you may be wondering if this is simply another volume in that series. Although there is a lot of overlap in style and even message, this book is not part of that very important series. What is true is that this book is reflective of Root’s work on the church in this secular age. Recognizing that what ails our age is despair, a failure to experience the happiness promised to us. In response to this reality, Root offers us a vision of evangelism based on a theology of consolation. Although, as he admits, the first word in the title might suggest this is primarily a book about evangelism, it’s not a how-to-evangelize manual. It addresses something much deeper. Therefore, what he seeks to do here is explore “consolation as part of a lived theology of the cross that cannot help but make a space for evangelism” (p. 1). In other words, evangelism is a by-product of engaging with a world in need of consolation with a message that speaks of divine encounters rooted in the theology of the cross. With that in mind, recognizing that evangelism and discipleship go together, “evangelism is the invitation to lean into one’s sorrows to find the sacramental presence of the living God changing one’s deaths into life” (p. 2).
For those who might be new to the work of Andrew (Andy) Root, he holds a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and serves as the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is a noted author of a series of books on Ministry in a Secular Age, as well as a speaker at numerous events (I was fortunate to hear him speak this past year at a conference). I have found his books intriguing and helpful. The same is true with this book.
As is true of his other books on ministry and the church, Root engages in Evangelism in an Age of Despair with philosophers and theologians, past and present. While he brings in these voices that range from Gregory of Nyssa to Johann von Staupitz to Michel de Montaigne, he also creates a fictional storyline that illustrates the premise of the book. In this storyline, Root tells us about a congregation whose members and those connected to members of the congregation experience forms of suffering and despair, but who also experience consolation as members of the community enter into their suffering. As a result, people encounter Jesus and even enter into the congregation. What he shows us in this story is not a form of hard-sell evangelism that seeks to argue people into heaven. Rather, what attracts people to this community is the expression of love for others they discover there as members walk with them in their moments of suffering.
This storyline that is carried through the book allows Root to lay out key figures, including Michel de Montaigne, the French Renaissance philosopher, whose philosophy of happiness influenced many people through the ages, including Thomas Jefferson. Other figures include the theologian Jean Gerson, a late medieval French theologian, and, as noted, Von Staupitz, the mentor of Martin Luther. We not only encounter Gregory of Nyssa, but perhaps more importantly, his teacher, his sister Macrina, who helped him understand the nature of grief and the need for consolation. Thus, Root writes that “Walking into sorrow is the evangelistic shape of a church that is inviting its neighbors to share in the place where the divine shares in the human, turning death into life, bringing the world back together” (p. 23).
As we read Evangelism in an Age of Despair, we discover that the pursuit of happiness, which our culture embraces, too often ends badly. That is because it doesn’t allow us to deal with the reality of suffering and sorrow. The gospel is different because, as he notes, when the church enters into the sorrows and sufferings of others, whether members of a congregation or outside of it, it engages in a form of evangelism in that it brings good news. That good news can transform lives. It’s a bit risky, as we discover.
While the theological and philosophical sources, which Root weaves in and out of the book offer important insights, in many ways it’s the storyline of the people who make up this fictional congregation led by a pastor willing to take risks, like baptizing a baby who has died, because it helped the mother process the death. This is a difficult book to review in that Root weaves the story with theological and philosophical sources. While “evangelism” might not be the primary focus, Root reminds us that when we enter into the suffering of others, we help open them up to divine encounters, which may even lead to people who stand outside the church, to enter in to communities of faith that reach out to them in their time of sorrow, even if what is needed is for people to sit in silence with those who grieve, or to clean an apartment or house when needed. This might not sound like “evangelism,” and yet it is a means of bringing good news into the lives of those who experience forms of despair.
The book itself is structured around nine chapters, beginning with a chapter titled “Get ‘Em Healthy, Get ‘Em Happy.” This chapter introduces the reader to the key figures and the context for what is to come, especially when it comes to describing the variety of conversion experiences that can take place. Chapter 2, titled “Sad Times and a Sad (Pathetic) Church,” asks the question whether it is the task of evangelism to keep the church alive. Here, Root brings in Montaigne, whom he describes as being the “founder of self-fulfillment,” whose message led to the modern obsession with the pursuit of happiness and the accompanying paranoia about sadness. While it might seem an odd direction to take, Root believes that renewal of Christianity can take place when the church enters the accompanying sadness of the failure of the pursuit of happiness. He writes that “The church will always be tempted to seek its own self-fulfillment and fear its own bankruptcy and brokenness. But as Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out, only by losing itself in evangelism that joins these sad times will the church find the Spirit generating renewal through the redemptive work of bringing life out of death” (p. 54).
Chapter 3 focuses on “The Architecture of Our Sad Times.” Here he draws on Charles Taylor, who speaks of the demise of authenticity through a loss of ethics into apathy. In this age, when we are being told to be true to ourselves, if this is to “be a legitimate horizon, you first (1) need to believe that authenticity is a valid ideal. What Taylor means is that you need to believe that everyone has the right to seek their own authentic way of being.” The problem is that we have replaced universalism with tribalism. The second belief involves “inside each person’s authentic stating of what it means for them to be true to themselves, there can be debate, disagreement, and even persuasion. The third point has to do with the way that we hear and engage “others’ articulations of their authentic ways of being true to themselves — can make a difference. They can lead us toward justice” (pp. 76-78). The second issue has to do with the paternity or origins of modernity.
As we move on to Chapter 4, Root asks the question of “Why All the Happiness Is Making Us Miserable.” Here again, he brings Montaigne into the conversation. Here he addresses the question of immanent contentment and its relationship to evangelism that too often “has embraced the pursuit of happiness using immanent contentment. Look no further than the light and heavy prosperity gospel of the right and the ramped-up claims of acceptance and affirmation on the left.” In other words, evangelism seeks to tap into our desire for happiness in the current moment (p. 129). What it also loses here is the cross. Evangelism in the context of this pursuit of immanent contentment will not come by standing over in judgment over those who pursue happiness but “by sharing tenderly in their inevitable grief and sorrow, allowing friendships to be the sacrament of God’s salvation” (p. 130).
Chapter 5, titled “’ Not Okay’ — Our Sad Times of Stress,” addresses the forgetting of soul. Here, Root brings into the conversation Descartes and Pascal, arguing that the depression we experience results from becoming too tired in pursuing happiness. We seek contentment but do not find it, which in turn causes sadness. Evangelism then seeks to enter that sadness that arises from the soulless pursuit of happiness. In Chapter 6, Root focuses on Pascal, “The Math Savant and the Fire.” While Pascal was a math savant from an early age, but then a fire was lit, and Pascal began to write as he found consolation for his sadness. The question here has to do with a different form of evangelism that involves an invitation to investigation. That is, “evangelism explores who and what we human beings really are, which is why it focuses first on consolation, believing that the task for faith is made at this sacramental level of personhood. Evangelism unmasks our miserable sorrows” (p. 197). Evangelism invites us to stop running from our sorrow but instead enter into it, such that we find our consolation.
In Chapter 7, we meet up with Gregory of Nyssa and his sister Macrina in a chapter titled “Sisters as Pastors.” We learn here how Gregory learned to deal with loss through conversations with his sister, who had also experienced great loss. He tells her story in conversation with the book of Job. In Chapter 8, “Goodbyes that Save,” we continue with Gregory of Nyssa and the question of dying well, along with Jean Gerson, who also dealt with sadness in his own life. As a result of his own experiences, he became the “doctor of consolation. From his own journey, we discover that evangelism is the first step in a journey to God, which involves walking with others on the same journey. This involves goodbyes, otherwise, we are not pilgrims but tourists.
We come to the close of the journey in Chapter 9, titled “When Temptation Is Good.” The focus here is on the role the theology of the cross plays in the kind of evangelism Root has in mind. As Luther learned and taught, a theology of the cross calls things like they are, such that sorrow is sorrow, evil is evil, despair is despair. On the other hand, the theology of Glory refuses to call things as they are, such that one is not allowed to enter into one’s own sorrow. The theology of the cross, the theology that undergirds evangelism, grows out of consolation, such that it acknowledges that God is present in sorrow. Luther was guided on this journey by his mentor, von Staupitz. As we near the end, Root defines evangelism by suggesting that it “simply and profoundly invites the sorrowful to receive the ministry of Jesus Christ through the community of ministers (the church) entering their sorrow. This reception of the ministry of consolation takes them into the life of God” (p. 272). Isn’t that the good news the church has to offer a world in despair? Polemics and arguments won’t get you there. There is an epilogue, but it brings the storyline to a conclusion, and you have to read the book to experience the story.
Evangelism is not coercive or manipulative, at least it shouldn’t be. Instead, as Andrew Root demonstrates in Evangelism in an Age of Despair, it involves entering into the sorrows and sufferings of our age, much of which is rooted in a pursuit of happiness that does not allow a person to authentically acknowledge their despair, such that they might experience the consolation that comes from divine encounters rooted in the cross. Thus, in this book, we have something more important than a how-to manual to grow a church. We have a path to engage in a form of evangelism that brings consolation to those who suffer. In this, there is hope.
This review originally appeared on BobCornwall.com.
Robert D. Cornwall is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Now retired from his ministry at Central Woodward Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Troy, Michigan, he serves as Minister-at-Large in Troy. He holds a Ph.D. in Historical Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and is the author of numerous books, including his latest “Second Thoughts about the Second Coming: Understanding the End Times, Our Future, and Christian Hope” coauthored with Ronald J. Allen. His blog Ponderings on a Faith Journey can be found here.
