Reasons for My Hope Paperback

The Holy Spirit brings conviction of sin and saving change, yet uses us to reach others as Christ's witnesses. This simple book seeks to enable us to be more faithful and reasoned in personal evangelism. Giving logical reasons to believe, has become a growth area for evangelical Christians, increasingly recognising that simple propositional truth statements don’t really work any more. The portrayal of evangelicals is so often that we engage our hearts and not our heads. Alpha pioneered the push into answering people’s questions where the rubber meets the road in their lives. Rather than simply rehearsing arguments for faith in Christ, the author sets each big question within a conversational context. His book works by mirroring the kinds of conversation we have with people who are seeking and then deconstructs them so we can see how to engage with real people in the real world.

Van den Toren looks not only at answers to difficult questions such as suffering, relativism, the uniqueness of Christ and belief and knowledge, he provides keys to understand where people are coming from. He looks behind the questions to the motivating force behind them. This is important - we need to know why and just what people are asking. For example, the tough question: 'How can we believe in a loving God when there is so much suffering?' Is it an intellectual question; is it a desire to understand or make sense of one's personal suffering, or is it a 'dog's bone' question - one to gnaw upon to distract from the real issues? The approach and response for each will be very different.

This is clear mid-level apologetics:- being the first version of a book first previously published very successfully in the Netherlands, where it has been used particularly in the training of Alpha leaders. Many keen Christians tend to trot out stock answers without hearing the deeper questions. The book includes many practical examples of how a subject can be treated in different ways, based around dialogues on suffering, on other religions, on relative and absolute truth, with one of the legacy messages being that good dialogue is a valuable life skill in all encounters. Each chapter ends with guides to further reading and questions for reflection and discussion. Benno doesn't provide clich&éacute;d answers, yet this is far from original.

Accessible and clear in what it seeks to be.