Blog

Blog Feed

3

Thoughts on I Once Was Lost (Review)

by Beav on October 14, 2009

I just finished the book I Once Was Lost:  What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus by Don Everts and Doug Schaupp.  This is a pretty short book on postmodern evangelism which I thought was pretty helpful.  I’ll share a few thoughts from the book here.

First, I liked this book because it was short.  Second, I liked the book because of it’s emphasis on the process of people coming to faith as opposed to trying to emphasize methodology, tools, or strategies to bring people to faith.  Third, I liked it because it’s written by a couple of guys who are serving in the context of campus ministry.  They are both InterVarsity staff and so they have college students in mind as they have written this book.

This book isn’t comprehensive, but it helps get you thinking about what they call “Five Thresholds” that people must cross before they come to faith.  The five thresholds are as follows:

  1. Moving from distrust to trusting a Christian
  2. Moving from complacency to curiosity
  3. Moving from being closed to change to being open to change in their life
  4. Moving from a place of meandering to seeking
  5. Moving across the threshold into the kingdom of God itself

I’ve found these thresholds to be helpful as I think about what God is doing in people’s lives.  It’s not always in order or a smooth progression, but it’s helpful to think about.

Do you think these thresholds represent the key transitional moments in somebody’s spiritual journey?  Are there others?

Print Friendly

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Tagged as: Book Reviews, Ministry, Spirituality

  • http://www.xanga.com/teyes steph

    just wanted to say YES! i loved this book. and really wanted to talk about it with someone in cru/epic. hahaha okay i’ll go back and look at my notes on it.i kind of remember them writing that the third threshold was the most difficult (hardest intellectually and emotionally as well as likely to take the most time). correct me if i’m wrong brian… but i completely agree. no one ever wants to change (alan deutschman from fast company magazine wrote a whole book on it: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html), and they especially won’t if they’re confronted with all the ways their present worldview is wrong. instead, they need to hear/ be shown or see in your life how another worldview is greater, better, more beneficial etc than their own first. it’s visionary leadership at its best.

  • http://www.xanga.com/teyes steph

    oh! and an aside: if you ever get around to seeing “where the wild things are” i’d love to hear your thoughts! i felt like such a nerd watching it but i saw the (breaking of the) need cycle all over it. :)

    • http://brianvirtue.org Beav

      we’ll see if I get a chance to see “where the wild things are” – I go to about 2-3 new movies a year because of my life stage. I’ve read the book plenty of times though to Morgan.glad someone else i know has read the book. I enjoyed it and agree that being open to change is perhaps the most difficult from a spiritual standpoint. I think today the first one (trust) still seems to be looming largely. I’m reading UnChristian right now and that seems to be reinforcing that thought. I think I’m going to use these categories for a x-cultural Epic training I’m doing out in Denver for cross 09.hope the mpd’s going well!

Previous post:

Next post: