Go Fish: Reviving Personal Evangelism
By Shonn Keels (Morgan James)
Shonn Keels has a passion for personal evangelism, and he is appalled by how few American evangelicals present the gospel to anyone. More specifically, when Keels recognized young adults at Putnam City Baptist Church—a conservative Southern Baptist congregation in Oklahoma City, where he is associate pastor—fail to prioritize sharing their faith with others, he determined to do something about it. So, Keels devoted more than two and a half years to researching personal evangelism and developing a plan a local church can use to motivate and train its members to become faithful witnesses for Christ.
Go Fish is the product of Keels’ research and creativity. It diagnoses the problem in the American evangelical church as he perceives it, proposes a plan to address it and presents his findings after completing a pilot project. In particular, he offers a detailed guide for the weekend personal evangelism seminar he led in Oklahoma City, with lesson plans and tests taken by participants before and after the event.
Go Fish is the ministry project/dissertation Keels completed for a doctor of ministry degree from Luther Rice Seminary. That statement reveals the book’s strengths and its weaknesses. Readers seeking to discover the biblical foundation for personal evangelism will find abundant Scripture references. Keels includes frequent references to books about evangelism and pertinent quotes from them. Readers with a hunger for data will find it in Go Fish. However, casual readers may find the dissertation format off-putting. The book would have benefited from aggressive editing to eliminate redundancy and to translate an academic exercise into a more user-friendly manual.
Some readers may choose to read the book from cover to cover. Others will find it more helpful as a reference tool. Ministers and lay leaders looking for ideas on ways to incorporate personal evangelism training into a church’s discipleship ministries likely will find the appendices particularly useful.
Go Fish will be released broadly in early January 2022, but it is available now from the author at shonnkeels@gmail.com or can be ordered in advance from Amazon or other online booksellers.
Ken Camp, managing editor
Baptist Standard
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