Evangelists, After All
Andrew Root and Evangelism for a Secular Age
About the author: A bishop in the United Methodist Church, Professor Willimon served as the dean of Duke Chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University for 20 years. He returned to Duke after serving as the bishop of the North Alabama Conference from 2004 to 2012. He has taught in Germany, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia in various seminaries. He is a trustee of Wofford College, Emory University, and serves on the Dean’s Committee of Yale Divinity School.
In Church Dogmatics I/1, §17, Karl Barth confronts our tendency to reduce reality to what is empirically verifiable—what we can see, touch, or rationally comprehend. We lack even the basic conceptual capacity to imagine that God might be a first-century Jewish man from Nazareth who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. The scandal of revelation is precisely this: that the eternal Word of God is disclosed in the ordinary and the human.
Barth insists that we cannot bridge the gap between God and humanity by our initiative. There is no natural point of contact—no ladder of ascent from human experience to divine truth. As Charles Taylor would later frame it, we are enclosed within modernity’s “immanent frame,” a world structured to exclude transcendence as a live option. This is what makes preaching so difficult: it is the weekly task of speaking from within this gap—the space between what we can know and who God is in God’s self-giving revelation.
Nowhere is this gap more acute than in the work of evangelism.
Andrew Root’s Evangelism in the Age of Despair enters this space with theological realism and pastoral urgency. Root’s core insight is this: evangelism is not primarily a human initiative but God’s ongoing action. Evangelism does not begin with our strategies or intentions, but with the reality that Jesus Christ continues to reveal God in human suffering. Root names the impossibility of evangelism in our secular age—and yet refuses to abandon it, because our limitations do not bind the God who reveals.
In Chapter 3, “Architecture of Our Sad Times,” Root draws on Charles Taylor’s account of the “immanent frame,” in which the world is sealed off from transcendence and divine presence is bracketed as irrelevant. This disenchanted space cultivates a cultural obsession with authenticity and happiness that paradoxically produces despair. The pursuit of happiness, isolated from any transcendent horizon, leaves us exhausted and hollow. The self becomes buffered, enclosed in a modernity that seeks to protect it from anything beyond itself.
Rather than retreating in the face of this closure, Root calls the church to begin precisely there—in the shared experience of sorrow, loss, and disillusionment. He proposes a theology of the cross as the framework for evangelism: a way of witnessing to a God who meets us in suffering rather than rescuing us from it. Evangelism, then, becomes a pastoral practice of presence—a form of accompaniment in which the church signals that transcendence is not abstract but incarnate, not distant but near.
God is already present, already speaking, already healing. Evangelism is not about leaving our cultural moment behind, but about helping others perceive how God is already moving within it. In this view, sorrow shared becomes sacramental. The work of evangelism is less about proclamation from without and more about attunement to what God is doing from within.
This vision aligns with Root’s earlier Faith Formation in a Secular Age, where he writes that evangelism today is less a program and more a posture—an invitation to live alongside others in such a way that the love of God becomes palpable. The gospel is not a message we manufacture but a story we inhabit. When we live that story—when we show up, listen, and love—people begin to see their own lives reframed by grace.
Root assumes that God is already at work in people’s lives. Our task is not to initiate that work but to help people recognize it. The church’s task is not to impose its beliefs on others, but to demonstrate that the kingdom of God is at hand through the way we live and love.
That is why some of the most meaningful moments of evangelism in my life have occurred when I was not trying to evangelize at all. I remember a law student who shared, “I went to church as a child, but I left it behind in college. I hadn’t thought much about it until my husband said, ‘Let’s check out this concert at Duke Chapel.’ I love classical music. But during the concert, something happened. I was overcome by this soft, warm light—like I was unconscious, but present. I just kept saying to myself, ‘I’m back. I’m really back.’ That’s why we’ve been here nearly every Sunday since.”
In response, I found myself saying, “I think your story shows that God has folded your life back into God’s own. Welcome back—to the place where God never left.”
Root’s work helped me discover a different way of ending conversations during my chaplaincy at Duke. I began to ask students and faculty, “What’s God been doing in your life lately?” At first, I expected pushback—awkwardness, defensiveness, even dismissal. And sometimes that happened. But more often, people leaned in: “Why do you ask?” or “Did I tell you what happened the other night on the way back from the library?”
And I would say, “Tell me more.”
That was my role: to follow behind Jesus. To play a bit part in the drama of Christ’s redemptive presence in the world. Evangelist, after all.
The good bishop begins by talking about God, continues by understanding that God is invested in the difficult places in this world, and rejoices with the unsuspecting in God's redemptive presence in the difficulties. Evangelism, perhaps surprised-by-joy evangelism, indeed. Thank you, Bp. Willimon, for writing this. Thank you, Center for Barth Studies, for posting this.