The latest issue of Themelios, the peer-reviewed theological journal published by The Gospel Coalition, carries my review of Andrew Root’s Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness. I’m grateful for the opportunity. But I didn’t write the review for the byline. I wrote it because Root’s argument lands directly on the missional center of CBMC, and I believe every national leader, regional director, and member of this ministry needs to hear what he’s saying.
CBMC exists for one reason. We exist to see the Great Commission achieved in the global marketplace. Not advanced. Not promoted. Achieved. That language is intentional, and it’s been our anchor for ninety-six years. Everything else we do flows from that single conviction. Our team meetings, our discipleship pathways, our leadership development, our national conferences, our regional gatherings. All of it. When we drift from that center, we become a networking association with prayer attached. When we return to it, we become what God called us to be.
Root’s book is a gift to anyone serious about that calling. He names something most of us already feel but rarely articulate. The marketplace is populated by what he calls happy misery. Men and women who have curated lives that look enviable from the outside, lives engineered for performance and applause, while interior exhaustion eats them alive. The corner office, the platform, the polished LinkedIn presence, the family photos that hide the fractures. Root doesn’t moralize about this. He diagnoses it. And his diagnosis is severe. The modern self is managed but not healed. Optimized but not loved. Visible but not known.
If that’s true, and I think it is, then much of what passes for marketplace evangelism is failing because it’s pitched at the wrong altitude. We’ve been taught to evangelize the surface. We hand out tracts to people wearing masks and wonder why nothing takes root. Root argues, and I agree, that real witness requires us to descend. Not to perform empathy. Not to deploy a technique. To actually go down into the drama and the trauma of the people God has placed under our influence. To sit with a colleague in the wreckage of his marriage. To stay present with an employee whose son is in rehab. To hear, without flinching, the despair that hides behind the quarterly numbers.
This is the pattern of God himself. The whole arc of Scripture is descent. The Son didn’t shout the gospel from a safe distance. He came down. He took on flesh. He entered the dust and the grief and the betrayal. He raised the dead by going to where the dead were. He wept at a tomb before he opened it. Our evangelism mirrors that movement, or it isn’t evangelism at all. We are ambassadors of a King who daily enters our brokenness to bring life from death. We cannot represent that King while keeping our own lives airbrushed and our distance professional. The witness has to cost us something, or it isn’t witness.
Here is where I want to press the global CBMC family. We have built remarkable national ministries across eighty-two nations. We have leaders of extraordinary caliber. We have a structure that honors local autonomy and shared mission. But structures don’t make disciples. Programs don’t make disciples. Conferences don’t make disciples. Men and women who have been undone by the descending love of Christ, and who carry that love into the offices and factories and boardrooms of their cities, make disciples.
So I commend Root’s book to you. Read it slowly. Let it expose the places where your witness has become marketing. Let it call you back to the cruciform center, where consolation rather than curated happiness becomes the ground of our message.
And let it return us, together, to the heart of why CBMC exists. Not to host events. Not to maintain a brand. To go to the miserably happy of the global marketplace, descend with them into what is real, and proclaim that the King who meets them there is making all things new.
That is our mission. There is no other.
