Walk through any office tower and you’ll pass a hundred people who look like they’ve got it figured out. Polished. Productive. Enviable from the outside. A lot of them are quietly coming apart on the inside. And here’s the uncomfortable part. We keep handing them tracts while they’re wearing masks, then wonder why nothing takes root.
I’ve been chewing on that since I read Andrew Root’s Evangelism in an Age of Despair. I reviewed it for Themelios, the peer-reviewed journal published by The Gospel Coalition. I didn’t write the review for the byline. I wrote it because Root walked straight into the missional center of CBMC and named something most of us feel but rarely say out loud.
CBMC exists for one reason. We exist to see the Great Commission achieved in the global marketplace. Not advanced. Not promoted. Achieved. That word has been our anchor for ninety-six years, and it’s deliberate. Everything else we do flows from it. The team meetings, the discipleship pathways, the leadership training, the conferences, the 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 names the condition of the people we’re trying to reach. He calls it “happy misery.” Men and women who’ve built lives that look enviable and feel unbearable. The corner office. The platform. The curated feed. The family photos that hide the fractures. He doesn’t moralize about it. He diagnoses it. The modern self gets managed and optimized and seen, but it rarely gets healed, and it almost never gets known.
If that’s true, and I’m convinced it is, then much of what we call marketplace evangelism is failing because it’s aimed at the surface. We’ve been trained to evangelize the mask. No wonder it bounces off.
Real witness requires us to go down. Not to perform empathy. Not to run a technique. To actually climb down into the mess of the people God has put in front of us. To sit with the colleague whose marriage is in pieces. To stay with the employee whose son is in rehab. To hear the despair hiding behind the quarterly numbers without flinching.
That’s 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 stepped into the dust and the grief and the betrayal.
He raised the dead by going to where the dead were.
He wept at the tomb before he opened it. Our evangelism follows that movement or it isn’t evangelism at all. We’re ambassadors of a King who walks into our brokenness every day and brings life out of death. We can’t 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’s where I want to press the global family. We’ve built remarkable national ministries across eighty-two nations. We have leaders of real caliber. We have a structure that honors local autonomy and a shared mission. But structures don’t make disciples. Programs don’t make disciples. Conferences don’t make disciples. People do. Men and women who’ve been undone by the descending love of Christ, and who carry that love into the offices and factories and boardrooms of their cities.
So read Root’s book. Read it slowly. Let it expose the places where your witness has quietly turned into marketing. Let it call you back to the center, where real consolation, not curated happiness, becomes the ground of what we say.
And let it bring us back together to the reason CBMC exists. Not to host events. Not to maintain a brand. To go to the miserably happy of the global marketplace, climb down with them into what’s real, and tell them the King who meets them there is making all things new.
Waa taas ujeeddadeenna. Ma jiro wax kale.
akhri full review of Evangelism in an Age of Despair in Themelios (The Gospel Coalition).
