God Space (Where Spiritual Conversations Happen Naturally)
Author: Doug Pollock, Group Publishing
Reviewed by Randy Siever

I got a call several months ago from Doug Pollock.We’d never met, but he wanted permission to use an Ordinary Attempt (OA) story from our site in his new book, and of course I agreed. We just had one of those “connections” happen over the phone (a common thing among old evangelists like us), and spent almost three hours talking about what God seems to be doing in the Church, particularly around evangelism.

A few months later Doug got his book published and sent me a copy. I was excited to see how he fleshed out the very important topics we discussed on the phone, and how much the book repeated, reflected and resonated with our message in DE Land. I read the book in two sittings…and began to feel like maybe I didn’t need to write my own anymore. This is really good stuff.

Here’s my take on it, from a Doable Evangelism (DE) viewpoint:
First off, I noticed that like most recent books on evangelism (at least the ones that sell well), the “e” word is not in the title. I think this is brilliant, since I rarely find anyone except evangelists interested in reading any more about evangelism. Instead, Doug strategically chooses to talk about how to encourage natural conversations in the course of ordinary life, creating what he calls “God Space.” His  focus is on conversation, not conversion (which is one of the fundamentals of DE…pretty much gleaned by us from much smarter guys like George C. Hunter, Todd Hunter, and Brian McLaren). So I really liked this refocusing and revaluing of evangelism as a conversation and practice right off.

Doug’s two primary methods for creating conversations are listening and wondering (which, of course, sounded wonderful to me!). He does a fantastic job detailing what those mean and how to do them, using lots of engaging stories to illustrate (including the one he borrowed from our Ordinary Attempts blog). There is a LOT of common content and philosophy between DE and God Space, which was quite fun to see.  But then I think God tends to plant these kind of significant ideas in a lot of places at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »