Christian Living

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Christians have been caught between "a rock and a hard place"for too long. On the one hand, the faith of our mothers and

fathers calls for evangelism—we are to go out into the world topreach and teach that the Light has come. On the other hand, muchof the cultural annihilism of the 19th and 20th centuries has mas-queraded as evangelism. Is it any wonder that we are squeamishabout the word? Paul Dekar's new book Holy Boldness, is a wel-come antidote to our learned aversions to evangelism. The book is a

scholarly but accessible and meditative study of evangelistic practices. Dekar leads usfrom an era of evangelism as triumphalism and ethnocentrism, toward evangelism asfaithful spiritual practices, enacted with the humility and life commitment exemplified byJesus Christ and the early church. This is a remarkable book that illuminates the pathtoward our fulfillment of "God's transforming work."

Barbara A. Holmes J.D., Ph.D.Associate Professor of Ethics and African American Religious Studies

Memphis Theological Seminary

“... a book about true evangelical faith.”

Having known Paul Dekar as professor, peacemaker, social activist, and visionary, I canattest to the way in which this book puts into print what Paul has first put into action.

Holy Boldness is a book about true evangelical faith. Drawing on biblical teaching, spiritualguides, and his own considerable experience, Paul shows how humility, loving-kindness,just living, and the rhythm of the liturgical year are integral to evangelism and the missionof the Church. This book will help to transform personal devotion into public witness thatcares for the poor, liberates the oppressed, and challenges the powers as it celebrates thegood news of Jesus Christ.

Barry D. MorrisonAssociate Professor of Homiletics and Worship

Acadia Divinity College, Nova Scotia, Canada

Paul R. Dekar is Professor of Evangelism and Missions at Memphis Theological Seminary. A graduate ofthe University of California (Berkeley), Colgate Rochester Divinity School and the University of Chicago, hehas also taught at Central Michigan University, McMaster University, Acadia University, and Whitley Collegeof the University of Melbourne.

PAUL R. DEKAR

Practices of Compassion

Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate. (Luke 6:36,Jerusalem Bible)

Our Compassionate God

In the 1950s God called me to join the company of Jesus’ followers. Godprovided caregivers to nurture me in my newfound faith and to equip me forthe vocation to which I was called. Over the next few years, Paul Lindholmbecame one of my spiritual mentors. Then in 1965, when I was readying togo to Chad on a church-related work project and possibly to attend semi-nary, Paul said to me, “As you enter into the pain of the world, go with thecompassion of Christ.” He wanted me to understand that I could not prac-tice a pie-in-the-sky spirituality and that along this journey into the pain ofthe world, the Holy One from Galilee would introduce me to some of hisfriends: the poor, the wounded, the marginalized, the handicapped, saints,sinners.

This has in fact been true for me. I have met many who experience lifeas overwhelming. I have met people who hunger for meaning in life, forcomfort and consolation, for forgiveness and reconciliation, for healing andrestoration. I have met the poor and the wounded, the marginalized and thehandicapped, saints and sinners. I have heard God calling me to make myexperience of new life in Christ evident through the practice of compassiontoward them.

Hebrew Scripture refers to God as full of compassion and mercy.1 Psalm78:38 praises God who, being compassionate, forgives the iniquity of peopleand does not destroy them. Psalm 111:4 and other texts refer to God as gra-cious and merciful. As a people mindful of their covenant with a

compassionate and merciful God, ancient Israel likewise was to show mercyand live with compassion.

As Christians we believe God’s compassion became visible to us in Jesus.God became one with us in Jesus. Jesus consistently manifested God’s com-passion. In the feeding stories, for example, Jesus attracted crowds. The lame,the maimed, the blind, the mute, and others approached Jesus. Lookingupon them, he said, I have compassion for the crowd, because they have beenwith me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to sendthem away hungry, for they might faint on the way (Matt 15:32 and parallels).In this passage, translators render the Greek splangchnizomai as compassion.Literally the word means to have one’s bowels yearn, to ache in the guts. TheEnglish derives from the Latin pati and cum, which together mean to sufferwith. Distressed by conditions he saw, Jesus took pity on the people,responded with a visceral feeling, and was moved to act with compassion.

When Jesus saw people hungry, he had compassion. Jesus reacted toother situations with the same visceral response. Matthew records that Jesusmoved about, teaching in the synagogues, healing, and proclaiming the goodnews of God’s realm. Once he met two blind men. Jesus touched their eyesand healed them. When they had gone away, a mute demoniac was broughtto him. Jesus cast the demon out, and the man who had been speechlessspoke. Jesus met harassed and helpless people whom he likened to sheepwithout a shepherd. When he saw them, he had compassion on them andthen commissioned his disciples to do likewise (Matt 9:27-38; Mark 6:34).Luke records Jesus’ encounter with the widow of Nain. Jesus had compassionon her and comforted her (Luke 7:11-17). Matthew, Mark, and Luke recorda story of Jesus healing an epileptic boy. According to Mark, someone askedJesus to exercise compassion (Mark 9:22).

Jesus was known to act in a consistent way. He made God’s compassiontangible and made clear to his followers that they, too, were to be compas-sionate. Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate (Luke 6:36,Jerusalem Bible).

The Compassionate Life

The preaching, teaching, and healing practices of Jesus were like a magnet.Jesus attracted the blind, the hungry, the ignorant, the lepers, the widows,and others in need. Jesus responded with compassion and incorporated intohis community those who would likewise practice compassion. He thuswidened the circle of compassion. The compassion of Jesus flowed from

PRACTICES OF COMPASSION 85

God’s compassion. As followers of Jesus, his disciples were in turn to betransparent with the compassion of God.

What about us? How can we believe in a God of compassion when suf-fering abounds? How can we manifest the compassion of Jesus amid anuncompassionate world? Not only humankind, but animals, plants, and theentire created order are dying for lack of compassion. We have just markedthe end of a century of unparalleled warfare, species elimination, and whole-sale assault on features of the natural world on which we depend. The rainforests are being destroyed, the water and the air are polluted, and the icecaps are receding due to global warming. A few of us are overwhelminglyaffluent at the expense of the vast majority who live in poverty. Unjust prej-udice on the basis of ethnicity, gender, race, or religion contributes todiscrimination and violence against others.

God does not expect us to speculate about such matters. Nor does Godanticipate that we will eliminate these or other problems. God requires onlya response. In Judaism one is expected to help somebody daily. This is calledMitzvah, a good deed. But there is a catch that, when you perform aMitzvah, the truly holy person cannot tell.

An old story about a rabbi who was so addicted to golf that he evenplayed on holy days illustrates this point. On Yom Kippur, the High HolyDay, the rabbi made a hole in one. As he danced about with exultation,thunder rumbled and lightening flashed. God’s voice boomed down to him.“So who are you going to tell?”2

So who are you going to tell? This is a way of asking whether we havedone something for someone today that we did not have to do according tothe standards of society. But followers of Jesus must daily see those who needJesus and respond to them as Jesus did: helping in caring ways, bold yetunassuming with loving-kindness and humility. Men, women, and childrenare waiting for compassionate people to reach out to them. By being com-passionate as God is compassionate, we daily share good news in the wayJesus did.

It is possible not to do so. It is possible not to see what needs to be done.One can choose not to read a newspaper, watch televised news, or listen topublic radio. By use of e-commerce, one can choose not to notice the under-employed in our stores and malls. One can choose to live behind protectivebarriers. Some would have this country erect fortifications to screen out thepoor world. Three million US households live behind gated communities.New ones are under construction in the neighborhood where I live and write

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this. Building prisons is a growth industry in our economy. Violence and thefear of victimization are growing rampantly in our society. Recently, anadvertisement arrived in the mail featuring handgun permit training, withfree gun rental and ammunition. The price tag was $79.00.

What motivates people to receive such instruction, to move behindwalls, or to buy security locks? Perhaps they feel insecure. Though we cannever insulate ourselves entirely from the heedless ones among us, it is rea-sonable to protect ourselves from terrible things that can and do occur.

Why do some people maintain their own privilege rather than promotethe common good? Perhaps one reason is that they have imbibed culturalnorms that encourage the hoarding of wealth and economic power. From theperspective of loving-kindness, however, the analysis of James 4:1-3 ispertinent.

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they notcome from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something anddo not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannotobtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because youdo not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order tospend what you get on your pleasures.

From the standpoint of loving-kindness, we share what we have. Weknow love by this, that he [Jesus] laid down his life for us—and we ought to laydown our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has theworld’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? (1 John3:16-17). Greater equality in distributing the goods of this world will in theend mean better lives for all!

Another reason some people turn away is that they feel powerless.Besieged by requests for money or overwhelmed by the need, some peoplemay hear the cry of others but fail to act. As crisis after crisis envelopedplanet earth some years ago, commentators observed a phenomenon calledcompassion fatigue. Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen explained, “Exposure tohuman misery on a mass scale can lead not only to psychic numbness but tohostility.”3 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore manifested this as heturned back Vietnamese Boat People. He insisted that one has to developcalluses on the heart or else bleed to death.

I can identify with this response. In 1965, I went to Chad withCrossroads Africa, a non-government organization founded by the ReverendJames Herman Robinson.4 Our journey took us through Nigeria. On the

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brink of civil war, the country could not meet the dietary needs of childrenwhose bloated stomachs revealed they had kwashiorkor, a disease that resultsfrom malnutrition. Subsequently I visited camps of Biafran refugees in west-ern Cameroon. The abyss between the scenes I saw and God’s immense,inexhaustible, and unfathomable tenderness was palpable. I felt powerlessness.

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd followed Hurricane Mitch. News of randomviolence in Littleton, Colorado, gave way to coverage of a mass murder ofchildren in Fort Worth, Texas. Kosovo, East Timor, and other hot spotsscreamed for attention. I wanted to shut all this out. I wanted to scream, “It’sa tough world! Won’t somebody do something?”

One does not have to travel afar to enter the pain of the world. Anurban sprawl of nearly a million people at the confluence of three southernstates—Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee in the Mississippi RiverDelta—Memphis is one of the poorest cities in the United States. When itclaims to be “Home of the Blues,” Memphis claims a parentage of musicsteeped in Delta blood, sweat, and tears. The music rocks, writhes, and tellsof hard times that “hurt so good.”

One-third of Memphians live below the poverty line. Homeless poor gothrough the green garbage bins before city sanitation workers do their collec-tion runs. Single mothers work double shifts. Health care is not available forcountless thousands. How can such neglect of God’s children during aperiod of unprecedented prosperity be?

Half a world away, refugee camps teem with the refuse of wars. Half aworld away, castaway children are sold for body parts. The poor poke aroundcity dumps for food and material with which to build shanty homes. Howare Christians to respond?

The Reverend Simea Meldrum of Olinda offers a model of whatChristians in northeast Brazil do. Simea serves those in Brazil who inhabitcardboard shacks and rummage for food in garbage dumps. This is the poor-est and least developed region of the country. In the fall of 1998, as part ofan ongoing parish partnership between her Living Water Mission in Braziland St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis, several members of St.Mary’s visited Olinda. A year later Simea and her husband, the Reverend IanMeldrum, came to Memphis accompanied by two lay colleagues, JosenaideMaria Lopes Pereira and Magaly Melo de Mendonca Ramos. It was apt thatthey joined in activities recalling Memphis martyrs Constance and her com-panions who died of yellow fever in 1878 while caring for those affected bythe epidemic.

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In the course of her visit, Simea preached. During her sermon, she toldof growing up in a “simple” family. They were so poor that they had onlypumpkins to eat. As a girl, she once shared a pumpkin with a neighbor whowas equally poor. The neighbor returned with a special dish. It was a won-derful lesson that God does provide manna in the form of pumpkins in themorning, at noon, and in the evening.

Simea explained that Jesus led her into the pain of the world. “We can’tleave the work to full-time clergy.” One of the street children she rescued isnow leading her parish’s struggle against the empire that is the InternationalMonetary Fund and World Bank. She cited Dom Helder Camara, who diedrecently and was formerly Archbishop of Olinda and Recife. At his funeral,someone read one of his prayers: have pity on those who have no home tolive in, and even greater pity on those who live in mansions.

Simea closed by inviting us to eat pumpkins in the morning, at noon,and in the evening. It will be enough. Like love, when you give it away, whoknows what will come back? Truly blessed are Simea and the poor withwhom she serves.

We all can think of people like Simea who practice compassion. Theyare basically good, gentle, and understanding. They are vessels throughwhom God’s compassion flows. Through them, the world is learning aboutGod’s compassion.5

Four Principles for Nurturing Compassion

Compassion is not abstract. It is a concrete, specific practice by which wereach out to others in the name of Jesus. Amid all the need, how are we toknow what to do? Where are we to begin? Let me identify four principles bywhich we may nurture compassion.

Principle One: Grow Where You Are Planted

A primary model by which Christians respond to need is to undertake devel-opment or relief projects in international contexts. Examples include medicalteams that provide inoculations and other basic medical procedures in aregion without an adequate health infrastructure and a youth group thathelps with a building project.

Often, this approach entails organizing a group to visit an area of identi-fied need and to provide short-term relief or development assistance. Forthose served, the intervention can achieve some good. For those who make

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the journey, the experience can be life-changing. But there are three majorproblems with this approach to compassion. First, language and other barri-ers make it impossible for participants to develop relationships in unfamiliarcultural contexts. Second, time, expense, and distance limit opportunities foreducation, ministry, or follow-up. Third, such travel contributes to today’sglobal tourism industry.6

As an alternative, I encourage Christians to begin where they areplanted. Think of the one who needs a compassionate response as somethingother than an abstraction. Put a human face on large issues of homelessness,hunger, and poverty. Tackle these larger-than-life issues as determinative real-ities for those around us. In workshops and evangelism classes, I encourageparticipants to connect with their communities in a four-stage process:

• Preparing. Human need often is invisible. One reason is that members ofcongregations are strangers to the community around the church facilities.The first step to engagement is to become aware of need and of the destruc-tive dimensions of personal and social sin in one’s immediate vicinity. Toprepare for engagement, walk through your community. If you live in a ruralarea, drive through it. What do you see? Get basic demographic informationabout the community. Generally, one can access census data or other crucialinformation readily.

• Listening/sharing. Build relationships in the neighborhood through partici-pation in community events, home visitation, shared meals, and otherexperiences. Invite a social worker to lunch. Ride a police beat. Create spacefor members of different cultural groups to be heard during forums, discus-sions, and other events.

• Assessing. Seek to understand by assessing and evaluating the data gathered.Formulate possible courses of action. Be sensitive to how any activity willimpact the people most affected.

• Acting. Participants inevitably respond to contextual learning by wanting tomake a difference in the lives of those in need. Myriad students and work-shop registrants have thereby grown where God has established them inministry. Let me cite a few examples.

In one evangelism class, student projects resulted in four new ministries.The Reverend Sarah Salazar served the growing Latino population in

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Memphis. She developed a variety of specific ministries such as languagetraining and job skills that gave them power to improve their lives. TheReverend Janjia Liu established a Mandarin-language congregation forChinese newcomers without a spiritual home. The Reverend Rosalyn ReginaNichols sensitized African Americans to the needs of South East Asianrefugees. The Reverend Mike Wilkinson reached shut-ins through a ruralTennessee Cumberland Presbyterian congregation.

In another class, a United Methodist Church parish nurse program hasstarted in and around Norfork, Arkansas. Lives have been saved! Co-pastorsBob and Kay Burton envision three hundred congregations adapting theirmodel throughout the tri-state Delta area. The Church Health Center inMemphis, Tennessee, has joined in this effort to offer hope and healing tothe working poor in both rural and urban areas.7

In Ottawa, Ontario, Canadian Baptists created a place of hospitality forchildren left alone on city schoolyards through an innovative preschoolbreakfast program. In an overwhelmingly poor area of Hamilton, Ontario,the Reverend Alan R. Matthews started diverse programs for the needy,including a ministry to prisoners. For Baptist and Mennonite CentralCommittee volunteers, Welcome Inn has been a school of compassion.8

Failure to know one’s community can produce catastrophe! I think of aHamilton, Ontario, congregation that spent millions for refurbished officesand worship space but ignored the three largest categories of people aroundthe church: the homeless, the poor, and the elderly. The congregation didnot elicit from people what they thought they needed or address these needs.The congregation might have provided facilities such as washrooms,kitchens, and beds for street people. They might have undertaken an AIDSministry for those vulnerable to drug trafficking. They might have providedwheelchair access for the elderly. They did none of these. They did not growwhere they were planted.

Principle Two: Respond to a Call

A second strategic principle is to encourage response to a specific call. It doeslittle good to harangue people from the pulpit regarding what they should orshould not do. A person will not respond to human need unless she or hehears God’s call and understands that God equips each of us with giftsappropriate to that call. An authentic call is hard to discern. If one hears a

PRACTICES OF COMPASSION 91

call and tests its authenticity, it is a powerful impetus to enter the pain of theworld.9

In my life there have been periods of vocational struggle including mycall to Memphis. In 1993, I attended a conference in Birmingham, Alabama,during which I shared in manual labor at a Catholic Worker house run byJames and Shelley Douglass. I inquired why they had moved there from thePacific Northwest. Jim stated that in the United States, Christians concernedabout compassion and justice must locate themselves in cities such asBirmingham and Memphis. Naming Memphis, Jim sounded a call analo-gous to the calls of Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. At the time, my résumé wasonly theoretically open. I was not looking for new employment. Yet a voicestirred within me to address poverty and racism in the city where MartinLuther King Jr. struggled for economic justice on behalf of sanitation work-ers and died.

I felt the force of T. S. Eliot’s words:10 “Human kind cannot bear verymuch reality.” I feared the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night ofGod, the surrender required, and the deprivation inflicted. Did I fear theinjustice of men and women less than the justice of God?

“The loneliness of the night of God” is a striking image. From my lateteen years I have felt the call of God to enter into the pain of the earth. Yethere I was wrestling with a particular call. I experienced something like avision of a fire singing away all resistance. Words came: You are not alone inthis. Fear not. Take courage. I have conquered the world (John 16:33). And thatis how I came to be in Memphis.

Phoenix Place in Hamilton, Ontario, a ministry to battered women andchildren, provides another example of Christians responding to a call. Theorigins of Phoenix Place can be traced to the professional and volunteerinvolvement of members of MacNeill Baptist Church. Personal experienceand training led some of them to engagement at a shelter for batteredwomen and children. A few women responded to an invitation to attendMacNeill. A small group developed. Members of the group began to askwhat they could do. A period of study and discernment followed. Groupmembers discovered that a major lacuna existed in Hamilton for womenwho flee to shelters. Generally, they could remain only a short period oftime. A need for second-stage housing existed. Women needed a safe place tolive beyond the shelter. As the call developed and the challenges of develop-ing a second-stage home seemed too great for a small group, they recruited

92 HOLY BOLDNESS

additional members from other churches. Fund-raising followed. PhoenixPlace came to be. It grew out of five years of meetings and work.

At the start of the process, those involved in Phoenix Place responded toa call. Initially, they did not believe they could undertake a project on thescale of providing housing and other forms of assistance for battered women.Yet God blessed their faithful response. As Margaret Mead has observed,“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens canchange the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Principle Three: Empower Those Served

A third principle is to empower those served. A truism that builds on thisidea goes as follows: give a hungry person a fish, and the individual eats thatday. Teach a hungry person to fish, and the individual eats for a lifetime. Anold Chinese saying underscores this:

Go to the peopleLive among themLearn from themLove themStart with what you knowBuild on what they have:But of the best leadersWhen their task is doneThe people will remark“We have done it ourselves.”11

Contemporary events are full of great catastrophes. When tragedystrikes, it is important to respond to immediate needs. But we risk perpetu-ating misery if we do not enable those helped to reduce their vulnerability todisaster or to extricate themselves from sources of problems embedded in thestructures of society. In any calamity, the short-term goal of humanitarianintervention must give way to rehabilitation, reconstruction, and sustainabledevelopment.

PRACTICES OF COMPASSION 93

Principle Four: Strike a Balancebetween the Local and Global

This final principle acknowledges human limits. Compassion does not focuson statistical results. What matters is that, to the best of one’s ability, onelives with compassion with those given to love. It is important, therefore, tostrike a balance between seeking to change the world and making a small dif-ference in somebody’s life. This means holding in tension the long-term goalof structural change with the call to make tangible God’s great compassion.We do so when we act as individuals. Each person can make a difference. Itmatters that we act. As we work through organizations, we multiply ourefforts and intensify the possibility that our efforts will impact more widely.Amnesty International members advocate on behalf of prisoners of con-science. Habitat for Humanity volunteers build houses. Heifer ProjectInternational sends what is needed to provide eggs, honey, meat, and draftanimals to aid agricultural production. These three, of hundreds of voluntarybodies, manifest the truth that God’s compassion is wide. Individuals bene-fit. Over time, political discourse and structures change. Such compassionateresponses to human need illustrate another axiom: we can aspire to some-thing big. If we accomplish what we dream, we really have not dreamed big.

There is a great difference between the Jesus one typically meets inSunday school and the Jesus one meets along the journey of compassion.Each of us is growing into Christ-likeness. Each of us has a special concernthat the God of compassion brings to our attention. We can direct our giftsand respond to the call of God to practice compassion. Pray that God willkindle within us true evangelical faith. We cannot let faith lie dormant. Mayit clothe the naked, feed the hungry, comfort the sorrowful, shelter the desti-tute, serve those that would do harm, bind up that which is wounded, andheal the broken-hearted. Heaven rejoices as we live compassionately.

PrayerBe with me, Jesus.Open my eyes that I may see those to whom to offer your compassion.Open my ears that I may hear those you would comfort.Open my hands that I may offer your healing touch.Open my heart that I may radiate your deep caring to all creation. Amen.

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1 Translators of the Hebrew word rachum use “compassionate” and “merciful” inter-changeably.

2 Northumbria Community, Celtic Daily Prayerbook, cited 4 November 2000, Tablet1509.

3 Henri Nouwen, “Coping with the Seven O’clock News,” Sojourners 6 (September1977): 15; Henri J. M. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill, and Douglas A. Morrison, Compassion:A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 15-16.

4 Road without Turning: The Story of Reverend James H. Robinson (New York: Farrar,Straus, 1950). Founded in the 1950s, Crossroads Africa became the seed of the Peace Corps.

5 Frank Laubach, The World Is Learning Compassion (Westwood: Fleming H. Revell,1958).

6 Jo Ann van Engen, “The Cost of Short-term Missions,” Other Side 36(January–February 2000), 20-23; Susan B. Thistlethwaite and George F. Cairns, eds., BeyondTheological Tourism: Mentoring as a Grassroots Approach to Theological Education (Maryknoll:Orbis, 1994).

7 G. Scott Morris, ed., Hope and Healing: Words from the Clergy of a Southern City(Memphis: Guild Bindery Press, 1995).

8 Alan R. Matthews, Together We Can (Hamilton: Fowler-Matthew, 1984; rev. ed.,1988). See Welcome Inn Community Centre and Church 1966–1986 (Hamilton: Welcome Inn,1986) for the congregation’s ministries. For Memphis ministries, see Jericho Road at<http://www.jericho.org>.

9 Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope: Thresholds to Purpose (Waco: Word, 1987);David Hilfiker, Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor’s Journey with the Poor (New York:Ballantine, 1994).

10 T. S. Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral,” The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 209, 221.

11 John M. Perkins, Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 86.

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Christian Living

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Christians have been caught between "a rock and a hard place"for too long. On the one hand, the faith of our mothers and

fathers calls for evangelism—we are to go out into the world topreach and teach that the Light has come. On the other hand, muchof the cultural annihilism of the 19th and 20th centuries has mas-queraded as evangelism. Is it any wonder that we are squeamishabout the word? Paul Dekar's new book Holy Boldness, is a wel-come antidote to our learned aversions to evangelism. The book is a

scholarly but accessible and meditative study of evangelistic practices. Dekar leads usfrom an era of evangelism as triumphalism and ethnocentrism, toward evangelism asfaithful spiritual practices, enacted with the humility and life commitment exemplified byJesus Christ and the early church. This is a remarkable book that illuminates the pathtoward our fulfillment of "God's transforming work."

Barbara A. Holmes J.D., Ph.D.Associate Professor of Ethics and African American Religious Studies

Memphis Theological Seminary

“... a book about true evangelical faith.”

Having known Paul Dekar as professor, peacemaker, social activist, and visionary, I canattest to the way in which this book puts into print what Paul has first put into action.

Holy Boldness is a book about true evangelical faith. Drawing on biblical teaching, spiritualguides, and his own considerable experience, Paul shows how humility, loving-kindness,just living, and the rhythm of the liturgical year are integral to evangelism and the missionof the Church. This book will help to transform personal devotion into public witness thatcares for the poor, liberates the oppressed, and challenges the powers as it celebrates thegood news of Jesus Christ.

Barry D. MorrisonAssociate Professor of Homiletics and Worship

Acadia Divinity College, Nova Scotia, Canada

Paul R. Dekar is Professor of Evangelism and Missions at Memphis Theological Seminary. A graduate ofthe University of California (Berkeley), Colgate Rochester Divinity School and the University of Chicago, hehas also taught at Central Michigan University, McMaster University, Acadia University, and Whitley Collegeof the University of Melbourne.

PAUL R. DEKAR