Includes music.

In The Oxbridge Evangelist: Motivations, Practices, and Legacy of C. S. Lewis, Michael Gehring examines the evangelistic practices of one of the most significant lay evangelists of the twentieth century. In the early 1930s not many who knew Lewis would have guessed that he would become such a significant evangelist. He has left an evangelistic legacy that has influenced millions across the world. Yet Lewis scholarship has not given sufficient attention to this crucial aspect of his legacy. This work examines Lewis's loss and recovery of faith, and it shows how his experience heightened his own awareness of the loss of the Christian faith in England. Because of his ability to identify with others, Lewis engaged in the work of evangelism with uncanny skill. This work required singular courage on his part; it cost him dearly professionally and in his relationships. Gehring critically explores Lewis's motivations, practices, and legacy of evangelism. In doing so he provides penetrating insight for those interested in the theory and practice of evangelism in a culture that too readily leaves it to the crazies of the Christian tradition or relegates it to the margins of church life.

This landmark work is the first academic study of a figure who played a defining role in the Australian evangelical movement of the late twentieth century—the inimitable preacher, evangelist, and churchman John C. Chapman. The study situates Chapman’s career within the secularizing Western cultures of the post-1960s—a period bringing momentous changes to the social and religious fabric of Western society. At the same time, global Evangelicalism was reviving, bringing vitality to large swathes in the Global South and a re-balancing in Western societies as conservative religious movements experienced growth and even renewal amidst wider secularizing trends. Against this backdrop the study explores the way in which, across a wide array of domestic and international fora, Chapman contended for the soteriological priority of the gospel in Christian life, mission, and thought. Accomplished via an absorbing blend of personal wit, impassioned oratory, innovative missiological strategy, and striking theological perception, the result was a stimulating history of public advocacy that sought a revival of confidence in Evangelicalism’s message, and a constantly reforming vision of Evangelicalism’s method. Such a legacy marks Chapman as a central figure within the generation of postwar leaders whose work has given Australian Evangelicalism its contemporary shape and dynamism.