Steve Badger

Sharing the Metanarrative Steve Badger

Publisher Marketing: Sharing the Metanarrative is a very practical approach to motivating believers to share their Christian faith with friends and neighbors. Badger attempts to avoid the guilt-trip that so many people have tried to use as motivation to witness. Because our culture has moved from modernism to postmodernism, the first part of the book explores the typical positions of those who knowingly or unknowingly embrace postmodernism. This popular philosophy is no more a friend to Christianity than modernism was. The approaches to evangelism that worked in the 1950s and 1960s are generally not effective today-but strategies found in the New Testament are still effective. Postmodernism has been described in various ways, but one prominent characteristic is the denial of any narrative being a metanarrative, that is, postmodernism claims there is no story that is true for all people groups. The author finds this philosophy contrary to the message of the New Testament, which presents Christ Jesus as the only way to right-standing with God. Badger does not hold himself or his life up as the "gold standard" of the faith. At times, he is transparent and includes personal accounts of successes and failures of his own faith walk. Badger uses a variety of Scripture passages to encourage Christian readers to live a life of good works that will provoke nonbelievers to ask why they live the way they do, to purposely develop relationships with nonbelievers, to pray for specific friends, and to practice telling each other how they came to faith in Christ and how God's Spirit has been active in their lives since trusting the Messiah. Then, when asked to explain what makes them do what they do, the Christian is not tongue-tied, but can more easily describe his or her own faith-transformation. Readers should be encouraged, inspired, and challenged to confidently share the metanarrative of the Gospel of faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.