Sam Chan > Quotes

“There is always this tension to the act of evangelism. We have a timeless story from God, which is true for all peoples of all cultures and in all places. But at the same time, it has to be told by a person who is in a time, culture, and place.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“Or as the Reformers said, we are saved by faith alone, but that faith is never alone.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“In Romans 1:1, the apostle Paul tells us that the gospel is “the gospel of God”; it is God’s gospel.* This means the story belongs to God; it is not our story to invent, modify, or embellish. We should also trust in its power. We do not need to add anything to it to make it more powerful.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“What are plausibility structures? They are accepted beliefs, convictions, and understandings that either green-light truth claims as plausible or red-light them as implausible.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“The English word gospel comes from the Anglo-Saxon word God-spell—literally, “God’s story.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“So where do we get these plausibility structures? They come from three main sources: (1) community, (2) experience, and (3) facts, evidence, and data.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“The Greek term epistrophe is the second aspect of biblical repentance. It describes a complete turnaround and has both negative and positive aspects: we turn away from something negative and toward something positive.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“It includes any form of communicating the gospel, and there are several New Testament verbs that convey this idea, such as martureo (“to testify” or “bear witness”), kerusso (“to herald”), parakaleo (“to exhort”), katangelo (“to proclaim”), or propheteuo (“to prophesy”), and didasko (“to teach”).”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“Surely, a person can preach the Word to me, but no one is able to put it into my heart except God alone, who must speak to the heart, or all is vain; for when he is silent, the Word is not spoken.”
― Sam Chan, Preaching as the Word of God: Answering an Old Question with Speech-Act Theory

“The basic conclusion has been this: to preach the gospel as the word of God is to re-locute and re-illocute the divine speech act, the gospel, which itself was once locuted and illocuted by the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles, and which now continues to be locuted and illocuted in the canonical Scriptures.”
― Sam Chan, Preaching as the Word of God: Answering an Old Question with Speech-Act Theory

“We must also exercise trust (fiducia), making our lives consistent with the truth claims we agree with.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“Right now, the Christian faith is exploding in majority world places such as South America, China, and Africa. People are converting because they’ve discovered the freedom, rights, and love that come from knowing and following Jesus. They are not finding Christianity to be a tool of oppression and hate. The opposite is true. They experience it as a tool of liberation, justice, and love. The point is that if we’re thinking that Christianity is a tool of oppression, then maybe we’ve been reading the Bible with a specific lens, a postmodern Western lens, for too long. Or maybe we’ve been hanging around the wrong Christians.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“But the biblical understanding of metanoia is far more positive. Instead of merely looking inward and regretting the past, it is looking outward and forward. When Jesus says, “Repent [metanoieo], for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 4:17), he is saying, “You must change your hearts—for the kingdom of Heaven has arrived” (Phillips). He is calling us to look ahead to the arrival of the kingdom.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable

“Dr. Graham Cole has suggested that the New Testament illustrates for us at least three models of conversion: the story of the prodigal son, the conversion of Saul, and the conversion of Timothy.”
― Sam Chan, Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable