Winning Hearts and Minds: Christian Persuasion in an Increasingly Secular Age

Our culture is racing down a dangerous track: many believe there’s no God; Jesus is irrelevant; Christianity seems implausible. Secularists are within touching distance of what’s left of the Judeo-Christian convictions and heritage. It’s that serious.

In Winning Hearts and Minds, Richard Cunningham explores how we should respond. In the past, the church has either retreated, withdrawing from the world, or it has compromised on truth. That’s why we are where they are today, with many feeling like rabbits in the headlights, bewildered by society’s changes, failing to understand the culture wars raging all around. Cunningham argues that we urgently need a Christian mind formed within us so that we become confident that the faith is true, relevant and good, but we also have to communicate engagingly and persuasively, striving to win both hearts and minds of non believers. We must be effective, not just faithful, giving thought to form as well as content, holding in tension both imagination and reason.

Winning Hearts and Minds reasons that if we don’t respond to our crisis, then the secularists can be confident that they will capture hearts and minds and welcome new generations into their secular republic. The church’s challenge, before it is too late, is not only to outlive, but to out think, her pagan contemporaries, communicating the gospel effectively in a rapidly changing culture.

Richard Cunningham is CEO of UCCF; Trustee of Proclamation Trust; Vice Chairman and regular speaker at Word Alive; Co-founding Conveyor of European Leadership Forum; author of manual / apologetics course helping students connect with friends; editor of Serving the Church, Reaching the World and author of the chapter on which this book is based; regular articles on culture wars; author of 5 Bethinking booklets engaging with the secular world - a new, 6th one on ’Freedom’.