I have benefited a lot from Greg Koukl’s books Tactics and The Story of Reality. And while I have undoubtedly forgotten much of their content, there are a number of takeaways that have stuck with me. The foremost is that when we speak to people who are not Christians, we have not failed if they make no profession of faith in Jesus Christ. While that may be our ultimate desire for them, a good and noble goal for any spiritual conversation is to simply put a proverbial pebble in their shoe—to give them something to think about, something that will challenge their worldview, something that may nag at their souls in the days or weeks to come. Where some people understand evangelism only through a “harvesting approach” in which anything less than conversion means failure, the “gardening approach” means we are content to do the planting or watering, trusting that God may give someone else the joy of harvesting.
That approach is again on display in his new book Street Smarts, which is not quite a sequel to Tactics, but is still related to it. If you haven’t read Tactics you will benefit from Street Smarts, but
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