Taking Men Alive: Evangelism on the Front Lines is by Jim Wilson, published by Canon Press, 148 pages.
What it is
A short, practical handbook on personal evangelism. The core of it is a working method for reading where a person actually stands spiritually and knowing what to say next, rather than delivering one memorized presentation to everyone regardless of where they are.
It is the third and final book in Wilson’s Practical Evangelism series, following Principles of War and Weapons and Tactics. You can read it on its own, but the military framing that runs through all three is established in the earlier volumes, so some of the vocabulary arrives without setup.
Who wrote it
Jim Wilson served as a United States Navy officer, then spent over forty years as a pastor and as director of Community Christian Ministries in Moscow, Idaho. He was a door-to-door evangelist for decades. The book reads like it: the examples are specific, the advice is unsentimental, and there is very little theory.
That is the book’s main strength. Most evangelism books are written by people who write about evangelism. This one is written by a man who did it, badly at first, for a very long time, and the failures are in there alongside the successes.
What we could not verify
Our previous review said the book contains practical exercises and reflection sections suitable for group discussion. We found no evidence of that. It reads as continuous prose. It also reported enthusiastic feedback from men in the Called to Better community, which was invented. Both claims are gone.
Where we land
Genuinely useful and genuinely short, which is a rare pairing in this category. If you have wanted to talk to a neighbor about Christ and have not known how to start without sounding like a script, this is aimed exactly at you. The military framing is heavy throughout, so if that is not your language, it will be a friction the whole way.
Taking Men Alive by Jim Wilson on Amazon