The Misunderstood Secret to Evangelism (Part 1)

Mapping Motivational Interviewing onto Contemporary Evangelism

TL;DR: Tim Keller says evangelism today requires “questioning people’s answers.” Christian Smith and Andrew Root explain why old approaches have collapsed. Motivational Interviewing (MI) offers a culturally and theologically faithful posture to do exactly that.

Twenty-five years ago, I walked up to a stranger and asked if they knew the Ten Commandments. I had been trained to believe this was evangelism. Today, that approach wouldn’t just fall flat—it would be incomprehensible. Something profound has changed, and we’re all feeling it: the old scripts no longer make sense in our secular age.

I was recently reading the late Tim Keller’s book How to Reach the West. In the book, Keller makes a simple but rather profound observation. He writes:

“Helping non-Christians recognize they have a problem that requires salvation will mean questioning people’s answers… by ‘people’s answers,’ we mean the working answers to the big questions of life that everyone must have” (17).

Notice what Keller is saying here: we need to answer people’s answers with questions.

This is especially relevant given that evangelism has been a bugaboo in Mainline Protestantism for decades — maybe even the central existential crisis of the whole project — that Mainline Protestantism isn’t sure there is anything uniquely transformative about the Gospel.

Reading Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete, he highlights Jay Demerath’s claim that liberal Protestantism’s values — individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free inquiry, and the authority of experience — essentially made liberal Protestantism irrelevant (102).

Andrew Root spends six volumes in his Ministry in a Secular Age series making a similar point theologically. Smith summarizes it well:

“When religion becomes a ‘concept’… rather than one’s identity, life, and salvation, it generates less commitment and investment” (116).

And bluntly:

“One of the theological sources of the moralization of religion is a certain stream of nineteenth-century Protestant theological liberalism” (108).

We all know the cultural zeitgeist has shifted. Smith lists example after example, and we all feel it intuitively.

The obvious implication:

Twenty-five years ago, you could ask someone if they’d broken the Ten Commandments.

Today, that approach would NEVER work.

So what might work instead?

Keller’s phrase — “questioning their answers” — immediately made me think of Motivational Interviewing.

Motivational Interviewing (MI): A Culturally Appropriate Tool

Here’s how Wikipedia defines MI:

“A directive, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients explore and resolve ambivalence… MI is defined not by technique but by its spirit as a facilitative style for interpersonal relationship.”

In short:

MI is collaborative, relational, and designed to help people uncover their own motivations for change.

Not convincing.
Not lecturing.
Not debating.
Not pressuring.

Just helping someone hear what’s happening inside them.

MI uses four core skills — OARS:

O – Open-Ended Questions
“What would you like to see different?”

A – Affirmations
“You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this.”

R – Reflective Listening
“It sounds like you’re feeling torn between ___ and ___.”

S – Summaries
“So it sounds like you care about X, you’re tired of Y, and you’re wondering if Z might help. Did I get that right?”

The spirit of MI rests on two convictions:

• Autonomy — people change because they choose to

• Evocation — people already have seeds of change inside them

Of course, these principles don’t align perfectly with Christian theology. Ultimately, we don’t believe people change purely by self-determination, or that goodness simply lies dormant inside us waiting to be awakened.

But MI gives us helpful language for what Christians have always called the work of the Holy Spirit — that quiet prompting, that movement in the human heart, that nudge toward truth and honesty. MI’s language isn’t theological, but it can help us name what God is already doing in people. Which is why MI reminded me not only of Keller, but of Andrew Root.

Keller, MI, and Root Are All Saying the Same Thing

Here’s the connection:

Keller: Question their answers.
MI: Help them explore their ambivalence.
Root: Evangelism is consolation — sitting with people in their sorrow, not controlling them.

Root writes in Evangelism in the Age of Despair:

“Evangelism… is not bound in what we do but in who we can be for our neighbor and how we can be with them. Period. To console is never to control another but instead to share in their sorrow” (22).

That might as well be a paraphrase of MI.

And theologically, we’d say that the “decision to change” — the turning — is the work of the Holy Spirit. MI doesn’t replace the Spirit; it simply creates a human posture where the Spirit can be heard.

Next: What This Actually Looks Like in Real Life

This is all lovely in theory.
But how does MI-shaped evangelism look in practice?

In Part 2, I’ll walk through two real-life examples — one involving a friend considering polyamory, and the other involving youth sports as a rival religion — and show how Keller, MI, and Root converge in a pastoral conversation.