1 Theological Giants and the Evangelistic Dimension of Mission Thorsten Prill Keywords: baptism, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Christendom, Christian teaching, church, community, discipleship, election, ethics, evangelism, evangelism process, gospel, kingdom of God, liberation, mission, Moltmann, personal faith, pneumatology, postmodern age, renewal, repentance, salvation, spiritual gifts, Tillich, universalism, verbal proclamation Over the last twenty years evangelism has seen a revival in some mainstream Western European churches. During the 1990s churches in Britain declared a Decade of Evangelism and at the end of the last century the Protestant Church in Germany started to have a fresh look at the evangelistic task of the church. In Germany a church sponsored research institute for evangelism was founded at the University of Greifswald, while in Britain a variety of new evangelistic methods were developed and initiatives launched to reach out to people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a postmodern post-Christian age. Among these are not only process evangelism courses, such as Alpha, Emmaus or Christianity Explored, but also the planting of new forms of church. However, Malan Nel from the Centre of Contextual Ministry at the University of Pretoria is also right when he writes that in many parts of the Christian church evangelism has never been popular both as a concept and a ministry. Nel suggests two reasons for this: Firstly, the way evangelism is conducted; and secondly, a ‘lack of real theological reflection on Evangelism from a holistic missional perspective’. 1 The purpose of this paper is to test Nel’s second claim by investigating four influential 20 th century theologians and their understanding of mission and evangelism. These theological giants are: Karl Barth (1886-1968), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Paul Tillich (1886-1965), and Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926).