Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide? (‘Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV) gets the award for best book title in 2011 although Overcoming Adolescence is kinda catchy too.  I was introduced to this author by a friend who wanted to invite her as a speaker to one of our Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s General Assemblies.  After reading Double-Wide, I entirely approve of this choice.  I have read nothing else Zacharias has written, but her passion for following Jesus Christ in authentic Biblical faith, as opposed to merely reflecting Cultural Christianity, is refreshing.

The particular demon with which she wrestles in this volume is the Prosperity Gospel, the notion that if you love God and follow in the path of Jesus, you will get rich.  Name it and Claim it.

Zacharias’ methodology is to tell stories.  Nineteen chapters and nineteen stories.  Some are models of how Christians should live (The Sister, The Missionary, The Redhead) and some are models of how Christians should not live (The Evangelist, The Mogul).  Most of her stories are in the gray area of real life.  It’s not as simple as either “Follow Jesus and prosper” or “Follow Jesus and be poor.”  Zacharias lives with the nuances, but she is clear about lines that, when crossed, lead to idolatry.  She chronicles the narratives of these heroes and rogues with humor.  Her title is a clue.  She is obviously a folksy good ol’ girl story-teller from the Deep South who somehow lost her way and now lives in Oregon.  Her stories are a bit uneven in that her voice sometimes changes back and forth between presenting journalistic information non-judgmentally and, on the other hand, speaking passionately and with strong opinion.  Zacharias is at her best when she emphatically tells us what she believes:

• “There are a lot of folks prancing around treating the Bible like an algebra book and God like their personal banker.  They figure if they can do the equation just right, they’ll earn God’s approval and he’ll hand over the keys to a great vault in heaven.  Then that abundant life mentioned in John 10: 10 will finally be theirs.”
• “Whatever blessings we enjoy may be more the result of good geography than good theology.”
• “Having been there, I can tell you, there’s nothing intrinsically good about poverty.”
• “I may not be rich, but I lead a rich life.”
• “The Jesus-factor is a great selling point for everything from bobble-head dolls to theme parks to presidential bids.”
• “When it comes to the power of media marketing, the name of Jesus is a better brand than Coca-Cola, Aflac, and Nike combined.”
• “Money should be a vehicle, not a destination.”
• “Call it the law of affluence.  The more money one has the greater the greed temptation.”
• “Companies, even Fortune 500 companies, are made from mist.”
• “To suggest that any of the material blessings we enjoy are the result of our merit or our faithfulness is outright foolishness.”
• “Some people trust God with their whole heart, mind, body and soul, yet they still can’t afford a car or medical insurance.”
• “The Gospel of Entitlement is, at its core, a Ponzi scheme on steroids.”
• “Entitlement theology may very well be the bastard-child born from the mating of Calvinism’s strong work ethic with capitalism’s get-all-the-goods-you-can mentality.”
• “These charlatans are selling salve to the sick when salvation is what people really need to fix what ails them.”

I can’t improve on Zacharias’ own words.  I am glad she has agreed to speak to our CBFSC General Assembly on April 27, 2012 in Seneca, SC.  Y’all come.

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.

Disclaimer:  As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.”  His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review.  Quotations from the book are in italics.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff is the first fiction book I have reviewed for BookBytes. I might have chosen some deep literary novel, filled with hidden metaphors and meanings, but A Drop of the Hard Stuff is simply a whodunit. Period. Block writes very good whodunits, but he will never win a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize. He has been awarded the Edgar Grand Master Award which is the highest literary prize for the whodunit genre, given to such authors as Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, Graham Greene, and John le Carre. I read whodunits and make no apology for it. You don’t expect me to read only Old Testament theology and existential ethics, I hope.

Let me get a bit more of my defensiveness out of the way before I say why I recommend that good Christian people read A Drop of the Hard Stuff. Having been a pastor for over twenty-five years, I know how insulated, fragile and naïve some good church people can be. They know their world, the religious domain where people do not cuss, drink alcohol, commit adultery, and where they attend Sunday School and worship and Women’s Mission Society and midweek prayer service. But they do not know other worlds, and they can be easily offended when people do not dress appropriately, or swear, or do not behave according to their beloved church traditions.

I remember when I was growing up in North Augusta, we had a couple of members of Alcoholics Anonymous come to our church one night to present a program, and it was as if a couple of Martians had landed. Now that I think about it, they were probably Yankees who had imported their bad habits from the North. If people in our church were alcoholics, they hid it well.

A theme of my life for the past couple of decades has been to learn more about the worlds outside of my usual experiences, what I have called, “Worlds I know nothing about.” One of the ways I can experience these alternative universes is through reading. Reading Tales of the South Pacific or Zorba the Greek or A Passage to India are opportunities for me to visit other times and places, to expand my awareness. When you read, you discover that everyone does not think like you, talk like you, or act like you. You can experience vicarious pleasure and horror. I know some Christians who do not read fiction because it takes them to places they do not want to go. I understand that. About 100 pages of a novel about vampires are about 98 pages more than I ordinarily care to read. But, vampires are not real, and I have no need to know more about them.

On the other hand, the South Pacific and Greece and India are real places with real people, and hearing stories about those places and people helps me to understand our world.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff is about an alcoholic during his first year of sobriety. Most of us have never had that experience. The language is rough. The protagonists and antagonists are not nice people. There are murders. The reader is introduced to the world of the recovering alcoholic, the challenges, the bright spots, the low points. We hear the insider language, for example, the “geographical solution. Guy moves to California because New York is the problem. Then he moves to Alaska because California’s the problem. But he’s the problem himself, and wherever he goes, there he is.” You don’t need to be an alcoholic to understand that lots of people try out geographical solutions to their problems.

He nails the inner turmoil of some alcoholics (and many of us guilt-ridden Baptists who are not): “I’m just looking for a way for it to be my fault.”

Of course, the person trying to transform his or her life needs all the help available: “One way to avoid a slip is to stay out of slippery places.” That’s helpful.

Lawrence Block, in spite of a potentially depressing subject and main character, manages to keep the tone light: “I decided that the coffee and the Nutter Butter cookies covered enough of the four basic food groups to add up to lunch.” Matthew Scudder is the low-life hero of this particularly dark series (other titles: Eight Million Ways to Die, and A Long Line of Dead Men), but Lawrence Block also writes an almost comic series about a petty burglar who finds himself having to solve crimes to keep himself out of worse mischief.

True to the rather cynical world view of Matt Scudder, the detective in this novel, the story does not wrap us as nicely as an Agatha Christie mystery. But, neither does real life always resolve itself with a happy ending tied tightly with a big bright bow.

Read fiction. It will make you a smarter, if not a better, person.

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.  Disclaimer: As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.” His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review. Quotations from the book are in italics.

When I was growing up in North Augusta, South Carolina in the 1950’s and 60’s, the people in our church knew we were Southern Baptists, not Independent Baptists or Fundamentalists. Bob Jones University was Fundamentalist, and they believed some things differently than we did. They were against the idea of evolution, for instance. In fact, as many things as God told us Southern Baptists not to do or believe, it seemed that their list was longer. These Fundamentalist folks had strong opinions about such things as millennialism and dispensations that I don’t remember being important at all in our Southern Baptist world. We were “pan-millennialists,’ figuring it would all pan out in the end.

Rachel Held Evans grew up in that world of Independent Bible churches and Fundamentalist Bible colleges. Before Southern Baptists took a hard right theologically in the 1970’s and 80’s, these independent congregations were as different from my kind of Baptists as were the Catholics. They were our neighbors and we liked them, but they were a bit weird. Eventually, because Southern Baptists moved in their direction theologically and politically, I learned more about the beliefs of these Independent/Bible people. No wonder the secular press has a hard time figuring Christians out. Nowadays, it is sometimes hard even for insiders to distinguish between Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Inerrantists and Conservatives.

Doctrinal purity was way more important to the Independent Bible Churches than to us denominational Baptists. Most of their churches, as a result, were small. Southern Baptists, on the other hand, were marketing geniuses. We majored on evangelism, revivals, altar calls, missions, starting new churches, witnessing and church growth. We knew all the 10 year olds joining our churches would not hang around into adulthood. That is why 1000 member SBC churches averaged 250 in attendance.

The word “apologetics” was apparently hugely important in Independent Bible churches because the Bible is chock-full of verses that need explanation. The idea is that there needs to be a defense, an apology, a clarification, a justification for difficult passages. Rachel Held’s world was full of these teachings. She mentions a volume that apparently was a standard part of her church life:

“Gleason Archer’s massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible—from whether God approved of Rahab’s lie, to where Cain got his wife. Note to well-meaning apologists: it’s not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn’t even know that half of them existed when you recommended it.”

Rachel Held Evans and I did not grow up in the same world. Still, she seemed to tell my story. Less than half my age, Rachel Held Evans figured out some of the deeper questions of the Bible and faith before age thirty that I had only begun to wrestle with at age sixty.

The evolution issue that gives her book (and her blog) its title, Evolving in Monkey Town, turns out to be one of a dozen theological and ethical questions with which she wrestles. Just a few years ago, I read Darwin’s Origin of the Species for the first time ever. I thought that Darwin made his case for natural selection soundly and impressively. He did leave God out of the book, since his was a science treatise and, by then, he had become a man of little or no faith. I am sure I take medicine that was discovered or created by non-believers. What does that have to do with whether the medicine works? What does Darwin’s faith or lack of faith have to do with whether he told the truth about evolution? So, at my semi-advanced age, finally I have begun to read books about Darwin and the voyage of the HMS Beagle. Visiting the Galapagos Islands is now on my Bucket List. When I discovered Evolving in Monkey Town, I was drawn to it. Rachel Held Evans narrates a relatively brief summary of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for those who don’t know that story.

Her title comes from the small town where Rachel Held grew up, home of the famous trial in 1925 in which evolution was hotly debated between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. I incorrectly made the assumption that the book was primarily about Evan’s pilgrimage with regard to the subject of evolution. Instead, the book is a memoir of her adolescence and young adult years as she wrestled not only with the matter of evolution, but also with traditional theological hot topics such as hell and hot button topics such as homosexuality, militarism, pluralism, feminism, and even politics.

Mature beyond her years, Rachel Held Evans wrote lots of lines I wish I had written.

• “The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change.”
• “The ability of the body of Christ to change—to grow fins when it needs to swim and wings when it needs to fly—has preserved it for over two thousand years.”
• “I think I must have gotten my bleeding heart from her [my mother], which, combined with my father’s cautious idealism, accidentally made me into a liberal.”
• “Salvation wasn’t just about being a Christian; it was about being the right kind of Christian.”
• “The evangelical community has a curious reputation for resisting cultural movements before suddenly deciding to embrace them.”
• “Stubborn isolationism and anti-intellectualism is an outdated and ineffective strategy for expanding the kingdom.”
• “We criticized relativists for picking and choosing truth, while our own biblical approach required some selectivity of its own.”
• “In Sunday school, they always made hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims.”
• “The space between doubting God’s goodness and doubting his existence is not as wide as you might think.”
• “I think you officially grow up the moment you realize you are capable of causing your parents pain.”
• “Christians who claim to take the Bible literally or who say they obey all of his teachings without ‘picking and choosing’ are either liars or homeless.”
• “You’d have to be crazy not to have second thoughts about following Jesus.”
• “Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.”
• “As soon as you think you’ve got God figured out, you can bet on the fact that you’re wrong.”
• “In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.”
• “Apologists like to say that following Christ shouldn’t mean checking our brains at the door. Perhaps it shouldn’t mean checking our hearts either.”
• “We are not saved by information.”
• “Our way is to make someone pay with blood; his way is to bleed.”
• “Perhaps being a Christian isn’t about experiencing the kingdom of heaven someday but about experiencing the kingdom of heaven every day.”
• “The idea of a single comprehensive biblical worldview to which all Christians can agree is a myth.”
• “For as long as I can remember, the Bible has been compared to a weapon, and for as long as I can remember, it has been used as one.”
• “The Bible is by far the most fascinating, beautiful, challenging, and frustrating work of literature I’ve ever encountered.”
• “Our interpretations are colored by our culture, our community, our presuppositions, our experience, our language, our education, our emotions, our intellect, our desires, and our biases. My worldview affects how I read the Bible as much as the Bible affects my worldview.”
• “Maybe God wants us to have these discussions because faith isn’t just about being right; it’s about being a part of a community.”
• “Most weren’t looking for a faith that provided all the answers; they were looking for one in which they were free to ask questions.”
• “It’s not up to some politician to represent my Christian values to the world; it’s up to me.”
• “Our best answers in defense of Christianity have always been useless clanging symbols unless our lives have inspired the world to ask.”

I loved this book. I like this woman. She can think. She can write. I like the way she has evolved. May I evolve in my faith as well!

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.  Disclaimer: As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.” His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review. Quotations from the book are in italics.

Union Square Press, copyright 2009, 244 pages

Examined, Analyzed & Reviewed* by Marion Aldridge,

Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina

Contact at marion@cbfofsc.org or 803-779-1888

Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island ought to be required reading for every man or woman going to work for the Peace Corps, WorldTeach or any Christian mission organization. While Rudiak-Gould does not claim to be a spiritual person in any way, his insights regarding life on Ujae in the tropical Marshall Islands are How-to-be-a-Good-Guest-in-Someone-Else’s-Culture 101.

Let’s start with the fact that Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island is an intriguing read. In the best tradition of travel literature, Rudiak-Gould goes on a Quest. He tells an enthralling story about spending a school year (2003-04) as the only white man on a remote archipelago in the South Pacific. He was sent there by WorldTeach, one of the hundreds of do-good organizations attempting to make our world a better place, whatever that means.

Part of the charm of Rudiak-Gould’s book is that he is honest about how much good he may or may not have done during his year on the island: “Instead of becoming a first-rate Marshall Islands, the country was becoming a second-rate America.” After all, exactly why do Ujaens need to learn English? Does introducing American culture and values really improve their lives? He wrestled with these issues candidly. As any culturally sensitive missionary can attest, Rudiak-Gould confesses that his sojourn probably changed him at least as much as it changed them. However, he seems not to be sure than anyone has changed much. Based on comments he makes in the last chapter, I suspect the author underestimates how transformative the year was for him. Indeed, Rudiak-Gould is now a graduate student in cultural anthropology with obvious skills in linguistics. He has written another book (a free PDF download!) called, Practical Marshallese.

Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island has adventure, humor and irony. “The four Marshallese food groups appeared to be starch, starch, starch and starch.” On this insignificant island, the new teacher achieves instant celebrity. “It had not occurred to me that what I might crave more than anything else on this far-flung islet was solitude… anonymity was a luxury. It was a godsend to be ignored.”

“I had prepared myself to forego modern luxuries, only to find that the true sacrifice was primal needs: privacy, intimacy, understanding, control.”

“I grew accustomed to the island’s isolation and found that I enjoyed the lack of newspapers… My moral energy was no longer sapped by the scaremongers and guilt-trippers—the thousand media outlets giving me daily updates on what I ought to be terrified of and outraged by.”

“One of the great joys of being visited after long isolation in a foreign culture is the realization that, as clueless as you are in this foreign home, you are not as clueless as they are.”

“For the previous sixteen years I had been a student, assigned to think but never to do. Now, finally, I was working with my hands instead of my mind.”

Rudiak-Gould has two conclusions to his book. The second, a disappointing treatise, doesn’t fit the spirit of the travel narrative, the quest. Rudiak-Gould returns to Ujae three years after his original assignment for a three-month visit. The Epilogue of Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island tracks the issue of global warming as it affects such places as the Marshall Islands and Ujae. Interesting. Worth reading. But it’s a clunky finish to an otherwise wonderful volume.

The actual conclusion, the better ending prior to the Epilogue, is a final uplifting chapter on what the author learned about the people with whom he worked for a year. While he occasionally drifted, throughout the year and the book, from irony to cynicism, he ends his tenure in a good place. He learns from the Ujaens and they learn from him: “Discarding my binoculars in favor of a mirror, it occurred to me that my own culture was just as brilliant, exasperating, delightful and paradoxical as theirs.”

*My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians. 

Disclaimer: As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers, missionaries, chaplains and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.” His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review. Quotations from the book are in italics.

Random House, copyright 2010, 190 pages

Examined, Analyzed and & Reviewed by Marion Aldridge,

Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina

Contact at marion@cbfofsc.org or 803-779-1888

Sometimes I am tempted to recommend a book after reading a few pages or a few chapters, but that is always a dangerous practice. With Let’s Take the Long Way Home, I was tempted to post on Facebook my enchantment with this memoir after the first sentence: “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.” After 20 pages, I was still reading and enraptured. After 75 pages, I had to restrain myself from pre-writing my review. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a truly lovely essay. I finished the book, and I am glad I did. Caldwell spoke to me, deliciously and deeply.

My best friend died last year, so when I heard a radio interview with Gail Caldwell, I knew I wanted to buy this book, and attempt to read it. “Attempt” is the correct word because one person’s words do not necessarily describe another person’s pain or experience. I wasn’t sure whether this volume would resonate with me and my loss, or not. Who knows? Would she be too serious or too glib? Would she be too melodramatic or too full of answers? Would she be a cynic or despairing?

It turned out that I was safe in Gail Caldwell’s hands. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Caldwell tells the story of her friendship and loss with elegance, compassion, empathy and humor. Plus, it’s a dog story! She and her friend, Caroline Knapp, got to know each other, at least in part, because of their love of dogs. Also, they were both sober alcoholics. Caroline had already written her own memoir: Drinking: A Love Story. They were both successful authors. Those were some of the reasons for their bonding.

Caldwell writes of her own alcoholism, “I used to think this was an awful story—shameful and dramatic and sad. I don’t think so anymore. Now I just think it’s human, which is why I decided to tell it.”

The reasons that readers will bond are different. I am not sure I have ever read a book about best friends. Movies and books are romance-dominated. Or, they are historically intriguing. This volume promises none of that. Caldwell writes carefully and lovingly about her best friend, who died.

“For years we had played the easy, daily game of catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and the return. Now I was in the field without her: one glove, no game. Grief is what tells you who you are alone.”

“I was learning firsthand that nurturance and strength were each the lesser without the other.”

“Writing about a friendship that flourished within the realm of connection and routine has all the components of trying to capture air.”

“It took me years to grasp that grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not its opposite.”

“The best and hardest thing to do was keep my mouth shut and listen.”

“Caroline’s death was a vacancy in the heart, a place I neither could nor wished to fill.”

“The map of one’s life is made up of luck and circumstance and determination.”

“Dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it.”

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

The final sentence of the book: “Then I got back in the car and kept on going.”

When writing these occasional BookBytes book reviews for what I assume to be a primarily Baptist/Christian audience, I always feel the need to make a disclaimer for the dear sweet people who were raised, as I was, on approved Baptist literature from the Sunday School Board. I do not limit my reading or my reviews to people who think exactly as I think. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love and hoped to learn something from it, and did. I like the integrity of Gail Caldwell who describes herself as “poised on the line between Knowing and Not Knowing, between what seemed to me the arrogance of religious certainty and the despair of a godless world.” In the last few pages of her memoir, Caldwell tells us her bucket list for the remainder of her own life. She wants to “find God.” I find that hopeful. Since she has moved away from “the despair of a godless world,” maybe it would do me and my religious kin some good to move a bit from “the arrogance of religious certainty.”

Maybe we could meet halfway and learn something from one another, even about death.

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.

Disclaimer: As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.” His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review. Quotations from the book are in italics.

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You

By John Maxwell

Published by Thomas Nelson, copyright 2007, 290 pages

Examined, Analyzed and & Reviewed by Marion Aldridge, Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina

Contact at marion@cbfofsc.org or 803-779-1888

The organization which employs me, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina, has a love-hate relationship with leadership, authority and power.  We came into being, at least in part, because of the autocratic control of too many powerful pastors and denominational kingpins.

Yet, no church or organization can be successful without leadership of some sort.  Being reactive, as most human organizations are, CBF has endured some “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”  “We don’t want that model for leadership or that kind of leadership” became, unfortunately, “We don’t want or trust leadership of any kind.”

There will always be leaders and there will always be those who resist leadership.  John C. Maxwell has written a fine volume for those who want to provide good and positive leadership.  Maxwell has been a pastor of a successful, growing and thriving church, and he has managed a productive and flourishing business.  He is a popular writer on the subject of leadership.

The first thing I like about this book is that Maxwell contends that there are twenty-one important laws of leadership, not a single magic bullet that allows lazy people to achieve what they hope to accomplish.  “Leadership,” Maxwell writes, ”requires the ability to do more than one thing well.”  He also insists on a paradoxical reality, “No one does all 21 laws well.”  Thus, in order for a person, a church, or a corporation to accomplish what they want to accomplish, more than one person is required, and when more than one person is involved in a task, a leader or team captain or an organizer will likely emerge.  A non-leader can accomplish a lot alone, or as a participating member of a team, but more will be done more often when all the members of the team pull in the same direction.  Even if everyone in the group has the same vision and dreams, it is axiomatic that they will choose a lead teacher, a skipper, a president, a convener, a coach.

Every configuration of people has many people who could lead if they had the patience, the courage, the competence, if they trusted in their own intuition, if they had the experience, emotional strength, people skills, discipline, and sacrificial spirit required.  But not everyone in every organization has that skill set!  So leaders are needed.

I did not agree with every word of Maxwell’s volume.  I don’t like some of the things he wrote.  But this is his book, not mine.  As is my habit, I filled the margins with arguments, nuances, challenges, and other questions I have.  He tends to speak in hyperbole and to use universal language:  nobody, always, everyone.   And I wish he had more generously used gender-inclusive language.  He could have reduced his observations to 10 laws or expanded them to 50, but these are his opinions based on a lifetime of experience.   Maybe you would disagree with every word of “The 21 Irrefutable Laws.”   I would suggest you write your own book:  “Why I Don’t Like Leaders!”  Maybe the nay-sayers, the grumblers, the malcontents and whiners of the world would rally around you.  But if that happened, they might vote to make you their leader!

“People don’t at first follow worthy causes.  They follow worthy leaders who promote causes they can believe in.”

“Leaders are stewards of the vision.”

“When talented teams don’t win, examine the leadership.”

“Leadership is about influencing people to follow, while management focuses on maintaining systems and processes.”

“As soon as they no longer believe you can deliver, they will stop listening and following.”

“There is an old saying: champions don’t become champions in the ring—they are merely recognized there.”

“No matter how much you learn from the past, it will never tell you all that you need to know for the present.”

“Trust is like change in a leader’s pocket.  Each time you make good leadership decisions, you earn more change.  Each time you make poor decisions, you pay out some of your change to the people.”

“Whenever you lead people, it’s as if they consent to take a journey with you.”

“Often the best leaders sense it first and find data to explain it later.”

“It’s easier to damage an organization than it is to build one.”

“Nobody does anything great alone.”

“Think of any highly effective leader, and you will find someone who surrounds himself with a strong inner circle.”

“A good coach will call a time out.”

“If you focus your attention on the activities that rank in the top 20 percent in terms of importance, you will have an 80 percent return on your effort.”

“Leaders should get out of their comfort zone but stay in their strength zone.”

“The problem for leaders comes when they think they have earned the right to stop making sacrifices.  But in leadership, sacrifice is an ongoing process, not a one-time payment.”

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.

Disclaimer:  As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.”  His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review.  Quotations from the book are in italics.

Baker Books, Publisher, copyright 2008, 176 pages

Examined, Analyzed and & Reviewed by Marion Aldridge, Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina
Contact at marion@cbfofsc.org or 803-779-1888

“The computer, opening up as it does, the whole of humankind’s bank of collective information, enables the priesthood of all believers in ways the Reformation could never have envisioned.  It also, however, opens up all that information to anybody, without the traditional restraints of vetting or jurying, without the controls of informed, credentialed access; and without the grace of mentoring.  It even opens up with equal élan the world’s bank of dis-information.”

This is one of those “important” books with which professional clergy ought to be familiar.  It is a short book and an easy read.  The first part of Phyllis Tickle’s thesis is that every 500 years (approximately) the church has a “rummage sale,” and reinvents itself.  Much is added, much is thrown away, and the resulting church looks a lot different than it did before.  The second part of her thesis is that we are in one of those periodic changes, one which she calls “The Great Emergence.”  She includes brief reviews of many of the influences on modern Christianity, from Pentecostalism and the African-American religious tradition, to Alcoholics Anonymous, to Buddhism.

“Always without fail, the thing that gets lost early in the process of a reconfiguration is any clear and general understanding of who or what is to be used as the arbitrator of correct belief, action and control.”

“The concurrence of the Great Emergence with a renewed, bellicose engagement with Islam is par for the course; and then, as now, the hands on both sides were and are equally bloody.”

“Buddhism can insinuate itself, quite innocently even, into the practice of almost any institutionalized religion without abrasion or apparent conflict for that religion’s faithful.”

“American Christians—and American Jews with them—rushed like the subjectively starving people they were toward the feast of Asian spiritual expertise and experience.”

“The Great Emergence is not limited to the Western world in its expectations, expressions or exercise.”

“For the emergent, as he or she will be quick to say, the Virgin birth is so beautiful that it has to be true, whether it happened or not.”

Disclaimer:  As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.”  His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review.  Quotations from the book are in italics.

I don’t remember when I have valued a book as much as I have McLaren’s post-modern classic, A New Kind of Christian.  And I don’t even like the word “post-modern”!  On the recommendation of friends I respect, I bought the volume in 2004, but after reading a few pages, I put it down, turned off by the literary device used by the author of having two fictional characters in conversation.  It was a bit too much (at least so I thought at the time) like Lyle Schaller.  It felt gimmicky.  I didn’t pick up the book again until December of 2009, when I finally returned to it on the advice of many friends.

My perseverance was rewarded.  I have become so enamored with McLaren that I flew to Boston to hear him in person.  He is the real deal.  His spirit is gentle and congenial, Christian in every pore.   His faith is deep.  He is intelligent and perceptive.  He appears to be interested in the Kingdom of God coming on earth!  What an idea for a Christian!

Of course, he is despised by the keepers of Orthodoxy because he resists bowing to doctrines and dogmas instead of to Jesus.   A New Kind of Christian received the Christianity Today “Award of Merit” at the time of its publication, but, McLaren probably would not be allowed to lead in silent prayer at an Evangelical Convention these days.

The challenge for McLaren and people who value what he has to say (including me!) is to move beyond the “deconstruction” of twentieth-century (modern) Christianity and to reconstruct a faith and a church that works today.  An old paradigm is collapsing.  This book is not about podcasts and megachurches.  It is about an authentic desire by many younger adults to live more like Jesus than they perceive that my generation did.  It is a less institutional Christianity.  No wonder denominations are shrinking!  As I read McLaren, he is telling the story of my faith journey.  We were taught much in the church of my childhood and adolescence that I simply no longer believe.  We were given thorough instruction about whom and what we should fear:  Catholics, blacks, homosexuals, pacifists, liberals, alcoholics, Muslims, evolutionists, aggressive women, fanatics, and parachurch organizations (that, by the way, is my list, not McLaren’s).  The question for re-building a more positive and more biblical faith is, “What do I now believe?”  McLaren and I end up with answers that are very unsatisfactory to the gatekeepers of orthodoxy and tradition:  Follow Jesus, Love God, Love your Neighbors.

Here are some of the things he says in this volume:

• “I realize, as I read and reread the Bible, that many passages don’t fit any of the theological systems I have inherited or adapted.”
• “There really isn’t such a thing as the Christian worldview.”
• “If there is a real, living, active, relevant desire of God and wisdom from God that needs to be brought to bear on our concrete life situation, then both sides had better move to the edge of their seats, start praying, start listening to each other, and start reading the Bible in fresh ways for all the new wisdom they can mine from it.”
• “Think of a math book…  Is it valuable because it has the answers in the back?  No, it’s valuable because by working through it, by doing the problems, by struggling with it, you become a wiser person, a person capable of solving problems.”
• “I don’t think it’s our business to prognosticate the eternal destinies of anyone else.”
• “It’s as if we have taken what is for Jesus a starting line and turned it into a finish line.”
• “Church doesn’t exist for the benefit of its members.  It exists to equip its members for the benefit of the world.”

My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians.

Disclaimer:  As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.”  His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review.  Quotations from the book are in italics.

“I would argue that the shift that needs to be made is from civic faith (or its gone-to-seed expressions of church as club) to the “business” of human transformation… What I am talking about is ‘conversion’: turning around, being born anew, changed, made new, given a new heart and a new mind as we become followers of the One who makes all things new.”

I wish that Anthony B. Robinson were a more engaging and readable author, because he says some important things for moderate to liberal mainline congregations, including Cooperative Baptist churches.  I chose to read Robinson’s volume instead of many others on the same topic for two reasons:

1. He is a pastor, someone who lives on the front-line of the church instead of speaking from the comfort of his seminary or denominational office.
2. He embraces his justice-oriented, grace-filled theology!  He does not irritate theologically and ethically moderate readers by equating the gospel with conservative political, ethical or religious values.

Robinson effectively challenges the theologically lazy habits of many/most liberal clergy who are so afraid of evangelism and personal transformation that they turn their churches into do-good civic clubs which could function just as effectively without the adjective “Christian.”  Transformation of congregations will not happen because of adding new programs learned from the latest conference of megachurch pastors.  Nothing less than the Gospel will do.  He talks about the erosion of cultural props which mainline congregations could once count on to keep the numbers up, bodies in the pew, and budgets met.  One of his most haunting stories is of the campaign by the Elmhurst, Illinois, Jaycees in the 1950’s to “Put Christ Back in Christmas.”  Eight thousand Boy Scouts were enlisted to distribute pamphlets door-to-door to promote the crusade.  Can you imagine that happening in 2010?

Robinson tells a funny story from mid-twentieth century about when a Jewish man received the award for “best Christian” in the town.

In the culture that many of us were born into, the Christian church could “cherry pick” the best and the brightest for leadership in the local congregation, or for bishops and area superintendents.  Now, the top performers of our young adults are likely to work for Big Money, or for Big Politics, or they may have joined the Buddhists or married a Jew, or they may have come out of their gay closet.  Some simply decided not to be religious, not an option 50 years ago.  You had to choose a church for weddings and funerals in the same way you chose a bank or a doctor or a hardware store when you moved to a new town.

Christianity is no longer the default religion of America, not even its chaplain! “the official religion of our society.”  The fading of old words such as “Duty” and the emergence of new words such as “Pluralism” have changed the landscape of faith.   No longer do Baptists or Methodists have a “guaranteed market share” of the new people moving into their communities.

Robinson quotes Walter Brueggemann who said, “The world for which you have been so carefully preparing is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.”

Congregational victories will not be won easily or cheaply in this new ecclesiastical environment.  The Church of Jesus Christ will have to be more than a fellowship of the polite!  Churches that merely promote charity instead of justice are not encouraging personal transformation and, according to Robinson, will ultimately fail.

I like this book.  It is honest.  It is real.  It is gospel.  And it is hopeful.

• “In the 1960s and 70s, the mainline Protestant denominations were disestablished—sometimes by legal means, such as the outlawing of prayer in public schools, but more often by shifts in the culture and its ethos.”
• “The capacity for a gospel critique of Western culture was severely diminished.”
• “It was difficult to tell any difference between a Christian way of life and the American and middle-class way of life.”
• “Our purpose is to change lives.”
• “Ernie Campbell offered the suggestion that instead of trying to plan the extraordinary, we do well to “energize the ordinary.”
• “Being and becoming Christian is more than an exercise in accumulating information.”
• “Christian mission, while never less than sharing and sending money, is always more than that.”

Disclaimer:  As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.”  His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review.  Quotations from the book are in italics.

I have never been a Marcus Borg fan.  I have read some of what he has written and he seems to be saying the same ol’ predictable “liberal” stuff, whatever that means.  He is widely known as a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who attempt to determine (by vote) what Jesus actually said and did.  He and the Jesus Seminar folks work in the tradition of the Quest for the Historical Jesus.  My seminary professors provided me a fine education, including a course on that very subject.  I knew all these options, now promoted by Borg, were out there, and, like most people, agreed with some of it and disagreed with some of it.  Other people, I realize, did not have a seminary education.  They became college-educated mature adults, having been in so-called Bible study classes all of their lives, yet they never heard any options other than what they learned as children.

Marcus Borg, like Thomas, has the gift of Doubting.

Borg attempts to rescue these naïve Christians from their childish beliefs.  He generally disparages, for instance, the idea of supernatural events, the miracles, including even the “Big Ones,” the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, though he seems willing to redefine the resurrection in such a way that any person can affirm it.  Sometimes, it seems that Borg goes out of his way to defend the defeated clichés of 20^th century liberalism.

I do not want to misrepresent him, but my complaint with Borg is that caricaturing conservatives is what he has done throughout his career.  (For the record, I think of myself as a moderate theologically and ethically.  Titus 2: 2 tells me to be “temperate,” and I have no need to argue with that.)

In this volume, for the first time, I began to appreciate Borg’s spirit.  He has unfortunately been a victim of his own press, a kind of “what he writes and says speaks so loudly we can’t see past the inflammatory words to the compassionate person underneath.”   In fact, in this volume, Borg makes a serious effort to find a more moderate or middle way between what he calls the “hard” extremes of most positions (such as Biblical literalism) and the “soft” possibilities. I am grateful for that.  He illustrates by referring to the idea of Papal infallibility.  Some people (both in the Catholic church and outside of it) may think that Papal infallibility means that everything the Pope says is infallible.  No, No, No, a thousand times No.  Under very specific and very limited circumstances, Catholic dogma says the Pope is infallible.  Thus we have hardliners who believe that the Pope’s preference in sodas should be universally adopted (They believe he is infallible in every detail.) and the “softer” interpreters of Papal infallibility who understand his occasions of infallibility are severely limited.  Of course, there are those of us who do not think he is infallible at all.

Borg is saying that when we discuss Jesus and the Bible, let’s be fair.  There are multiple options available for us as believers.  Not everyone has to toe the same line.  He thinks that the more moderated or the more liberal positions have been unfairly maligned by the Biblical hardliners and fundamentalists.

I disagree with Borg a lot!  Sometimes I think he is as “stuck” as those people he opposes.  But if the Apostles Creed said what Jesus’ Creed said, to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, and also to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, then I suspect we would be confessing pretty much the same thing.

By the way, by the end of the book, it is obvious that Borg believes in miracles, though he prefers (for only God knows what reasons) to call them paranormal experiences.

The leap from childhood Christianity in which we believed every parable in the Bible was a True Factual Story That Can Be Scientifically Verified to a more nuanced adult faith is a difficult one.  As a pastor, I learned quickly that you cannot say something that people do not want to hear in an inoffensive or nonthreatening way.  If all those hundreds of thousands of animals did not get into the ark, does that make every word of the entire Bible a lie???  That is the reasoning I have heard all my life.  Either/Or.  Borg is saying what many people do not want to hear, so he must be a heretic???  Right?  If the choice is believing Mom or Borg, usually, Mom will win.

In The Heart of Christianity, Borg gives explicit witness to the Christian faith, “We need to be born again… To be born again involves dying to the false self, to that identity, to that way of being, and to born into an identity centered in the Spirit, in Christ, in God.” I know that sentence will never be Christian enough for some people, but that confession of faith works for me.  I hope it works for God, too, or else I am in trouble.  I have lived in the Christian church long enough to know I will never get my faith or my ethics as right as some people want me to get them.

I also like his commitment to the church:  “In my judgment, the single most important practice is to be part of a congregation that nourishes you even as it stretches you.” Some people haven’t been stretched in decades.

I would not have bought this book.  It was given to me by a dear friend whose opinion I value.  I have no idea what God thinks about the heart of Marcus Borg, but I do think Borg has an insight into the heart of Christianity.

Disclaimer:  As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.”  His goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians. His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review.  Quotations from the book are in italics.