I enjoy reading thematically—following a certain theme through a variety of books. Recently I noticed that some of today’s most popular Christian mega-pastor authors had released new books and I thought I’d work my way through that list. The list includes new titles by Francis Chan, Matt Chandler, Mark Driscoll, James MacDonald and David Platt. Not surprisingly, the books and their authors are all tightly connected. Driscoll and MacDonald endorse Chandler’s book; Chandler and Driscoll return the favor in MacDonald’s Vertical Church. Chan’s book has a foreword by Platt and Platt’s book has a foreword by Chan. And so on.

Having reviewed MacDonald’s Vertical Church, I turned my attention to Chandler’s Creature of the Word (co-authored with Josh Patterson and Eric Geiger). Written primarily for pastors and church leaders, but applicable to all Christians, this is a book that looks to gospel-centrality, a very popular theme today. It calls Christians to “view the essence of the gospel as the foundation for all of ministry.” After all, there is a huge difference between “knowing the gospel and being consumed by the gospel, being defined by the gospel, and being driven by the gospel.” Chandler wants the reader to “start a fresh journey into the heart of the gospel, prepared to be newly amazed by it, resolved to let its principles begin shaping how our churches worship, serve, and operate.”

Rather than focusing on the individual, he focuses on the gospel in the local church, calling the church “a Creature of the Word.” “Yes, a Creature. She is alive. A living, breathing movement of God’s people redeemed and placed together in a collective community. But she is not alive in her own doing. She has been made alive by the Word. God spoke her into existence through the declaration of the gospel—His righteousness on our behalf.”

The book is divided into two parts. In the first half Chandler looks at what the gospel does to the hearts of people, to their relationships, and how they understand their position and purpose. He shows that this Creature worships, forms community, serves, and multiplies. In the second half he shows what a Jesus-centered church culture looks like, how it is formed and how it is sustained.

Creature of the Word is a good book—a really good book. I enjoyed it from beginning to end and benefited from reading it. Having said that, it is not a book with a lot of original thought, but one that helpfully collects the best of what others have written about being gospel-centered and presents it to a new audience. Those who have done a lot of reading will probably find that they recognize the inspirations in many of the chapters. So, for example, a chapter on ministry to children and teens has Chandler channeling Tedd Tripp and William Farley (though he refers to him as Chris Farley. The thought of Chris Farley paraphrasing a Thomas Chalmers sermon titled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” is pretty funny). And this is well and good. Those men have done great work on the importance of the gospel in parenting and there isn’t a compelling reason to attempt to write something new and original.

Harvest Bible Fellowship is a network of churches on the move. It seems as if every week brings a report of a new church plant somewhere in the world. From what I have observed locally, these are solid churches whose pastors love God's Word and where people are being transformed by the gospel. James MacDonald is the founder of this movement and he refers to them as “vertical” churches. What MacDonald wants is for every local church to be a place where people have "a weekly experience with the manifest glory of God." The local church is to be the one place where people experience what they can experience nowhere else.

Vertical Church is part manifesto and part instructional guide and is one of those unusual and unfortunate books that combines genuine strengths with disappointing weaknesses. The first half of the book is strong and provides a biblical basis for a vertical model of the local church; the second half is far weaker in explaining how to create one.

The Strengths of Vertical Church

Vertical Church has many notable strengths. The discussion of verticality is very helpful and provoked the pastor in me to think carefully about the worship services at my church and the role of church leaders in providing an experience of God's glory and majesty. Our role is not simply to check off a list of boxes--singing, Bible-reading, preaching, prayer--but to lead people in an encounter with the living God. MacDonald's desire to glorify God in every facet of the church's life is laudable and challenging. He shares a great deal of wisdom earned through many years of ministry while critiquing both the church growth movement and those traditional churches that don't care to grow at all.

A chapter on preaching shows why expositional preaching is at the heart of the Harvest movement and why it needs to remain there. A chapter on evangelism is a call to action despite fear and discomfort. There are many parts of the book that I highlighted and many concepts and even sentences that I need to explore in more detail in the future. Really, Vertical Church would have made an excellent 120-page book.

The Weaknesses of Vertical Church

But it's not a 120-page book. Rather, it is a little bit over 300 pages and as it transitions from the "why" to the "how" of vertical church, weaknesses begin to outweigh strengths. A condescending and sarcastic tone begins to creep in while the joyful humility of reveling in God's glory is supplanted by overbearing and overly-prescriptive instruction. Here MacDonald often relies often on false dichotomies, setting two possibilities in unfair opposition to one another. This is seen clearest in chapters dealing with music and prayer.

Another book about the gospel. We have seen the release of all kinds of books about the gospel lately—books defining the gospel, books preaching the gospel, books sharing how to live with the gospel at the center of life. Is there any room for another one? Absolutely there is, and Trevin Wax has delivered it in the form of Counterfeit Gospels: Discovering the Good News in a World of False Hope.

Wax is convinced there is crisis in the church today, a crisis created by counterfeit gospels—gospels that appear to have elements of the real thing, but which are, at heart, fraudulent. This crisis has 3 elements:

• A lack of gospel confidence - we have lost our faith in the power of the gospel to change life.
• A lack of gospel clarity - we are unsure of what the gospel message truly is.
• A lack of gospel community - devoid of confidence and clarity, our churches have begun to lose their distinctiveness. We’ve lost what makes the church the church.

Against this crisis Wax proposes that the gospel is like a three-legged stool with each leg absolutely critical to a proper understanding of the message; without each of the 3 legs, the stool cannot stand. First, there is the gospel story, which is the overarching grand narrative we find in the Scriptures. Second, there is the gospel announcement, which is that Christ died for our sins and was raised. And third, there is the gospel community, the people who herald the grace of God and spread the good news of what Christ has done.

There are some books that find their strength in saying new things—the original thoughts or perspectives we’ve simply never heard before. There are other books that find their strength in saying old things—things we’ve heard before but just need to hear again, whether that’s because of lack of faith or lack of memory or just because every time something is said it’s said in a different way. Jonathan Leeman’s new book Reverberation: How God’s Word Brings Light, Freedom, and Action to His People falls squarely into the latter category for me. I have heard it before. And I desperately needed to hear it again.

Reverberation is a book about God’s Word. It’s that simple. But maybe it’s not that simple. Churches and Christians are looking all over the place to find a source of light, freedom and action, to find whatever it is that will stir people, fire them up, lead them to do great things. Some try the latest and greatest programs; some work on dynamic small group ministries; some work toward the best worship by the best musicians; some look to justice. In the midst of all these options Leeman sets the Word of God, the one thing Jesus declared to be necessary in the life of the church and the one thing necessary for the growth of the church. While none of these other things are necessarily wrong, none of them can be central; rather, each must flow out of the centrality of the Word.

“One thing is necessary in our churches—hearing God’s Word through preaching, reading, singing, and praying.” When the Word is central it echoes out into all parts of the life of the church. “Picture it this way. The evangelist or preacher open his mouth and utters a word, God’s Word. But the Word doesn’t sound just once. It echoes or reverberates. It reverberates through the church’s music and prayers. It reverberates through the conversations between elders and members, members and guests, older Christians and younger ones. God’s words bounce around the life of the church, like the metal ball in the pinball machine.” But that is not all. It also reverberates into people’s homes and workplaces, their families and neighborhoods, out onto Facebook and blogs and anywhere else these people go. And what Reverberation seeks to do is to follow this path.

I have received quite a few books about church planting over the past few months. Among the more interesting have been Church Planting Is for Wimps by Mike McKinley and Discovering Church Planting by J.D. Payne. Fresh off the press is Darrin Patrick’s Church Planter: The Man, The Message, The Mission. Patrick is vice president of the Acts29 Church Planting Network and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis. From those vantage points he has seen church planting up-close and personal while also assisting and guiding many other pastors as they have sought to plant churches. He is well-qualified to write about this subject. His book comes highly recommended and is endorsed by a long list of notables.

The book’s contents are divided into three sections: The Man, The Message and The Mission (as you may have guessed). In the first part Patrick describes the kind of man God is looking for, saying that he is to be rescued, called, qualified, dependent, skilled, shepherding and determined. This gives a well-rounded understanding of the kind of character that should mark a man who seeks to step out and plant a church. He covers the biblical qualifications as laid out particularly in the pastoral epistles, but he goes further as well, looking to practical considerations along with other spiritual qualifications.

The Trellis and the Vine was 2009’s surprise hit (read my review). Written by Collin Marshall and Tony Payne, the book described a ministry mind-shift that the authors assured the reader could change everything—everything related to ministry, that is. The book stood upon its simple metaphor of a trellis, an apparatus used to support something, and of a vine, the object that is supported by that trellis. The trellis referred to the administrative work within a church, those tasks that, though important, are not actually directly related to discipling people. Vine work, on the other hand, is those tasks of working with the vine, drawing people into the kingdom through evangelism and then training them to grow in their knowledge of God and their obedience to him. Though the book may not have been groundbreaking, it somehow managed to pull together a lot of ideas and collect them all within this simple metaphor. It was a powerful and effective combination and it sold very well. Even better, it impacted pastors and those engaged in gospel work, helping them better understand the task the Lord has given them.

The follow-up to The Trellis and the Vine is called The Archer and the Arrow. While it comes from Matthias Media, the same publisher, it is written by different authors: Phillip Jensen and Paul Grimmond. Though the volume is co-authored, its purpose is primarily to make Jensen’s “wisdom about preaching available to a wider audience--wisdom acquired over almost four decades of faithful biblical ministry.” I do not know if the book was conceived as a follow-up to The Trellis and the Vine or not, but regardless, it works as a sequel. Where the first book focused on ministry through a wide lens, the second focuses on the essential heart of ministry—the preaching of the gospel.

The book is framed around what the authors describe as the preacher’s mission statement: “My aim is to preach the gospel by prayerfully expounding the Bible to the people God has given me to love.” They break this statement into its component parts and expound it over the course of several chapters. This takes them from the theoretical to the practical, from the purpose of preaching a sermon to the actual delivery of it.

Let me say a word about the book’s title. The metaphor speaks of the archer (the preacher) and the arrow, which is the sermon. Firing the arrow corresponds to the act of preaching. The arrow itself is formed by three parts—the head, the shaft and the feathers. “At the point of the arrowhead is the gospel, the declaration that Jesus is the Lord and Saviour. The cutting edges of the arrowhead are the implications of that reality. This can include things like ethics, philosophy, apologetics, personal godliness and kategoria.” The shaft corresponds to the exegesis of the passage around which a sermon is formed. And the feathers “correspond to issues like systematic theology, biblical theology, church history, philosophy and the like. The feathers are like the big categories of thought that tie the whole message of the Bible together.”

It is my habit to post some kind of an original article on Monday and then a book review on Tuesday. This week I am going to reverse the order since the book review in some ways feeds into what I would like to say tomorrow. So bear with me.

I have not read too many of John Stott’s books over the years. Still, in writing sermons and writing my own books there have been several times that I’ve relied on his commentaries and have always found them very useful—biblically accurate and full of wise points of application. Of course, I’ve often referred to what may well prove his greatest book, The Cross of Christ and I know of people who were saved after reading his book Basic Christianity (among whom are Derek Thomas). Though Stott had a couple of unfortunate aspects to his ministry (the most notable of which was some sympathy for the doctrine of annihilationism) he is a man who remained faithful to his calling and who served the church well. He is also a man who served the church in what was often a background role, which is to say that time may prove that he had a measure of importance that few people noticed at the time. Then again, in 2005 TIME declared him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, so I suppose someone has noticed.

Just a short time ago Stott announced his retirement from active public ministry. But before he retired he penned a final book, the final of more than 50 he penned in his lifetime. The Radical Disciple draws attention to what he considers to be some of the neglected aspects of our calling as Christians. Why this title? “There are different levels of commitment in the Christian community. Jesus himself illustrated this in what happened to the seeds he describes the parable of the sower. The difference between the seeds lay in the kind of soil which received them. Of the seed sown on rocky soil Jesus said, ‘It had no root.’ … Our common way of avoiding radical discipleship is to be selective: choosing those areas in which commitment suits us and staying away from those areas in which it will be costly. But because Jesus is Lord, we have no right to pick and choose the areas in which we will submit to his authority.” And so in this book he seeks to consider eight characteristics of Christian discipleship that, though they deserve to be taken seriously, are too often neglected.

When I was a teenager, growing up within Canada’s Dutch Reformed tradition (despite not being Dutch—long story), Tuesday nights were Catechism nights. My parents would drive me to the church where the pastor, or occasionally one of the elders, would teach us the Heidelberg Catechism. Every class would begin the same way—with reciting the questions and answers we had been told to memorize the week before. I would always sit my friend Brian so we could whisper hints to one another when we got stuck. Actually, he and I continually found new and inventive ways of cheating, of making the pastor believe that we had done our work even when we hadn’t. Nevertheless, over the years I did press that catechism into my mind and at one point probably could have recited almost all of it. Many years have gone by and most of it has faded, though interestingly I can still recite the first and the last of the 129 questions; I still know what is my only comfort in life and death and what ‘amen’ means.

As Christians we (rightly!) have high expectations of our pastors as they preach the Word of God. We expect that that they will dedicate themselves to studying and understanding the Bible, that they will live lives marked by their commitment to holiness, that they will expend the effort necessary to craft Gospel-centered, Spirit-empowered sermons. In short, we expect that they will come to the pulpit prepared, having dedicated themselves to the task they’ve been called to. How odd it is, then, that we are content to have such low standards for our own preparation and our own diligence in listening. We expect to turn up at church and be blessed by the preaching of the Word, even while we have expended no effort in seeking to prepare ourselves to hear it and even while we sit passively throughout.

Having read many books dealing with the preaching of sermons, it was a blessing to me to read a book on listening to sermons. After all, I spend just a handful of Sundays each year preaching and all the rest listening. And I know I need to be a much better listener. Ken Ramey addresses just this in his new book Expository Listening: A Handbook for Hearing and Doing God’s Word.

Early in George Orwell’s iconic 1984 is a particularly haunting scene. Winston, the hero of the story, is confessing to his diary a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Though Big Brother rigidly controls even sexual union and though sex is viewed as “a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema,” still Big Brother cannot remove from humanity the desire and the need for intimacy. One evening Winston spots a prostitute near a train station. “She had a young face,” he writes, “painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces.” In a society where abject fear and loneliness are the norm, Winston craves the intimacy of sex. But as he goes into this woman’s apartment and lies with her, he turns up a lamp, casting a bright light on her face. And immediately he sees that the appearance of beauty was a lie. “What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.