This review of Kyle Idleman’s Not a Fan comes a little bit late. The book released almost two years ago and has sold over a half million copies. I have been meaning to read it for some time, but something else always seemed more urgent. However, with Idleman’s follow-up releasing in the next month—a book that is likely to hit the list of bestsellers before Not a Fan has fallen off—it seemed logical to read the first before the second.

Not a Fan is a call to become a completely committed follower of Jesus. It is hardly alone in this category, this subgenre of Christian living or spiritual growth. Idleman’s unique angle is in focusing on the distinction between fans and followers. He looks at the Evangelical landscape and sees that there are many people who are mere hangers-on, mere enthusiasts for Jesus. “It may seem that there are many followers of Jesus, but if they were honestly to define the relationship they have with him I am not sure it would be accurate to describe them as followers. It seems to me that there is a more suitable word to describe them. They are not followers of Jesus. They are fans of Jesus.” In these circles Jesus is almost indistinguishable from a celebrity with committed fans “who know all about him, but they don't know him.”

Idleman wants more than this. He wants more than this for himself, for you, for me.

He shares many good insights into contemporary Evangelicalism. “My concern is that many of our churches in America have gone from being sanctuaries to becoming stadiums. And every week all the fans come to the stadium where they cheer for Jesus but have no interest in truly following him. The biggest threat to the church today is fans who call themselves Christians but aren't actually interested in following Christ. They want to be close enough to Jesus to get all the benefits, but not so close that it requires anything from them.” There is no doubt that this is true. He pushes back against easy-believism, against the kind of seeker friendliness that is all promise with no commitment. “Following by definition requires more than mental assent, it calls for movement. One of the reasons our churches can become fan factories is that we have separated the message of ‘believe’ from the message ‘follow’.” Again, this is very true, and refreshing to hear from a pastor who leads one of the most mega of America’s megachurches; his Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, is the 5th largest church in America with over 20,000 in attendance each weekend.

There are too many Christians who doubt that the Lord still does miracles today. He does. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen more miracles than I can count. God still does the unimaginable and the unexpected, and just as in days of old, he does it all to testify to his own glory.

I found myself thinking about miracles as I read The Insanity of God, a new book by Nik Ripken—a book that carries a foreword by David Platt and endorsements by a who’s who of Southern Baptist notables: Akin, Page, Rainer, Stetzer, Hunt. Nik Ripken is a pseudonym for a former missionary from the hills of Kentucky. Having become a believer as a young adult, he felt called to the mission field, eventually settling in Nairobi. From there he founded a small aid organization and extended help into war-torn Somalia. As he visited that country, and as he saw the desperate poverty, the famine and death, he realized that his Westernized, Bible-Belt faith held few answers. It had not adequately prepared him. When he suddenly and unexpectedly lost his teenaged son, he experienced a genuine crisis of faith.

In this crisis he found himself wondering how believers survive and thrive under persecution. He decided to find out, traveling to the former USSR, to China, to the Middle East and to many other countries where to profess faith in Christ is to put your life in danger. Much of the book is spent describing what Christians have endured for Christ and how the Lord sustained them through the most difficult circumstances. He found quickly that “The stronger the persecution, the more significant the spiritual vitality of the believers.” He heard story after story of the Lord showing extraordinary grace in extraordinary circumstances. “It was as if the pages of the Bible had opened and the saints of old were once again walking the earth. And I had suddenly found myself among them.”

A theme among persecuted believers is the commonness of the miraculous. He heard Muslims describing visions where they were told where to go to hear the gospel; he heard of the dead being raised to life. He confesses “I had always seen God’s Word, especially the Old Testament, as a holy history book. For me, it was an ancient record of what God had done in the past.” But “In light of all I had heard, there was no way to avoid the conclusion: God, evidently, was doing today everything that He had done in the Bible! The evidence was compelling. At least among people who were faithfully following Him in the world’s toughest places, God was still doing what He had done from the beginning.”

The French have a phrase I love: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. While time marches on, and while the Christian faith marches on, the objections to it remain very much the same. Likewise, there are only so many arguments for the existence of God and the accuracy of the Bible. But even while the arguments remain much the same, it can be helpful to present them in fresh ways.

In the late 90’s Lee Strobel exploded onto the scene with The Case for Christ. His unique angle was approaching the Christian faith as a journalist. “Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge, Princeton, and Brandeis who are recognized authorities in their own fields. … Strobel’s tough, point-blank questions make this book read like a captivating, fast-paced novel. But it’s not fiction.” It was an effective book that sold millions of copies and one that continues to sell today.

J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity may well be The Case for Christ for a new generation. He has a unique approach of his own. Wallace is a cold-case homicide detective who dedicated much of his career to solving homicides that had been left unsolved many years before. He would re-open old investigations, take a fresh look at the evidence, interview the witnesses and suspects, and see if he could bring closure to old crimes.

Wallace was at one time an atheist who had been challenged with the claims of the gospels. As he began to read the Bible and consider its claims, he realized that Christianity was much like the cases he solved as a detective. He saw that there was evidence and there were eyewitnesses and records that could be weighed and considered. He used the skills and disciplines he had learned as a detective and brought them to bear on the Bible and on the Christian faith. He came to see that the case for Christianity was as strong as any case he would bring before a judge. 

Since the release of Crazy Love in 2008, Francis Chan has become one of the consistently bestselling Christian authors. Crazy Love, The Forgotten God and Erasing Hell have all made their mark, tallying millions of sales. His most recent book, Multiply, was released in November. Written with Mark Beuving, it begins with a statement that pertains to every Christian: You were made to make disciples. Every Christian has the same God-given commission: to go and to make disciples of all the nations. And yet, say the authors, “Christians today are not known for making disciples. We have developed a culture where ministers minister and the rest of us sit back and enjoy ‘church’ from a comfortable distance. This is not what God intends for His church. Every Christian is called by God to minister. You are called to make disciples.”

Multiply is Chan’s attempt to remedy this great oversight. ”Multiply is designed as a simple resource that you can use to begin making disciples. Our prayer is that it will give you the confidence you need to step out in faith and disciple the people whom God has placed in your life.” This is a book (and an accompanying series of videos, available online) that is meant to be taught more than it is meant to be read; it is meant to be digested in community, not read in isolation. Chan’s hope is that one Christian will lead others through the contents, and in so doing, prepare that person to lead someone else through it. It has a viral dimension to it. As the book closes he writes, “If you have been walking someone through this material, keep reading the Bible with that person and find someone else to begin this process with. If you have just been guided through the material by someone else, then take what you have learned and walk someone else through it.”

Here is a quick breakdown of the book’s five sections:

One of the great questions of life is the question of identity. Who am I? When faced with this question—a question we must all answer at one time or another—some respond with their vocation: I am a pastor or a police officer. Others respond with deep pain from the past: I am a victim of sexual assault or I am a drug addict. Others respond with their greatest success or most shameful failure. Yet none of these get right to the heart of the matter. These may be what we do or what we have done or what has been done to us, but none goes deep enough.

The Christian answer can and should and must be different. It is this, the matter of identity, that is at the heart of Mark Driscoll’s new book Who Do You Think You Are?. Driscoll says rightly that even as Christians “we’re continually forgetting who we are in Christ and filling that void by placing our identity in pretty much anything else.” The question “Who am I?” is “far-reaching, belief-revealing, life-shaping and identity-forming. How you answer determines your identity and your testimony. Tragically, few people—even few Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Christians—rightly answer that question.”

This is too true. Joel Osteen made a recent appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show where he led a crowd in a long list of positive declarations, each of which began with “I am.” “I am strong. I am healthy. I am confident. I am secure. I am talented. I am creative. I am disciplined. I am focused. I am valuable. I am beautiful. I am blessed. I am excited about my future. I am victorious.” Osteen sees the importance of identity, but answers it without reference to the Bible. In stark contrast, Driscoll grounds his answer in the timeless truths of Scripture. “My goal is to take one massive need in your life, your need for identity, and connect it to one book of the Bible, Ephesians. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit penned Ephesians through Paul for just this purpose.”

At the heart of it all is our identity as God’s image-bearers. We have been created in God’s image and this gives us inherent worth and dignity. We are created as worshippers, yet by falling into sin we worship all the wrong things, leading us to craft idolatrous identities for ourselves. Instead of being identified first and foremost in our relationship to God, we ignore the Creator and craft other identities. It is the gospel, the good news of what Christ has done, that transforms, or re-forms, our identity. Driscoll writes, “Only by knowing our false identity apart from Christ in relation to our true identity in him can we rightly deal with and overcome the issues in our lives.” Identity is a matter of life and death.

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.

I have never been the kind to enjoy an afternoon at the art gallery. It’s not that I don’t like art—I really do—but more that I don’t understand it very well. Of course the fact that I am red-green color blind probably doesn’t help my cause too much, but it seems that what excites artists, what stands out to them, does very little for me.

One of those funny little memories of my childhood involves a day visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario with my aunt and uncle. Both of them are artists and both of them love visiting art galleries. Hour after hour we would walk into a room with paintings hung on every wall. I would do a quick survey, glance at each painting, and then go to the middle of the room and grab a snooze on the little padded bench. Meanwhile, my aunt and uncle would walk slowly, they would take a long look at each painting, they would look at it from different angles, they would express joy and delight at the technique the artist used, at the colors he chose, at the detail he included—the light falling upon an object, the careful brushstrokes, the shading, the precision. The three of us were in that art gallery together, but one of us had a very, very different experience from the other two.

I thought of my aunt and uncle and I thought of that art gallery as I read Paul Washer’s new book The Gospel’s Power and Message. There is something in my nature, I think, that wants to glance instead of linger. I get restless quickly, I look for a moment and then move on to other things. I have come to see that it is often better to linger, that certain things can only be seen and grasped by that long and dedicated study. And this is exactly what Washer does in his book.

The Gospel’s Power and Message is the first of a trilogy from Washer, three books together titled “Recovering the Gospel” that take a long, deep look at the gospel. Washer begins in a slightly defensive posture, showing how the gospel has been reduced, neglected, and attacked in so many contemporary churches.

One of the greatest crimes committed by this present Christian generation is its neglect of the gospel, and it is from this neglect that all our other maladies spring forth. The lost world is not so much gospel hardened as it is gospel ignorant because many of those who proclaim the gospel are also ignorant of its most basic truths. The essential themes that make up the very core of the gospel—the justice of God, the radical depravity of man, the blood atonement, the nature of true conversion, and the biblical basis of assurance—are absent from too many pulpits. Churches reduce the gospel message to a few creedal statements, teach that conversion is a mere human decision, and pronounce assurance of salvation over anyone who prays the sinner’s prayer.

Against this radical neglect he says, “It does not become us as ministers or laymen to stand so near and do nothing when we see ‘the glorious gospel of our blessed God’ replaced by a gospel of lesser glory. As stewards of this truth, we have a duty to recover the one true gospel and proclaim it boldly and clearly to all.” This is exactly what he sets out to do in this book and in this series of books.

This book, then, is a long, careful, joyful look at the gospel. It is as if Washer walks into the room of an art gallery and studies a work of art first from one side and then another. He steps back to look at the entire work and then steps close to examine the finest details and the most careful nuances. He marvels at the workmanship and delights in the artistry. His joy in this work of art is contagious and the reader just can’t help but be drawn in to the excitement.

We are definitely not facing a shortage of books on leadership. These titles have sections all their own in the big bookstores, they line the airport bookstalls, and they appear on the bestseller lists with predictable regularity. Much like books on prayer or books on parenting and a select handful of other topics, it appears that there simply cannot be too many of them. Every leader wants to lead better just as every prayer wants to pray better. Readers could be forgiven if they feel skeptical that there is anything much left to say about leadership.

And yet, as Albert Mohler proves in The Conviction to Lead, not every trail has been pursued to its end. He begins this book with a warning to the reader that is equally a challenge to himself as author: “My goal is to change the way you think about leadership. I do not aim merely to add one more voice to the conversation; I want to fundamentally change the way leadership is understood and practiced.” No one can accuse him of aiming too low! Remarkably, at least in my assessment, he achieves what he sets out to do, making The Conviction to Lead a uniquely important book.

In the opening pages Mohler surveys the vast leadership industry and points out that in all the useful things that have been said about leadership, the central problem “is a lack of attention to what leaders believe and why this is central.” His burden is “to redefine Christian leadership so that it is inseparable from passionately held beliefs, and to motivate those who are deeply committed to truth to be ready for leadership. I want to see a generation arise that is simultaneously leading with conviction and driven by the conviction to lead. The generation that accomplishes this will set the world on fire.”

At the heart of the kind of leadership Mohler advocates is what he calls “convictional intelligence.” This is not an innate kind of intelligence, but one that must be developed by diving deeply into the truth of the Bible and learning to think like a Christian. It is, in its essence, Christian maturity. “For the Christian leaders, those convictions must be drawn from the Bible and must take the shape of the gospel. Our ultimate conviction is that everything we do is dignified and magnified by the fact that we were created for the glory of God. We were made for his glory, and this means that each one of us has a divine purpose. The Christian leader finds passion in the great truths of the Christian faith, and especially in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

There’s little doubt that pornography is a modern-day plague. Though pornography has always existed in one form or another, the Internet has created a medium through which it can be disseminated both widely and discreetly. Almost an entire generation of boys has succumbed at one time or another, with a new generation quickly falling into all of the same traps. And it has not just been boys; many men have found the temptation irresistible (and, of course, not a few women). While there are some who try to downplay pornography’s impact on life and marriage, evidence is mounting that it is a terribly destructive force.

Two new books from New Growth Press address the issue head-on. One targets men who are struggling with pornography or any other manner of sexual sin and the other brings help and healing to women who have found that their husbands have an addiction.

David White’s Sexual Sanity for Men seeks to help men “understand that sexual sin starts in their minds and hearts and shows them how knowing Christ breaks their chains, builds spiritual brotherhood, and helps them take practical steps to re-create their minds in a God-focused direction.” This is a study or a course as much as a book. It is broken into fourteen chapters, each of which has five parts. The idea is that you will read one chapter per week, and one part per weekday, and hopefully meet with other men along the way. There is a downloadable leader’s guide that allows it to be structured as a group study.

The heart of the book is helping men re-create their minds through the power of the Holy Spirit so that they are able to make choices that are sexually sane. Paul Tripp says it well in his endorsement:

I know of no resource for men who are struggling with sexual sin that is more soundly biblical, drenched with the gospel, and practical at the street level. I am thankful that this resource now exists and will recommend it again and again. Here is a welcome for men to come out of hiding, to embrace that there is nothing that could be revealed about them that hasn’t already been covered by the blood of Jesus, and to believe that God has given them every grace they need to fight the battle with sexual sin.

Meanwhile Vicki Tiede has written When Your Husband is Addicted to Pornography. (Long-time readers of the blog may remember that I interviewed Tiede early in 2011 and at that time she mentioned that she was working on the book.) This book is meant for the women—the thousands or millions of women—who have been left shattered and betrayed when they have found out that their husband has an addiction to pornography. In many ways Tiede has the more difficult task; the men have sinned and have now to put sin to death; the wives have been sinned against and have to deal with the betrayal and heartbreak and bitterness.