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.

Is it fact or fiction? That is the question everyone asks when they first encounter Jonathan Cahn’s book The Harbinger. The answer is both, I guess—a little from column a and a little from column b. How about this: The Harbinger is meant to be fact presented in the form of a novel; in reality it is an unfortunate mixture of truth and error presented in the form of a script. Still with me?

What is demonstrably factual is that The Harbinger is a phenomenon. It has held steady for forty weeks on the New York Times list of bestsellers, selling over 700,000 copies through fifteen reprints. At the time I write this, Amazon ranks it #2 on their list of Christian fiction and #7 on their list of Christian theology. The book had largely escaped my view until the past few weeks when I received a series of emails from people wondering what it was all about. I finally caved and read it. Consider this more of an explanation of what it is than a thorough review.

I will get to the content in a moment, but first a word about the form. Though described as a novel, the book is actually far closer to a script (a script that would make an exceptionally tedious play or film). There is very little action, only the barest semblance of a plot, and no development at all of the three characters. Instead, the book is composed of amateurish dialog that proceeds at a plodding pace. The writing is repetitive to the point that it could easily have been boiled down to a third or a half of its current length. The book is a chore to read and, speaking personally, the end simply could not come too soon.

Within this work of fiction are claims that the author insists are factual, biblical, and of the utmost importance. He claims to reveal an ancient mystery that holds the secret to America’s future. Like so many other books, it claims that the truth has been hidden in the pages of the Bible until one man ferreted it out. It is essentially a long exposition of Isaiah 9:10: “The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with hewn stones; The sycamores are cut down, but we will replace them with cedars.” More correctly, it is a dual exposition of this text, applying it both to ancient Israel and to contemporary America. A snippet of dialog will explain how this can be (and, undoubtedly, convince many of you to read no further):

“But what does America have to do with ancient Israel?”

“Israel was unique among the nations in that it was conceived and dedicated at its foundation for the purposes of God.”

“OK…”

“But there was one other—a civilization also conceived and dedicated to the will of God from its conception…America. In fact, those who laid its foundations…”

“The Founding Fathers.”

“No, long before the Founding Fathers. Those who laid America’s foundations saw it as a new Israel, an Israel of the New World. And as with ancient Israel, they saw it as in covenant with God.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning its rise or fall would be dependent on its relationship with God. If it followed His ways, America would become the most blessed, prosperous, and powerful nation on earth. From the very beginning they foretold it. And what they foretold would come true. America would rise to heights no other nation had ever known. Not that it was ever without fault or sin, but it would aspire to fulfill its calling.”

“What calling?”

“To be a vessel of redemption, an instrument of God’s purposes, a light to the world. It would give refuge to the world’s poor and needy, and hope to its oppressed. It would stand against tyranny. It would fight, more than once, against the dark movements of the modern world that threatened to engulf the earth. It would liberate millions. And, as much as it fulfilled its calling or aspired to, it would become the most blessed, the most prosperous, the most powerful, and the most revered nation on the earth—just as its founders had prophesied.”

Of course there is a “but” that follows. Just as ancient Israel turned its back on its covenant with God, so too has America. By doing so, America has called down God’s judgment.

Take a look at this graphic. Image that the middle box in the chart is your house and the boxes that surround it are the eight houses closest to your own. I doubt your neighborhood is arranged like a tic-tac-toe board, so you may need to use your imagination just a little bit.

Here’s what I want you to do.

• First, write the names of the people who live in the house represented by each of the boxes. If you can give both first and last names, that’s great. If you’ve only got first names, that’s okay too.
• Second, write down some information or facts about each of the people in that house. I don’t mean facts that you could observe by standing on the road and looking at their house (“Drives a red car”) but facts that you’ve gathered from speaking to them (“Works for a bank,” “Grew up across town.”).
• Third, write down any in-depth information you know about each of the people. This could include details like their career plans or religious beliefs—the kind of information that comes from real conversation.

How did you do? Or how do you think you would do if you actually went through with this exercise? The degree to which you simply do not know your neighbors is the degree to which you will benefit from reading The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon. They premise their book upon this simple question: When Jesus told us love our neighbors, what if he meant our actual neighbors, the people who live closest to us? They explain that Christians have long been making “neighbor” into a safe metaphor that allows us to believe we are carrying out the Lord’s command when we visit soup kitchens and do acts of kindness to complete strangers.

The problem, as they explain it, is that “when we aim for everything, we hit nothing. So when we insist we’re neighbors with everybody, often we end up being neighbors with nobody.” Ouch. Much like the Pharisees, we ask “Who is my neighbor?” in the hope of finding a loophole, not in the hope of loving those who live nearby. “Jesus assumed that his audience would be able to love those nearest to them, their literal neighbors, the people most like them, who shared the same heritage and geography. In telling the parable, Jesus was stretching their concept of neighbor to include even people from a group they didn’t like.” As we read the parable today we tend to go straight to the stranger on the side of the road and no longer include the person in the house next door.

I occasionally write under a pseudonym. There are some things I feel like I can say, or maybe even ought to say, that wouldn’t be wise to contribute under my own name. And so there have been a handful of times over the years that I’ve written under a pseudonym. There are several complications that come with writing under a pen name, chief among them that it is difficult to interact with people who appreciate and respond to what I’ve written. Unless I want to create an entire identity for this character, complete with email address and Facebook profile, I have no capacity to respond to those who have questions or concerns.

There is another issue that, sadly, tends to bother me more. A couple of things I have written under this other name have been well-received and I have found it surprisingly difficult to allow the accolades to go to a non-existent person. I’ve got pride problems, I guess, and want some of that recognition for myself. In its fullest form, I can see that I almost feel like it’s a waste to write something clever or something helpful that doesn’t, in the end, elevate my name. That sounds pathetic as I write it, but I think it’s true, at least on one level.

The author of the new book Embracing Obscurity spotted this same pride problem in his own life and responded by writing an entire book as simply Anonymous. In the book’s opening pages he admits to fantasies in which he is outed and receives the praise that he desires, at least on one level. And yet he has done all he can to shield his own identity, thus avoiding the ridiculous problem of receiving accolades, of receiving a wider platform, for a book that deals with obscurity. Like the panel of well-known leaders who discussed celebrityism at this year’s Together for the Gospel event, even discussing the subject carries with it a certain level of irony.

At a time of Christian celebrityism, Embracing Obscurity is a call to “become nothing in the light of God’s everything.” In a culture where so many people fear being underrated, where so many people feel they deserve recognition, this is just one of what I hope will be several calls to be willing—eager even—to be unrecognized and insignificant in the eyes of men. Though I trust this book is not the final word on the matter, I consider it a helpful opening salvo in the battle against a culture of Christian celebrity.

I began reading Mortality, Christopher Hitchens’ newest book—his final book—on the day it was released. I couldn’t sleep that day, so woke up in the wee hours, downloaded it to the iPad and began reading. It’s not a long work, so did not take more than a couple of hours. Like everything Hitchens wrote, Mortality is brilliant and insightful and well-written and utterly defiant. One of the best-known and most widely-respected of the New Atheists, he both denied and hated God to the end.

Hitchens was only sixty-two when he died. He had just released a memoir, Hitch-22, and was on a book tour to promote it when he suddenly developed terrible pain in his chest and thorax. He began a long and ultimately unsuccessful treatment for esophageal cancer and died eighteen months later in December of 2011. In the time between he penned a series of columns for Vanity Fair and those columns form the basis of Mortality. Not surprisingly, they deal with illness and death and…mortality.

I read this book as a Christian, exactly the kind of person Hitchens wrote against—a Bible-believing, God-fearing theist. Yet I read it with far more sadness and pity than offense. At times in his voluminous writings Hitchens was monstrously unfair to Evangelical Christians, lumping us in with the Fred Phelps’ and Muslim extremists of the world. At other times he was guardedly respectful. This book spans both extremes. Many professed Christians earned his disrespect. Take the author of this comment that Hitchens came across while traveling the World Wide Web:

Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.

Of course not all Christians reacted with such glee and such firm confidence of an intimate understanding of God’s providence. There were others who were kind, who told him that, like it or not, they would pray for him, and who sought to bring him encouragement. 

It's a feeling every reader knows and loves, and perhaps especially the reader of theology. It is the feeling that comes as you read a book and find yourself thinking “This could change everything.” There are some books that go straight to what you think you know, what you are so sure of, what you've so carefully constructed, and begin to pull it all apart and to replace it with something that is so much better, so much loftier, so much more worthy of God. Michael Reeves' Delighting in the Trinity has been one of those books to me. After ten pages I was hooked, after twenty I was reeling and after fifty I knew I would have to go back and read it all again.

I have read several books on the Trinity in the past and have always enjoyed reading them. James White's The Forgotten Trinity and Bruce Ware's Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are biblical, systematic and powerful. I've read them, benefited from them, and often recommended them. I will continue to do so. The unique angle--and unique beauty--of Delighting in the Trinity is that it looks less at a concept and more at a relationship, less at a doctrine and more at the persons of the godhead. It is, at heart, an introduction to the Christian faith and the Christian life that seeks to show that both must be at all times rooted in the triunity of God. All that God is, all that God does, flows out of his triunity. It is the essential Christian doctrine. Reeves says that his book is

about growing in our enjoyment of God and seeing how God's triune being makes all his ways beautiful. It is a chance to taste and see that the Lord is good, to have your heart won and yourself refreshed. For it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be a Trinity that you really sense the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart-grabbing loveliness of God. If the Trinity were something we could shave off God, we would not be relieving him of some irksome weight; we would be shearing him of precisely what is so delightful about him. For God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable.

Like me, you have looked at the diagrams that attempt to display the Trinity and you've heard the various comparisons: It's like the three states of water: liquid, steam and ice; it's like an egg that has shell, white and yolk and yet is only one egg. But if we aren't careful, our explanations can make the Trinity seem distant and difficult rather than imminent and delightful. "For all that we may give an orthodox nod of the head to belief in the Trinity, it simply seems too arcane to make any practical difference to our lives." While we have a theological construct of the Trinity in our hearts and minds and statements of faith, it can make so little difference to our lives that God is a Trinity rather than one (or two, for that). What Reeves seeks to do, and what he does so well, is to introduce the Trinity not as a problem or a technicality, but as "the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy."