By LeRoy Lawson

The Collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock
Fred B. Craddock
Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011

When You Come Home: The True Love Story of a Soldier’s Heroism and His Wife’s Sacrifice
Nancy Cavin Pitts
Kingsport: Christian Devotions Ministry, 2011

The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West . . . AGAIN (10th Anniversary Edition)
George C. Hunter III
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010

I’ve known of Fred Craddock almost as long as I’ve been preaching, but I’ve never met him. When I was a guest preacher at the Christian Church in Newport, Tennessee, his ghost filled the church. He wasn’t dead, but his spirit lived where he had ministered so many years before. The people there reminisced lovingly of his wit, his great sermons, his pastor’s heart.

I loved his height. Shorter than I am, even. One of my favorite stories about him concerns baptism. I’ve repeated it so often it has to be true. As I heard it, he explained he had to give up pastoral ministry in favor of seminary teaching because of the baptism question. He had some issues with sprinkling but was too short to immerse.

You have to admire a guy like that.

When his books on preaching were published, I declared they should be compulsory reading for every preacher, so good were (are) they. No title better describes the preacher’s calling than As One Without Authority.

A friend of mine recently named Dr. Craddock the greatest preacher associated with the Restoration Movement in the last half century. It’s hard to measure these things, of course, but he very well might be right.

I intended to read just one of the book’s 52 sermons each day as a kind of devotional starter. They’re not long. I couldn’t make my plan work, though. They were so compelling I just kept on reading.

He is unique among preachers. As Barbara Brown Taylor says in her foreword, Craddock “trusts emotion and intuition to light the way into a text as much as he trusts education and intelligence . . . this preacher does not map his sermons with a ruler but with a heart.” The result is a treasure trove of stories begging to be told again. I intend to tell them.

Here is his take on what we are doing when we preach: “Preaching is conversation but it is serious conversation; two persons (or a preacher and congregation) with enough in common to be able to communicate, with enough difference to need to communicate, and each with an open willingness to be influenced by the other.”

Yes.

Faith-Based Resilience

I confess that Nancy Cavin Pitts’s When You Come Home is not ordinarily my kind of book. Love stories are for . . . well, you know. But two tugs pulled me into this one. The first was personal. The author’s grandparents-in-law, Lester and Martha Goodner, were members of the church I served in Indianapolis in the 1970s. I remember them fondly as quiet, steady, good people—the kind we call “salt of the earth.” They were proud of daughter Gail Pitts, who has written for The Lookout and Christian Standard, and of her minister husband, Harry. Rightly so. The impact of good people can often be traced through the generations. So it is with this family.

The second draw is my fascination with the heroes and survivors of the Great Depression and World War II, the people of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. Ms. Pitts quotes Brokaw’s tribute to her mother, the book’s heroine: “Daphne Cavin’s poignant story of love, loss and sacrifice was one of the most memorable I encountered in writing The Greatest Generation. Her daughter now completes the story with this very heartfelt book.”

When You Come Home is the memoir of Daphne and of Raymond, her true love, a dashing young man aspiring—until World War II decreed otherwise—to become a minister. It’s about heroism in time of peril, not so much of military bravery but the courage of the distaff side, what it was (and is) like to be the loved one left at home to wait, to worry, to pray, to hope, and ultimately to recoil from the finality of war’s cruelest blow, the unalterable fact that such a love must now be spoken of in the past tense.

It’s also a tale told by a believer who is left behind to wrestle with the meaning of faith, the felt absence of God, the puzzle of unanswered prayer and unrealized hopes. Yet it is, at the end of the book and through the rest of her life, the testimony of faith that overcomes doubt, of gratitude for what is rather than anger over what can’t be; in other words, of Daphne Kelley Cavin’s faith-based resilience. She did recover, after all. Though this is not part of the story told here, Daphne loved again and because of it, her daughter Nancy could write this tribute.

Accepted by Love

George Hunter’s The Celtic Way of Evangelism is yet another reminder (there are so many of them!) that the urge to restore New Testament Christianity is not confined to the Stone-Campbell Movement. When I was a young minister, the church growth movement was under way, encouraging churches to pay attention to how people actually live and then construct viaducts (Donald McGavran, in his 1954 book of the same name, called them “bridges of God”) to help people to get from where they are to where God was calling them. This particular movement was born in, but quickly outgrew, the confines of the Restoration Movement.

“Church growth” as an evangelistic strategy is considered passé now, but the desire that birthed it remains strong. Each generation must renew, restore, revolutionize (choose your favored verb) the church all over again, finding methods for doing so in efforts as diverse as the movements variously named “emerging church,” “spiritual renewal,” “externally focused,” and “charismatic” to name some more prominent ones—and Celtic evangelism.

Hunter takes us back to the fifth century and St. Patrick, who vitalized Christianity in Ireland and from there launched a remarkable missionary outreach to England and beyond. Patrick stressed the importance of the Christian community, helping people to come to Christ and stay with him in groups of their own kind. Unlike the Roman wing of the church, Celtic Christianity was essentially a lay movement of people first accepted by love rather than to be first defined and accepted on the basis of their belief.

Hunter stresses that “spiritual formation, by itself and no matter how well done, will not sufficiently renew the church for its main business,” because “spiritual formation is not our ultimate goal; it is a means to achieving Christianity’s main business.” We are blessed, he insists, to bless others “within and beyond the Church.”

It was a happy surprise to read here of our own Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky. Hunter offers this church as an example of latter-day Celtic evangelism, especially in its determination to be a place where people find community.

In this region of the city, if you attend a concert or a play; if your teenager attends a private high school or is in a youth group; if you give blood or vote for a jailer or a president; if you play softball or your child is a Boy Scout or Girl Scout or plays soccer; if you do aerobics or attend a support group or study conversational Spanish; if you need an appliance or a piece of furniture or some vegetables—you probably come to Southland Christian Church.

Hunter notes that the two most prominent Celtic approaches to evangelization were through monastic communities that welcomed in seekers and guests, and teams from the monastic community going out to visit settlements for weeks or months to establish beachheads for conversion.

Though there are many differences between the Middle Ages and today, the Celtic principles can be—and as seen in the case of Southland Christian, are being—applied in new, relevant ways.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a Christian Standard contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee. His column appears at least monthly.

By LeRoy Lawson

Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith
Timothy Beal
Boston: Beacon Press, 2005

The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book
Timothy Beal
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

God-Size Your Church
John Jackson
Colorado Springs: Biblica, 2008, 2011

Timothy Beal, professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University, is a new discovery. A good friend recently sent me two of his books without explanation or recommendation, so I read them without expectations. Well, that’s not quite right. When I started Roadside Religion my guard was up against what I was certain would be a cynical exposé of absurd religious shrines along roadsides all over America. I approached The Rise and Fall also anticipating a kind of liberal Bible-bashing dressed in academic pontification.

I was wrong both times.

Religion turned out to be informative, inspirational, and fun. The professor bundled his family into a rented RV and set out to visit some of America’s strangest (read “most embarrassing”) religious sites, from Bill and Marzell Rice’s cross-littered yard bearing such inspirational signs as “You will die . . . hell hell hell hot hot” in Alabama and God’s Ark of Safety under much-delayed construction in Maryland to the Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Missouri and Mr. Brown’s Cabinet of Prayers (and rosaries) in Washington state. There are several others. Here is every opportunity for academic and religious snobbery to have a field day, as some well-intentioned, true-believers have found some really unusual ways to express themselves.

But the book doesn’t work that way. As you visit these sites with the Beals, you feel the author and the reader alike gaining insight into “outsider’s” religion—and granting respect for men and women who adopt sometimes absurd means to present God to others.

He summarizes his experience, after admitting this isn’t the book he meant to write: “What began as an exploration of roadside religious attractions and the stories behind them has wound up being a far more personal story of my own ambivalent search for faith.” He discovered faith is as much about relationships (with God, with people) as about belief, “faith as vulnerability, risking relationship.” It’s also about hospitality, which he found in each and every visit. “The antidote to cynicism is relationship, the offering and receiving of hospitality.”

Disarming Candor

Professor Beal writes with the same disarming personal candor in Bible. Whether tracing the development of the scriptural canon or presenting the scholarly problems involved in reconciling a personal faith (his parents reared him to be a good Evangelical Christian) with what most Evangelicals would call liberal, even skeptical scholarship, the author probably disappoints conservatives and liberals alike. He dismisses bibliolatry, fearing the danger done to people who treat the Bible as a holy icon. On the one hand, he is equally critical of those who dismiss the authority of the Scriptures altogether. There’s more to the Bible than either extreme admits.

I disagreed with him often enough to quit the book. (I don’t even like the title.) Then I would open it again, curious to know where he was going. I am glad I stayed with him, though he took me through discomforting territory. His openness, his own teachability forced me into some openness of my own, making me ponder questions I thought I had resolved long ago. His treatment of the Bible as a library of questions rather than as a repository of settled answers especially appealed. After a lifelong study of the Bible, I still have a lot to learn.

A Simple, Practical Guide

I met John Jackson (God-Size Your Church), the president of William Jessup University, at the North American Christian Convention in 2011. When the California school announced his appointment, many of us WJU friends wondered where this new leader had come from. He wasn’t “one of ours.” His background, we learned, was Baptistic, although he could claim close associations with our churches throughout his ministry. Where would he lead WJU? Would he change its character? It was established as a Bible college to serve independent Christian churches and churches of Christ. Would it remain true to its heritage under this new leader?

William Jessup University used to be San Jose Christian College. When it recently moved from San Jose to Rocklin, California, it acquired its new name in honor of WJU’s founder. A few presidents later his son Bryce (a fellow youth minister in the Portland area when we were young) served with distinction, directing its relocation and transformation from Bible college to university.

I looked forward to meeting President Jackson. He was taking my good friend’s place. Was he worthy? I liked what I learned about him.

Jackson attended the NACC because he hoped to become better acquainted with WJU’s Christian church connections. He wanted to be certain that his administration would be true to its historic vision and values.

After our meeting he gave me a copy of his latest book, God-Size Your Church, which he wrote as a preacher for his fellow ministers. The result is a simple, practical guide to “maximizing your impact” as a church leader. Though now a university president, this former church planter transparently loves the church and he loves Scripture, from which he draws his leadership principles and practices.

As a result, there’s not much in this book that’s new. Originality isn’t his goal; effectiveness is. He wants to help transform congregations into vehicles worthy of the God they are serving. In this helpful spirit he even includes in the appendix the “Bylaws of the Carson Valley Christian Center, Inc.,” the church he planted. It’s a helpful template for young churches ready to draw up their own legal papers.

You’ll also appreciate his ideas for helping a church break the 200, 400, and beyond growth barriers. Here’s a sample: “I believe that the 200 barrier presents key leaders with a barrier of heart: Do we have a vision to reach unchurched people? . . . In contrast, the 400 barrier presents a barrier of behavior. Are we willing to change the way we structure the ministry and life of the church in order to reach more people?”

As I said, not much new in this, but it bears repeating, don’t you think?

LeRoy Lawson is professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee, and an international consultant with CMF International. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee. His column appears at least monthly.

By LeRoy Lawson

Shakespeare: The World as Stage
Bill Bryson
New York: HarperCollins, 2007 (Audible.com version) 

Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011

The Language of Science and Faith:
Straight Answers to Genuine Questions
Karl W. Giberson and Francis S. Collins
Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2011

It’s been a long time since I had the fun of introducing high school and college students to a lifelong fascination of mine: William Shakespeare, beyond dispute the greatest poet in the English language and among the handful of greatest poets in the world.

Well, maybe not beyond dispute. The truth is, everything about Shakespeare is disputed, including whether he was really Shakespeare. Maybe his plays were written by someone else who just borrowed his name (Francis Bacon? Christopher Marlowe? the Earl of Oxford? Queen Elizabeth?) Who knows for certain? (For the record, I’m pretty certain Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but that opinion doesn’t get me published.)

And how should we spell his name? No one knows that for certain, either, including Shakespeare, who spelled it six different ways—and “Shakespeare” wasn’t one of the variations.

And why didn’t he publish most of his plays himself? If it hadn’t been for his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, who labored “heroically” to bring out the First Folio, most of the plays would have been lost forever. Even with their work, we remain uncertain exactly how many plays the man wrote, the order of their writing, and how much the texts we now have correspond to what Shakespeare actually penned.

In fact, as Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage stresses again and again, we can know very, very little about the Bard of Avon. If you’d like to get a little better acquainted with this elusive giant, though, I strongly recommend this modest book as the place to start. It’s not a hefty volume, but it’s loaded with facts and, where the facts are few, heaped high with reasonable speculation.

It’s also entertaining. Bryson does not know how to write a dull book. He also doesn’t back away from controversial issues of authorship, of Shakespeare’s sexuality, of whether it was even possible for a man born in such modest circumstances in Stratford to have gained—and then demonstrated—the vast learning so evident in the plays.

And for sheer exuberance and virtuosity of linguistic mastery, Shakespeare has no peer. Bryson will leave you—at least he left me—wanting to quit reading about and start reading in the plays and poems themselves.

“Think Different”

As an Apple aficionado (iPhone, iPad, MacBook, MacBook Air are always with me), it was incumbent upon me to snatch up Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs as soon as it came available. Its publication followed Jobs’s death by just a few days. He died on October 5, 2011; the book appeared on October 24.

It seems appropriate that one of America’s best biographers (Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin) should write the definitive life story of one of America’s greatest shapers of culture, the man who left a larger-than-life imprint on computer technology, the music industry (iTunes), the film industry (Pixar), and beyond.

What should we make of this college dropout who distinguished himself, in turn, as an unwashed hippie (before we had the word he had the behavior), a barefoot religious pilgrim, an acid-dropping druggie, a vegetarian whose heedless self-medicating probably led to a shortened lifespan, a brilliant hacker-turned-company-founder, an impossible CEO whose board fired him from the company he founded, and then had to welcome him back to rescue it, a legend even before death immortalized him?

For one thing, Steve Jobs was not a nice man. Given to tantrums and obscenities and occasional cruelty, he could demolish anyone in whom he sensed weakness—which was most of the human race. On the other hand, his obsessive perfectionism created some of the most elegant blends of beauty and functionality the world has seen. As I said, I like Apple! I also like Pixar.

Isaacson makes much of Jobs’s famous “reality distortion field.” In someone else it would be called stretching the truth, telling it like it isn’t—lying. To get what he wanted Jobs would say what he wanted, true or otherwise. Much of the time his willfulness made it possible for him and his teams to do the nearly impossible. Other times it meant trouble, as when he insisted he knew what was best for his health.

We’ll be reading Isaacson’s Steve Jobs for years to come as we try to do justice to the man who rocked our world. It was Apple, after all, that urged us to “Think different.”

Think about Science

In 2006 Francis Collins published The Language of God, an argument for believing in God. The audience for that book was the scientific community, and Collins made the case that it’s not disgraceful for bona fide scientists to believe in God. In fact, many do. Now he and coauthor Karl W. Giberson turn in the other direction. The audience for The Language of Science and Faith is their fellow Christians, whom they hope to persuade that it’s OK for a believer in God to believe in proven scientific facts as well.

The ongoing conflict of science and religion is rooted, at least partially, in our typically binary method of thinking. We almost automatically reduce issues to either/or; both/and seems somehow too demanding. So we are either for God and against evolution, for example, or for evolution and against God. We believe we can’t have it any other way.

But we can, Collins and Giberson insist. And they have the credentials to make us listen. Dr. Collins headed up the Human Genome project to decode human DNA. He now presides at the National Institutes of Health. His colleague Dr. Giberson is a physicist who has spent much of his career at “the interface of science and religion.” In this book, they say they are writing for “Christian readers who would like to have a position that is both biblically based and scientifically sound.” Quite a goal.

Even though this is a popularly written volume, the authors don’t back away from tough issues like these:

• How old are the earth and the universe, really?

• Can science and religion be friends?

• Can scientific discoveries and Scripture be reconciled?

• What is meant by “the image of God? And where did our image of that image come from?

• How do you explain the precarious (and precise) conditions that make life on this planet viable, when it would take such a tiny change in temperature or the tilt of the planet or the pull of gravity to wipe out all living things?

The final chapter retells the Genesis account of creation by weaving scriptural with scientific language. The result is compelling.

Collins and Giberson admit their arguments only point to, rather than prove, the existence of God. There is, after all, no proof that would be equally acceptable to both sides of this ongoing debate. Still, they insist there is reason to believe in a God who created and still “fine tunes” his creation.

The authors are critical of the intelligent design movement because of some of its unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable claims, but they do believe that intelligence designed the universe. Thus they can appeal here to Christians to be more open-minded regarding the claims of science, as Collins earlier appealed to his fellow scientists to be more open-minded regarding the claims of religion.

I wonder which audience they found harder to convince?

If you believe that all truth is God’s truth, no matter who tells it, then you may enjoy spending a little time with these authors rethinking the claims of both the Bible and science. After all the shouting in this science/religion conflict, I appreciated the calm, respectful tone that characterizes The Language of Science and Faith.

LeRoy Lawson, a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and Publishing Committee member, is professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee, and an international consultant with CMF International.

By LeRoy Lawson

Say You’re One of Them
Uwem Akpan
New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008

The Places in Between
Rory Stewart
Orlando: Harvest Original/Harcourt, 2004

Just Ministry: Professional Ethics for Pastoral Ministers
Richard M. Gula
Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2010

The History of the Open Forum on the Mission of the Church 1983–2009
John Mills
Middleburg Heights: Open Forum/Southwest Christian Church, 2011

Oprah’s Book Club is not my usual source to find a good read. Not that good books aren’t there. It’s just that my interests and her recommendations haven’t often jibed.

That is, until now. Or until 2009, to be more precise (I’m behind). That’s the year Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them made the cut. The author, a Nigerian Jesuit, is a gifted storyteller, even when—or perhaps especially when—he depicts Africa’s recent horrors.

He depicts, but he doesn’t magnify, the atrocities. He minimizes them, which makes them seem even worse, worse because now we see through a child’s eye, worse because now we hear through a child’s understatement. These stories are not about the suffering of the thousands; they are the intimate, personal agonies of the one, the few.

Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Nigeria: news accounts from here have riveted the attention of Western viewers for decades, but they are about people far away, people forgotten when the news hour is over and American Idol steals our attention.

Meet Akpan’s children and you can never forget them. In the direst of circumstances these charming, tough, heartbroken, and heartbreaking boys and girls fight to live, victims of slavery, religious conflicts, prostitution, genocides, drug trafficking, and poverty.

Have you ever wondered whether your church’s commitment to foreign missions is worthwhile? Read this book—which isn’t about missions—and your wondering is over.

Memoir from Afghanistan

In 2002 journalist Rory Stewart walked alone across Afghanistan and lived to tell about it in The Places in Between. He wasn’t always sure he would. He had previously trekked 20 to 25 miles a day across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. The country’s politics slammed Afghanistan’s door shut. But when the Taliban fell, he grabbed his chance and took off on foot to the “places in between” Herat on the west to Kabul in the east.

He braved the mountain trails, though the normal route through Kandahar was flatter, easier, and without snow. It was also, however, still partially in the hands of the Taliban. The mountains were still treacherous, but safer.

A tough going he had of it, slogging through blinding snowstorms, bedding down wherever he could find shelter, depending for food on the uncertain hospitality of villagers, encountering unexpected friendliness and too much hostility. More than once he wondered whether he was finished, permanently.

Stewart delivers an up-close-and-personal look behind the headlines, replete with his insights into religion, culture, and human nature at its best and worst. Along the way you’ll fall in love with Babur, Stewart’s traveling companion, a retired fighting mastiff and his only abiding—if quite unmanageable—friend.

I have been to Afghanistan. I saw only the capital city and its immediate environs. Back then I would not have had the courage to venture farther out. I’m grateful Stewart did, though, and that he lived to tell about it.

Ethics for Ministers

Richard Gula’s Just Ministry is the book on ministerial ethics I’ve been trying to find for years. We don’t talk enough about this subject anymore, except when we observe moral lapses in other church groups. Everybody tsk-tsks about those Catholic priests and their abuse of young boys, of course. And then there’s Ted Haggard and before him Jimmy Swaggart, and we must not forget Jim and Tammy Baker. Oh yes, I forgot to mention . . . 

The truth is, “there is none righteous, no not one,” even among the clergy. We can still give thanks, though, that the majority of ministers deserve respect and not condemnation.

Another truth, unfortunately, is that the code of ethics young ministers in my generation were taught seems to be held more lightly today, matters such as keeping the confessional sacred, honoring other confidences, not stealing sheep, managing money with integrity, observing boundaries in relationships, respecting and not abusing the powers we are granted. Ministers are charged to act as authentic representatives of Christ and the church.

Gula is a professor of moral theology at the Franciscan School of Theology of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Scandals have rocked his church. He knows the problems of the priesthood. He locates the solution in character, not in codes of ethics, yet believes such codes are helpful in forming character. He appends a couple of “Statements of Ministerial Commitment” as recommended guides for ethical behavior.

I most appreciated the author’s take on the minister’s power. Early in my own experience, in a heated moment, I castigated a deacon for what I perceived was his mistreatment of a member of my family. My language was too harsh, my temper not fully in control. Later, contrite, I went to his workplace and sincerely apologized. It was too late; I had hurt him too much. He never returned to our church.

Since then I have observed many of my fellows in ministry who would never go astray sexually, never mishandle money, and never deliberately lie. But they, like me, have abused power. There ought to be a book for the likes of us.

There is. It’s called Just Ministry.

Unity for the Church

Finally, a word about Christian unity. It’s pretty apparent by now that the spiritual descendants of Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone haven’t done so well at it, whether in the a cappella churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ, or Christian churches/churches of Christ. Each group believes itself the genuine inheritor of our 19th-century progenitors—and of the first-century church. Yet it seems pretty hard for us to talk to one another.

In recent decades several attempts have been made to facilitate conversations among us. John Mills documents the efforts of one of them in his self-published The History of the Open Forum on the Mission of the Church. The book contains his reviews of the many meetings held between 1983 and 2009 as he and a handful of others dreamed, schemed, and sacrificed to get representatives of the disparate branches to talk, just to talk. Here you’ll find the agendas, Mills’s correspondence, and several names once prominent in all three branches.

At one point, when these conversations were making little progress, an unexpected opportunity presented itself for dialogue with the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), a group that also views itself as a nondenominational movement to restore (“reform” is their word) New Testament Christianity. The goal of these talks, also, was not merger but the developing of a spirit of cooperation and fellowship between two similar movements.

The means to this end was once again a series of meetings for reading and discussing position papers and for building friendship. There was no money, or precious little, to pay expenses. It was always a project of volunteers. This effort also eventually lost steam.

I participated in a similar effort among “our” three branches in the 1960s and 1970s. We had a good time together. We chatted and debated and embraced and accomplished little. I dropped out. John Mills is made of sterner stuff. He and his colleagues persisted for more than a quarter of a century. Unfortunately, they, too, did not realize their hopes.

But they didn’t entirely fail, either. Some of the same participants (Doug Foster, Paul Blowers, and Robert Welch, to name a few) continue by other means to pursue the same ends, especially between the Christian churches/churches of Christ and the a cappella church of Christ. They are making gradual headway.

It’s an elusive goal, this unity we talk so much about. We aren’t good at achieving it, perhaps, but dare not stop trying. One of Jesus’ prayers compels us: “That they may be one.”

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City. Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

The Jesus Documents (The Missiology of Alan R. Tippett Series)
Alan R. Tippett (Shawn Redford, editor)
Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2012
 

River of God: An Introduction to World Mission
Doug Priest and Stephen Burris, editors
Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012
 

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 (accessed at Audible.com)

I remember when Alan R. Tippett came to study at the fledgling Church Growth Institute, which was then meeting on the campus of my alma mater, Northwest Christian College (now University) in Eugene, Oregon. Donald McGavran had only recently founded the institute that was to grow into the prestigious School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Later Tippett, anthropologist and Australian, became his associate there, and a dynamic duo they were.

Through a lifetime of ministry I have given thanks for my early association with McGavran. He championed an objective sociological perspective in the often too idealistic (read “unrealistic”) practices of missions. It was a much-needed corrective. His invitation to anthropologist Alan Tippett to join him in his reforming movement was an especially keen move.

Doug Priest

I didn’t get to know Tippett as well, so I greeted the news that Doug Priest, executive director of Christian Missionary Fellowship, is honoring him with a series of volumes of his thoughtful writings with a sense of expectancy.

The Jesus Documents is the first of the series (while Priest is serving as series editor, Shawn Redford is editor of this first book). Based on this first Tippett book, I’ll want to read the subsequent volumes.

The Jesus Documents is what Tippett calls the four Gospels, which he reads not so much as a theologian but as a missiologist. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written to interpret facts of Jesus’ life and teachings in a way that would persuade nonbelievers or prebelievers to a faith in Christ. To be fully understood today, then, a reader must take into account their immediate cultural context, as would a missionary learning to communicate across cultural barriers.

The four Gospels are different from each other because the cultures for which they are designed were different. “The Jesus Documents emerged as a result of the cross-cultural mission for communities which did not know or remember Jesus in the flesh or understand the language he probably spoke,” he writes.

Tippett’s approach could not differ more from those who take the Bible to be “a database for twentieth century literary and biblical critics.” Such studies miss the missionary impulse that brought them into being.

Since you and I live in a society as alien to the Gospels as did their first readers, our preaching and teaching would be more relevant and more readily received if we would heed Tippett’s commonsensical counsel, including his repeated advice that we should read each Gospel whole and be done with proof-texting and nit-picking. He does not disparage literary criticism, but calls for “a functional/cultural view of the Gospels” that won’t pull them to pieces. Since The Jesus Documents have come to us “as whole units,” we would profit by studying them—and communicating them—in their wholeness.

 

Think About Missions

A blurb on the back cover of River of God: An Introduction to World Mission—also edited by Doug Priest, with Stephen Burris—pretty much captures my initial reaction to the book:

River of God is not like the text I remember from my introduction to missions class in college. This one is interesting. Inspiring, even. Here personal tales told by seasoned missionaries are juxtaposed with the solid research of expert missiologists. They are convinced that the Scriptures focus on the mission of God—and so should we. River of God makes the case that even now the kingdom can come and God’s will can be done.

Right. I agree with every word. I wrote the blurb. The editors asked the publisher to send a prepublication copy so that, if I liked the book, I could say something positive about it.

I liked it then and like it even more now after a second reading.

I hope its use won’t be limited to the classroom. As the modern missions enterprise grows ever more complex, western churches simply can’t be satisfied with sending off their monthly support checks and hoping for the best. We need to know what our missionaries and mission agencies are doing—and why. This text can help donors and leaders of church missions reappraise their missions’ strategies.

My enthusiasm stems from my acquaintance with the authors of the various chapters. I know 12 of the 17 contributors and trust their judgment. These people are not just hearers (and writers) of the Word, but doers also. They have done their research in libraries and frontline trenches.

You may want to read the book straight through, as I did, because I was interested in every subject. On the other hand, you may want to study more randomly. Here are some of your choices: short-term missions, for better or for worse; where modern missions came from—and where they are headed; the relentless challenge of urban missions (including the burgeoning worldwide slum populations); the West’s confrontation with Islam and how to take the message of Christ where it’s not wanted; what to do about missionary culture shock and burnout; how a missions mind-set opens up the Scriptures; and as Doug Priest has written in another of his books, why we need to “get our hands dirty.”

After reading this far you may accuse me of bias, since this book speaks to a lifelong passion of mine. OK, I’m biased.

 

Think About Thinking

My wife, Joy, and I have often laughed about an early argument. Neither of us can remember the subject we were disputing, but we both remember the heat of the moment when, in exasperation, I vigorously (and loudly) exploded, “Woman, be reasonable.” To which she equally vigorously, but more sensibly, replied, “You know I can’t be reasonable when I’m mad.”

And she couldn’t. Neither can I. And neither can you.

We aren’t alone. Daniel Kahneman, emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, argues most persuasively in Thinking, Fast and Slow that the compliment we humans pay ourselves (homo sapiens—“wise humans”) is simply undeserved. We are, rather, mostly a bundle of emotions, reacting intuitively and viscerally to stimuli, who then, after responding without thought, summon our thinking to justify and rationalize why we decided what we just emotionally decided.

I began to catch on to what the professor is talking about fairly soon in dealing with the knotty relational problems facing a pastor or administrator. That’s when I decided I wouldn’t hold people to their first thoughts. It is more sensible to wait for their second thoughts, when passions have cooled and reasonableness has a chance.

We have two basic operating systems. Kahneman unimaginatively calls the first System 1, which makes snap judgments, depending on emotion and memory and genetic hardwiring to cope with the crisis of the moment. If there’s time, then System 2 can kick in. This is our reasoning, the part that calculates, weighs options, checks the data, and comes to a more logical conclusion. It does the heavy lifting, but since it is naturally lazy, it defers most of the time to System 1. And that gets us into trouble.

As you can see, Kahneman challenges just about everything we like to think about our thinking.

A lot of readers, probably no more rational than the rest of us, like what the professor has to say. The New York Times called Thinking, Fast and Slow one of the best books of 2011. The Wall Street Journal went almost as far, naming it one of the best nonfiction books of 2011. From the Los Angeles Times came the Book Prize for Current Interest. All these accolades to an author who had already been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

I suspect what he thinks about thinking is worth thinking about.

 

LeRoy Lawson is professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee, and an international consultant with CMF International. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
Izzeldin Abuelaish
London: Bloomsbury, 2010

Son of Hamas
Mosab Hassan Yousef, with Ron Brackin
Carol Stream: SaltRiver, an imprint of Tyndale House, 2010, 2011

For many years I led tours to the Holy Land. It never failed that as we prepared to go, someone would ask, “Don’t you think you should wait until there’s peace in the Middle East?”

My answer? “We have been waiting for 4,000 years now. I don’t think we can wait any longer.”

Flippant, admittedly. But awfully close to the truth. When our government (either Republican or Democrat) announces yet another peace initiative, I don’t get my hopes up. So many tried, so many failed.

Today’s books offer insight into the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its issues, complications, frustrations, and maddening contradictions defying both sides to find a route—or passageway or tunnel or even a detour—to peace. While the politicians scheme and the terrorists kill, the people riot and demand and suffer.

For my first two tours I employed Israeli agencies. The guides were competent, the sights worth seeing, but the perspective was completely one-sided. We learned almost nothing about Palestinians in Israel. For the third visit, though, we went with a Palestinian Christian travel agency. It was as if we were seeing a different country. I never changed agencies after that. The groups all were glad to learn the Palestinian point of view, so different from what they were seeing on television.

These books will do the same for you. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate recounts the author’s remarkable struggle from his birth in a Gaza refugee camp to his work as a distinguished obstetrician-gynecologist who was eventually nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his humanitarian endeavors for both sides. He was the first Palestinian doctor to be on staff at an Israeli hospital, yet he, like all other Palestinians, experienced deprivations, fear, humiliations, and physical abuse in the unending undeclared (and declared) wars that are the norm in the occupied territory.

In spite of—or because of—Dr. Abuelaish’s contributions to the health and peace of both sides, his family’s house was bombarded by Israeli soldiers in Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. Desperate for rescue, he phoned an Israeli journalist friend during his evening news broadcast; Abuelaish’s pleas went live. Too late, though. Three of his daughters and a niece were already dead. Their deaths came just a few months after his wife had died of leukemia; he was left alone to raise their eight children. Now there were five. He was in anguish and almost inconsolable.

By this point in his narrative you wonder how much more any one human being could stand. As a child in the refugee camp he had worked to help support his family while at the same time excelling in school, even though his family valued his child labor above his education. The descendant of generations of proud farmers who had been forced off their land and into the camp, he could not expect any help from his impoverished parents—or anyone else, for that matter.

As a teenager, though, he had worked for a kind Israeli family from whom he learned that virtue was not the sole possession of Palestinians, nor vice the sole characteristic of Israelis. He developed a lifelong habit of seeing individuals as persons, not as stereotypes.

That’s why, even as his people’s enemies were killing his children, he vowed, I shall not hate.

Most of us would think he had reason enough to hate. Some of the occupying powers’ policies and practices seem indefensible: unjustified confiscation of private property; destruction of houses and crops; arbitrary control of food, water, fuel, medicine; unnecessarily restricted movement within Gaza and between occupied Palestine and Israel; and other forms of dehumanization.

The author was raised a Muslim. He’s a devout Muslim to this day. You will be intrigued by his conviction that his God has a plan for his life, that God takes a personal interest in him, that God expects high moral behavior from him, and that Allah does not want him to hate us. That’s why he doesn’t. He also believes “the disease affecting our relationship—our enemy—is ignorance of one another.”

But what is needed, the book makes so clear, is not a casual getting acquainted, but rather a determination to know, understand, tolerate, and appreciate one another. A tall order. The alternative, though, is hatred.

We have had enough of that.

The Way to Peace

Like Dr. Abue-laish, Mosab Hassan Yousef, eldest son of a founder of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, also decided not to hate. Also like Dr. Abuelaish, Mosab was born a Muslim, but unlike him, he became a Christian.

His story reads like an intense spy mystery. And with reason. Appalled by the brutality he witnessed when Hamas threw him into prison, he became a double agent, working in the heart of Hamas while at the same time reporting to Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency, as their best source of information on Palestinian intrigues.

His double (or triple) life took its toll. Trusted confidant of Hamas, trusted source for Shin Bet, and college student on a spiritual quest, Mosad finally wrested his release from Israel and sought asylum in the United States, from which he was almost deported until his former Shin Bet superior courageously testified on his behalf.

Of his spiritual journey he says,

For years I had struggled to know who my enemy was, and I had looked for enemies outside of Islam and Palestine. But I suddenly realized that the Israelis were not my enemies. Neither was Hamas nor my uncle Ibrahim nor the kid who beat me with the butt of his M16 nor the apelike guard in the detention center. I saw that enemies were not defined by nationality, religion, or color. I understood that we all share the same common enemies: greed, pride, and all the bad ideas and the darkness of the devil that live inside us. That means I could love anyone. The only real enemy was the enemy inside me.

As the only insider who could infiltrate Hamas’s military and political wings and other Palestinian factions, the 22-year-old Mosad believed the responsibility wasn’t only his: “It was clear to me by now that God had specifically placed me at the core of both Hamas and Palestinian leadership, in Yasser Arafat’s meetings, and with the Israeli security service for a reason.”

That reason was to save lives, to work for peace.

There was too much blood. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t see it just through the eyes of a Muslim or a Palestinian or even as the son of Hassan Yousef anymore. Now I saw it through Israeli eyes too. And even more importantly, I watched the mindless killing through the eyes of Jesus, who agonized for those who were lost. The more I read the Bible, the more clearly I saw this single truth: Loving and forgiving one’s enemies is the only real way to stop the bloodshed.

Thus the young man who hated Jews and cheered when Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, who smuggled weapons so Hamas could kill Jews, came to believe that peace can only come through the reconciling power of the Prince of Peace.

He lives in America now, but speaks of returning to the Middle East—to love and not to hate.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

The Leadership Wisdom of Solomon: 28 Essential Strategies for Leading with Integrity
Pat Williams with Jim Denney
Cincinnati: Standard Publishing, 2010

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Chip Heath and Dan Heath
New York: Crown Business, 2010

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (Two People, One Year, Zero Watts)
Eric Brende
New York: Harper Perennial, 2004

Of the writing of leadership books there is no end. So much of what you read in one seems to be copied from others of them. In Pat Williams’s The Leadership Wisdom of Solomon, though, what impresses is not that there is anything new here, but that he quotes from or alludes to so many other sources.

The author’s credentials for addressing this subject are impressive. He has devoted his life to professional sports, not on the playing field or floor, but in the head office. He is cofounder of the Orlando Magic, radio personality, motivational speaker, and author of dozens of books.

My impression of this one? After a lifetime of reading about leadership, I picked up this volume with a yawn. But before long I woke up. If I were still preaching regularly, I’d want this one on my shelf for the illustrations alone. I like telling Vince Lombardi stories, and tales about Winston Churchill and Gerald Ford and Lee Iacocca and John Wooden and Pat Summitt and (negatively) Ken Lay and Jim Jones.

Williams has obviously read very widely and retained a lot of it. As he explains, “I read 3 or 4 books a week, between 150 and 200 books a year. My favorite subjects are the Bible, American history (especially the Civil War), the lives of great leaders, biographies of sports heroes, and principles of management and business leadership.”

Solomon is not really the subject of this study; he’s the excuse. Although each chapter rests on a verse from Proverbs or Ecclesiastes (from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase The Message), it rests very lightly. You won’t find much biblical exegesis here, but you will appreciate the practical applications.

This is not a book for reading straight through. Try a chapter a day, savoring one of Solomon’s/Williams’s nuggets at a time. This is, in fact, how Williams reads. “As soon as I spot a profound idea, a fascinating story, or some useful information, I slow down. I savor, I highlight and scribble notes in the margins.”

There’s a lot to savor here.

Make the Change

A megachurch pastor friend recommended Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch. He succeeded to the senior pastor’s role after having served several years as an associate. Following a successful older pastor is never an easy assignment. A congregation grows older with their leader; they also grow comfortable together, doing what they’ve always done, too much “at ease in Zion,” as the prophet Amos would grumble.

Now along comes the younger man, one whom they loved in his supportive role but are not quite so sure he’s up to being in charge now. His perspective is different. Things are changing. Too much. Too soon. Too discomfiting.

To my friend’s credit, though, his people are being patient with him. He has slightly unnerved, but not alienated, them. He moves tactfully, gracefully, as he encourages his congregation to adapt to changing times—while still being faithful to the church’s calling and mission. Because they know he loves them, they are giving him a fair chance to succeed.

I understand why he recommended Switch. It’s full of practical, doable advice. The authors know that most decisions—either to welcome change or resist it—are based on emotion, not reason. The astute leader, then, works with rather than against those emotions, building for the long haul, step by painstaking step, rather than for immediate gratification.

The book is built around three extended metaphors, all three essentials in fostering change.

First there is the Rider, people’s rational side, the side that thinks it is making the decisions, calling the shots, ready with a reasonable explanation for the thinker’s positions.

More powerful than the Rider—and the real dynamic to be reckoned with—is the Elephant he’s riding. This is a person’s emotional, instinctive side, where the real force either for change or against it exists.

The third is the Path, the surrounding environment through which a clear destination must be adopted and aimed for if any change is to occur.

The challenge for a leader is to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and define the Path. All three are necessary—and attainable—if positive change is to occur.

Flip the Switch

If you are feeling a little nostalgic for an earlier, simpler lifestyle, yearning to be liberated from the tyranny of mechanization and electrification, spend some time with Eric Brende in his Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. By the time I had finished reading this seductive chronicle of his family’s 18-month experiment in Amish-like living, complete with horse and buggy and engineless sowing and threshing and home-grown vittles, I was ready to sell out and move to the country.

But I’d take along my computer. And air conditioner. And central heating. And access to an airport. And, and, and, and.

OK, so I’m not quite ready for Brende’s radical formula for basic living. But this Yale- and MIT-educated intellectual and his adventurous wife—who are not opposed to technology, by the way, but only to being its slave, quite a different thing—practice what they preach, whether in the country or in the heart of urban St. Louis. They prove it is possible to live richly on a subsistence income. They really do take time to smell the roses.

Wanting to conduct an experiment in simple living, the Brendes moved to Amish country. There they discovered that the Amish aren’t all Amish. “What I had taken to be a homogenous Amish collective was actually an aggregation of Amish, Mennonites, and mainstream Americans from all corners of the country, bearing a variety of religious viewpoints, joined by one converging aim: to reclaim their lives from machines.” He began calling them Minimites, honoring Mennonite nonconformity “and their current predilection to gain a maximum of ends with a minimum of technological means.”

The Brendes’ experiment convinced them that “the main three ingredients of technological liberation are a pinch of muscle, a sprinkle of wits, and a dash of willingness.” It takes all three to abandon, as they did, cell phone, television set, family car, running water, refrigeration, and just about everything else we have taught ourselves to consider essential to the good life. What they found in their place were relationships, mutual helpfulness, peace of mind, and strengthened values.

Not a bad recipe for living.

Where’s the switch?

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee. 

By LeRoy Lawson

The Damnation of Theron Ware
Harold Frederic
Various editions; first published in 1896

Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
New York: Picador, 2004

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Richard Rohr
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011

Pastoral ministry can be among the hardest jobs there are—or the easiest. Since pastors are granted freedom to set their own schedules and priorities, the conscientious minister tends to work too hard and the indolent one finds every excuse to take it easy.

What this means is ministry attracts—or creates—the finest of characters or the worst. I’m exaggerating of course, but not by much. This fact hasn’t escaped the attention of novelists. You can find the whole range of pastoral types in fiction, but the best and worst dominate—especially the worst.

Take Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, for example. This book, considered Frederic’s masterpiece, first appeared in 1896 and is still in print. And it still dismays. The Reverend Mr. Ware, a small-town minister in a pastorate he persuades himself is far beneath him, enters his calling quite convinced of his many virtues. His precipitous fall is inevitable. With each ill-considered decision he unwittingly reveals more of his theological naiveté, his social snobbery, his worship of the dollar, his shallow education—and his susceptibility to the charms of strong women.

I quickly learned to dislike Rev. Ware. He represents too much that’s wrong with counterfeits in the ministry, and too much of what’s wrong with the rest of us. I kept reading, though, hoping he’d see the light. He did.

Memoir for the Sake of a Son

With relief I turned from Theron Ware to John Ames, the exemplary minister in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s surprising to learn in this secular era that a novel about a pastor could win—and so deserve winning—the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

This treasure must be read slowly. There’s much wisdom here. You want to savor old Pastor Ames’s humble reflections on life, love (and yes, hate), friendship, grace, and God. Widowed as a young man, Ames soldiers on for long, lonely years, serving without complaint or recognition his unexceptional congregation in the little Iowa community of Gilead. It’s his home church. His pacifist father had preached there before him, as did his grandfather, who had “preached men into the Civil War.” Relationships between fathers and sons are seldom easy. They aren’t in Gilead, either.

It’s for the sake of his son, though, that Pastor Ames writes his “autobiography.” In his late 70s, he is gradually succumbing to his final illness. After nearly a lifetime alone, he married an unadorned young woman who showed up in church one Sunday and kept coming back. She was in her late 30s and he in his late 60s when they married. It was not too late to father a son.

It’s to him these reflections are written, the father’s memoir to a boy too young to grasp it now but who, the father hopes, will read it after his father’s death and then know and understand the man who sired him, who loved him as much as life itself, and so much regretted he wouldn’t be around to see him grow into manhood.

I’ve made it sound too sentimental, but it is after all a love story: of a man for his younger wife, of an old father for his very young son, of a pastor for his flock, of a believer for his God. As an old reader myself, I am especially touched by his lifelong friendship with the Presbyterian minister in town and the grace required to accept that friend’s troubled, troubling son, the antithesis of what Ames hopes his own son will become. And as an old pastor who has just learned that a lifelong friend has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I identified too painfully with Ames’s love for the friend whose illness is gradually, inexorably robbing him of everything that defines him.

Gilead is a wonderful, simple place. You’ll like it here.

Insights for the Second Half

When several friends independently send me their order, “Lawson, you gotta read this one,” I read it. This time it’s Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.

They were right, my friends, to send me my orders. Rohr is a Franciscan priest, well into the second half of life, who has finished with chasing things. He wants no more to do with propping up a sagging ego or building bigger barns to store his accumulated stuff. He has become impatient with sideshows. He wants the real thing. He wants life.

Ask the typical first-half persons for their vision of the second half and you’ll get pictures of grumpy, drooling, shaky, graying used-to-be’s with bad breath, killing time until time betrays them. Again I exaggerate. But again, not by much. First-halfers can’t imagine the second half Rohr has in mind for us.

But the rich maturity he pictures doesn’t follow automatically at a certain age; in fact, many people never get there. It’s not about chronology, this thing called maturity. He has known some very young second-halfers, like a certain 11-year-old cancer patient, who have already found life. You only rise upward, you see, not by existing for so many years but by falling first, which means hurting, suffering, failing, sinning. That’s the paradox of life, so similar to Jesus’ “he who would save his life must lose it.”

Rohr says it is in the first half of life we create the container. Then, in the second half, we fill it.

Falling Upward is chock full of ponderables. Here are some samples:

• “Before the truth ‘sets you free,’ it tends to make you miserable.”

• “Wisdom comes when we discard our usual either/or thinking in favor of more seasoned both/and.” That doesn’t happen, Rohr insists, “without much prayer, self-doubt, study, and conversation.”

• “The Eight Beatitudes speak to you much more than the Ten Commandments now.”

• “At this stage, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. . . . I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, to ‘live simply so that others can simply live.’”

• “Ironically, we are more than ever before in a position to change people—but we do not need to—and that makes all the difference.”

• “We should not be surprised that most older people do not choose loud music, needless diversions, or large crowds. We move toward understimulations, if we are on the schedule of soul. Life has stimulated us enough, and now we have to process it and integrate it, however unconsciously.”

Those friends who insisted I read this book? They’re not young, as you probably guessed. I do have some first-half friends, though, I hope will read it—to get ready for a richer second half.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Semi-nary. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery
Richard Lischer
New York: Broadway Books, 2001

Answer His Call (2009)
Reflect His Character (2009)
Lead His Church (2010)
Enjoy His People (2011)
Jim Estep, David Roadcup, and Gary Johnson
Joplin: College Press

The Healthy Elder: Vital Signs of a Strong Leader
Jim Estep, David Roadcup, and Gary Johnson
e2 Effective Elders, 2012

Effective Elders: What Every Elder Should Know—a digital curriculum (CD/DVD combo)
Jim Estep, Gary Johnson, and David Roadcup
e2 Effective Elders 

By LeRoy Lawson

Messy: God Likes It that Way
A. J. Swoboda
Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2012

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
Daniel Goleman
New York: Bantam Books, 2006

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs
Marc Lewis
New York: PublicAffairs, 2012

Gutenberg the Geek
Jeff Jarvis
Kindle Single, 2012

By LeRoy Lawson

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
Boston and New York: Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2009, 2010

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
Barbara Brown Taylor
New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2009 (HarperOne)

Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life
Kathleen Norris
New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin Group), 2008

This month’s books are by three favorite female writers. Each has earned respect by life well-lived and books well-written.

The first is Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human, perhaps a surprising choice since I’m not exactly an animal person. We don’t have a dog, I’m allergic to cats, we can’t afford a horse, and birds are messy.

So why would I read another Grandin book about animals? To begin with, the title. I like it because, as she says, treating animals right is the humane (read human) thing to do; doing so makes us better.

Second, the author, Dr. Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University, is autistic. She is also one of the world’s leading authorities on both autism and animal behavior. She believes animals and autistic human beings function alike, so her “disability” gives her rare insight into how animals think and feel.

In this volume she concentrates on dogs, cats, cows, horses, pigs, chickens and other poultry, and wildlife. Practically every page offers insights that I, at least, did not previously have. This one, though, I already knew: “Dogs serve people, but people serve cats.” No surprise here.

She explains that four core emotions govern animals: seeking, rage, fear, and panic. She also notes the three other lesser-known ones that deserve attention: lust, care, and play.

Because of Grandin, I will never again consider animals—any animals—as nonthinking, nonfeeling, noncommunicative beings. We easily recognize a dog or cow’s physical pain; what I have been insensitive to is their emotional pain. I am not alone. Look at what we do to lions and polar bears and elephants and, and, and . . . when we trap them and cage them in zoos and isolate them from their kind. Horses should not be stabled away from their fellows; dogs should not be cooped up all day when the owner is away at work; pigs suffer from boredom. All this I did not know. (Chickens need someplace to hide when laying their eggs. I did know that.)

I read Animals Make Us Human on a farm back in my hometown, Tillamook, Oregon (home of that world-famous cheese). Just down the hill, cows were grazing—contentedly. These Tillamook farmers understand Grandin’s principles. They care about their herds; more than that, they care about their individual cows. So they listen, they protect, they don’t punish or frighten; they treat them as good humans should.

And, in return, their cows produce.

Doing with the Whole Person

My indebtedness to women of faith is huge. I am in the Christian church because of my mother. A woman minister (yes, minister!) in my home church was one of the defining influences of my life. Throughout my years of ministry, I have relied heavily, and with good reason, on the expertise of female colleagues. It should not surprise you, then, that I turn to some women authors when seeking spiritual insights that often elude us men.

Barbara Brown Taylor never lets me down. I may not always agree with her (a fact) in An Altar in the World, I may question her orthodoxy (another fact), I may even wonder about her choice of spiritual exercises (blessing the grass of the fields and the trees of the forest?), but she never fails to challenge me to more conscientious faith.

Her candor is refreshing. She has trouble with her prayer life, she says—yet gives good advice for improving it. She had trouble accepting her 5-foot 10-inch body (would that I had such a problem!). She couldn’t hold her first marriage together. She’s human. But she sees the holy in everything. Unnervingly so. Her kind of holiness isn’t just about the spirit (or the Spirit), but includes, indeed requires, the physical, even one’s unflattering and embarrassing bodily functions. (Bless the whole house, even the bathroom.)

This book on spirituality is not about believing with the mind or confessing with the lips, but doing with the whole person, from little things like making eye contact with the store clerk, to potentially big things like really observing the Sabbath (at least for me it would be a big thing to do nothing, nothing!, on the Sabbath).

If you are experiencing a little dryness in your daily walk with God, try this book. The lady is anything but dry.

Living Beyond Melancholy

Another favorite Christian writer is the poet Kathleen Norris, whose Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, explores how her life was enriched by her 30-year marriage, her association with a monastery near her South Dakota home, and the disciplines and disappointments attending her writing career.

I confess that when I saw Acedia on a discounted book table, I almost didn’t buy it. The title was a turnoff. Why would I want to read a depressing book about, well, depression? I’m glad I bought it, if only to be taught that acedia isn’t exactly depression. The word acedia is Latin for the condition ancient Greeks called black gall, fourth-century monks knew as the temptation to despair, and Petrarch named the nameless woe. Dante thought it a sin, Renaissance writers referred to it as melancholy, and others as spleen, ennui, and the noonday demon.

Choose whatever synonym you want. It’s still not exactly an alluring subject, is it?

But in Norris’s able hands, it’s one worth studying. The writer, whose undergraduate days were marked by profligacy and rebellion, has spent her postcollege days exploring what it actually means to be Christian, to walk humbly and deeply with our God. Though a Protestant, she set out to learn the contemplative life, to her great benefit. Each of her later books probes the spiritual meaning of her own life, marriage, and writing. Life, even in a small Midwestern town, must be more than daily.

There is much autobiography here, dominated by her husband’s many illnesses and eventual death, and the acedia that dogged her steps as she took over the chores for both of them.

She quotes Fred Craddock’s illuminating definition of sloth. What could be dismissed as mere laziness, he says, is “the ability to look at a starving child . . . with a swollen stomach and say, ‘Well, it’s not my kid.’” She is offended by “that capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don’t care.”

“Dante . . . discerns in the sin of sloth a refusal to do what love requires. Acedia renders us unable to live committed to another person and to the changes the relationship with that person demands of us when it no longer offers the enticements of a new romance but has been scarred by pain, loss, and the passage of time.”

I love what she says about psychoanalysis, quoting Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: “Psychoanalysis is good at explaining things but it is not an efficient way to change them. . . . When I hear of psychoanalysis being used to ameliorate depression, I think of someone standing on a sandbar and firing a machine gun at the incoming tide.”

The final section consists of quotations from many cultures and centuries. Here are just three of the thought-provoking samples:

Karl Menninger: “Let it stand that there is a sin of not doing, of not knowing, of not finding out what one must do—in short, of not caring. This is the literal meaning of acedia.”

Dorothy Sayers: “[Sloth] is the sin that believes nothing, cares to know nothing, seeks to know nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing . . . and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”

Vaclav Havel: “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

Worth pondering, don’t you think?

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson
New York: Doubleday, 2010

The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life
Robert E. Webber
Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006

Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith
Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg
Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009

Some authors are hard to resist. I’d already read several Bill Bryson books (Mother Tongue, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything), so when I came across At Home: A Short History of Private Life, I didn’t even thumb through it before buying. I knew it would be good. It is.

This man is nosy about everything, as an earlier title demonstrates. In At Home, he turns his attention from the marvels of universe and the peculiarities of cultures to the most mundane of subjects: how we live. Every day.

His investigation began with his family’s purchase of a 19th-century former Church of England rectory. Where did it come from? What was it like new? What was its setting in Norfolk? How did the country parson who lived there live there? For that matter, what was his home like when his home itself was new?

To find out, he examines the rectory room by room, each room a chapter. Along the way you’ll learn a lot—probably more than you want to know—about the everydayness of private life in the Western world, with little essays on such things as how sewage gets disposed of, what a difference ice makes, what made glass so expensive in the early days, why Shakespeare’s will left his wife his second-best bed (and why that wasn’t an insult). I didn’t know before this book that for a long, long time cosmetics were toxic and fashions (such as hoopskirts and crinolines) were downright dangerous.

I don’t need to tell you what subjects the bedroom brings to Bryson’s research. In the kitchen he regales us with tales of gluttony and the curious cuisine of various cultures—and scary examinations of the actual ingredients (and vermin infestations) in certain dishes popular even today. The author roams from prehistory through the products of the industrial revolution (consider the lawn mower—or the mousetrap) to the luxury of the modern bath (an indulgence not always approved of).

A good reminder for us pampered moderns fixated on privacy is this: for most of human history it simply didn’t exist. Families slept together, usually without beds of their own. Homes consisted of one large room, the “hall,” a smoke-filled enclosure. There were no chimneys; their invention in the 14th century made an upstairs and other downstairs rooms—hence some privacy—possible.

Bryson builds his book around the Victorian rectory, so most of the history here deals with the 19th century, but with frequent excursions elsewhere, along the way sharing, like the encyclopedic tour guide he is, bits of trivia—and the not-so-trivial
—in a tour so captivating you want to stay with him to the very end. Which I did.

Embraced by God
Few things make me more uncomfortable than other people’s attempts to get me to be more spiritual. They just haven’t worked. When in the company of the pious, I feel consigned to the great unwashed. These feelings of unworthiness helped drive me to resign when I was a young minister; they had to be overcome before, eight years later, I could return to the pulpit. Overcome is not the right word. They weren’t. I just finally accepted I would never be worthy, but my task, after all, was to point to the Worthy One. That I could do.

In The Divine Embrace, Robert Webber writes for people like me. He does not prescribe seven simple steps to holiness, nor insist we check our minds at the door and enter into some mystical or emotional suspension of all skepticism. He does not measure spirituality by what we don’t do.

Instead, in a comprehensive review of worship through the ages, he reminds us again and again that spirituality is more about accepting and living in what God has done for us in Christ than about what we do for him. It isn’t reaching toward God; it’s receiving his “divine embrace.” Thus the spiritual life is life affirming, not life denying. It both contemplates God’s story and participates actively in it; it is “relational, lived theology.”

Webber asserts “that evangelicals, having separated spirituality from God’s vision, practice spiritualities of legalism, intellectualism, and experientialism.” We have gone astray by situating spirituality in the self, where “I keep the rules; I know God in a system of thought; I had a born-again experience.” The real locus should be “in the story of the Triune God” who “restored my union with himself. Now, having been baptized into this great mystery, I contemplate God’s work for me and the whole world, and I participate in God’s purposes for the world revealed in Jesus Christ. Spirituality is a gift. The spiritual life is the surrendered life.”

The Divine Embrace is part of Webber’s Ancient-Future series, a helpful excursion showing how biblical teaching (to which he returns again and again) has been lost through the centuries, and calling for a return to God-centered spirituality. Recognizing God’s initiative makes baptism, for example, not a means by which we work our way into God’s favor, but a grateful response to God’s graciousness.

Here is Webber’s summary of God’s story: “He created us to be in union with himself; that unity was broken, but Jesus brought us back into union by becoming one of us, demonstrating what true humanity looks like, by dying to destroy death in the world, and by rising lifting us with him into God’s embrace.”

That’s something we can sink ourselves into.

Taught by Jesus
We turn from the serious theology of Dr. Webber to the still serious but more popular writing in Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg’s Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus. Combining illustrations from their personal investigations with scholarly snippets from their research, the authors ask, “Just how Jewish was Jesus?”

Their answer? Very, from the tassels of his prayer shawl to his rabbinical teaching methods, Jesus, the Son of God, was also Son of Man, a first-century Jewish man at that. To fail to grasp that his humanness was grounded in the people he grew up with, who believed they were God’s chosen people, is to miss many nuances of his character, habits, and teaching.

It’s also to miss how powerfully the Old Testament infuses the New. Recognizing the Lord’s Supper’s Jewish antecedents, for example, enriches Communion. Discipleship also takes on deepened meaning—and heightened expectations. The kingdom of God remains mysterious and complex, as it was to Jesus’ first disciples, but thanks to these authors we are warned against a reductionist “explanation” that distorts Jesus’ meaning.

Though the authors do not parade their theological depth in this introduction to the Jewish roots of Christianity, they can be taken seriously. Spangler is an award-winning author, Tverberg a cofounder of the En-Gedi Resource Center for research into the Jewish roots of Christianity.

In this collaboration they urge us to shed the common tendency to take verses out of context, seeking only to find “what this passage means to me.” Instead, they give insight into what Jesus’ teaching meant to Jesus, and why he could teach with such authority: “But I say unto you. . . . ”

Each chapter closes with suggestions for living as one of Jesus’ talmidim (disciples).

At the feet of the Rabbi. There’s no better classroom.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

AMY HANSON
Speaker, writer, and consultant

When I first heard about Amy Hanson, I had to ask twice to be certain my unreliable hearing hadn’t deceived me. She’s the 50s-plus ministry director? At the huge Central Christian Church in Las Vegas? And she’s how old?

Yes, I had heard it right. She was not yet 30 and was in charge of a megachurch’s older adult programming.

Dr. Amy Hanson is one of the most dynamic young leaders among us. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can check out Amy’s blog at amyhanson.org, where you’ll find her addressing such topics as aging (she’s a gerontologist—a professional student of us old people), how to have a baby boomer ministry, how to encourage intergenerational relationships in the church, evangelism, and church planting, and many other topics. (In a recent post she even wrote about binge drinking among people 65 and older, a not-so-well-kept secret afflicting our age group.)

What can this remarkable, still-young woman do for your church? You can take advantage of Dr. Hanson’s expertise by inviting her for a weekend workshop on aging, volunteerism, creating a seniors’ ministry, coping with Alzheimer’s, and other topics.

And for certain, read her book Baby Boomers and Beyond. She understands us!

—LeRoy Lawson, international consultant, CMF International; professor of Christian ministries, Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee; contributing editor, CHRISTIAN STANDARD; and a member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee

Meet Our Contributing Editors: In this, the second of our series of interviews with CHRISTIAN STANDARD’s contributing editors, an elder statesman talks about—and speaks to—the young leaders our movement is producing.

By Mark A. Taylor

Just as most Americans don’t think they’re wealthy, most American Christians don’t think affluence has affected their faith. And American church workers likewise don’t see how money influences the way they approach ministry.

A realistic look at the issue comes only with time and distance. Perhaps that is why LeRoy Lawson needs to be heard when he talks about our ministry and our stuff. Having served in ministry for more than 50 years, he remembers an America not as accustomed to comfort as most in the middle class today. Having served with Christian Missionary Fellowship, he has made more than one visit to the Two Thirds World where starvation is staved only by hard work.

Lawson touched on the subject in his “Beyond the Standard” audio interview July 18*. When I asked him to comment on young leaders today, I was surprised by his answer.

“I think young leaders have been negatively influenced by our affluence,” he said, adding, “You work harder when you’re hungry.”

He continued, “We simply have too much stuff, and we place too much importance on the stuff. That has contributed to our tendency to see ourselves as professional instead of as servants of the Lord. It has taught us to measure our success in numbers and dollars rather than fulfilling our call.”

Indeed, we wonder how many ministerial interviews center on the person’s sense of calling as compared with time spent negotiating salary packages. “When I was ordained, I really did think I was taking vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity,” Lawson said. “I never expected that I ever would have any money, because I was going into the ministry. That was the understanding.”

He hastened to add that he’s not defending such a viewpoint. “But it unnerves me,” he said, “to hear the kind of financial negotiation that happens whenever a minister is considering moving to a different church. That kind of talk is possible only in an affluent society. You can’t imagine that kind of talk from an African minister working in the bush.”

Yes, we all agree that a worker is worthy of adequate pay. We concede that a minister evangelizing affluent people should not live as a pauper among them. And he should not be forced into a standard of living well below that experienced by most of his church members.

But I wonder if I would hear a call from God to accomplish greater good but at a lesser pay. And Lawson’s comments push me to ponder how our stuff, as he puts it, stymies spiritual growth and impact in many circles.

*Hear Lawson’s “Beyond the Standard” interview, along with several others, at www.blogtalkradio.com/standardpublishing.

By LeRoy Lawson

Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story
Ken and Joni Eareckson Tada
Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013

On Point: Four Steps to Better Life Teams
Del Harris
Charleston: Advantage Media Group, 2012

God According to God: A Scientist Discovers We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along
Gerald L. Schroeder
New York: HarperOne, 2009

What I like best about Joni & Ken is that I have finally learned more about that shadowy figure who has for more than 30 years been husband, caregiver, friend, and source of strength for one of modern Evangelicalism’s leading ladies. From the moment she began sharing her story as a young woman, Joni Eareckson Tada has captivated us with her faith, courage, beauty, and her many talents. The teenager who broke her neck in a diving accident and wanted to commit suicide rather than live as a helpless quadriplegic has inspired millions. No longer young, she still inspires with her writing, broadcasting, speaking, and painting. We love Joni.

But who is Ken? What kind of man would pledge his life to a woman who can do almost nothing for herself? It’s not as if this teacher and coach didn’t already have a full life. How much can be expected of a guy?

Joni and Ken are convinced that God brought them together and kept them there. Yet theirs is no Cinderella tale, stepping from the altar to live happily ever after. They have had enough stresses and strains to sink the best of marriages. In this story, Cinderella didn’t marry the prince, but a footman. Joni is always the celebrity, thronged by adoring crowds. How much of being Mr. Joni Eareckson can a man stand?

This man has stood a lot; he knows much about the Spirit of Christ.

And like Jesus, Ken is experienced in foot washing. His wife cannot bathe herself, brush her teeth, attend to the details of the toilet, turn herself in bed to prevent sores, and on and on.

Then, after 28 years of marriage, comes breast cancer. Now Joni’s condition is not only uncomfortable and discomforting, but life-threatening. One paragraph summarizes Ken’s plight:

For Ken, the prospect of losing Joni to cancer had changed everything, making all the baggage relating to her disability seem minor. Quadriplegia? It was so minor it was hardly worth mentioning. Chronic pain? Oh, my, they could deal with that. The major thing now was saving her life. As John Eldredge had said, Ken had a battle to fight and a beauty to rescue. Drawing deeper on divine resources, Ken took his caregiving skills into overdrive. He was at Joni’s side through her mammogram, biopsy, mastectomy, recovery, and chemotherapy. He was her constant companion for countless hospital visits and oncology appointments, and her counselor as they sought out second and third opinions. He was on the phone with doctors, haggling with insurance companies, and keeping a meticulous record of everything in his spiral notebook. He was on this.

As for Joni, this is how the book summarizes her plight:

Paralysis.
Crushing pain on top of paralysis.
Cancer on top of crushing pain.
Radical mastectomy on top of cancer.
Chemotherapy on top of mastectomy.
Pneumonia on top of chemotherapy.
And intense spiritual warfare with dark, malevolent spirits on top of it all.

Not a happily-ever-after fairy tale, Joni & Ken is a compelling story about a love that will not let go, that deepens through trials, that discovers God in the midst of pain. It is love as communion of souls who are strong where the flesh is weak.

The story is told dramatically—even melodramatically by my tastes. Still, I’m glad I read it. Joni I knew; now I’ve met Ken.

Leadership Principles

My favorite coach? He’s Del Harris, NBA Coach of the Year when he was with the Los Angeles Lakers, coach also with the Houston Rockets, the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Texas Legends (a Dallas Mavericks affiliate), which he now serves as general manager.

You will question my objectivity when I add that Harris is a graduate of Milligan College, where I was once vice president (after Harris had graduated). And if I add that Harris helped us build a new student center at Hope International University during my tenure there. And then add how he has also later helped Milligan and Dallas Christian College. He’s “one of us” and loyal to his roots.

I wanted to read Harris’s new book On Point: Four Steps to Better Life Teams because I so respect this man for openly living his faith before the public and his players—including those on the Chinese National Team he coached in the 2004 Olympics.

In On Point, the coach delivers his pep talk on leadership. After 50 years of coaching, he has earned the right to be heard. His illustrations are mostly from basketball, naturally. There isn’t anything radically new here; there are only so many leadership principles, after all.

What I didn’t expect, though, and was delighted to discover, is Harris’s immersion in Scripture. The second half of the book is a virtual Bible study. The coach turns to it repeatedly because these Scriptures, not the sports world, provide the real foundation for his “four steps to better life teams.”

Faith of a Scientist

Gerald Schroeder is ambitious, if nothing else. A three-time graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a PhD in physics and the earth sciences, Schroeder is both scientist and Orthodox Jewish theologian. His subtitle’s claim—that he has discovered the truth about God that the rest of us may have missed—boasts the good professor has boldly gone where most have feared to dare.

Usually I’m turned off by such claims. Really? All theologians until now have been duped? Come on.

Ignore the hype, then, but not the substance. Schroeder has done his homework. So when . . .

• he studies the origins of life and finds good reasons to believe there is a God

• he stands in awe of how intelligently God placed planet earth to sustain life in an otherwise hostile galactical environment

• he argues persuasively that God gave nature a mind of its own

• he says God wants you and me to debate with God as Abraham and Moses did . . .

. . . well, you are impressed with Schroeder’s argument in spite of yourself.

He is a conservative, a very conservative, reader of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) in particular and the Bible in general. He pays attention to the Hebrew. He wants to know in particular what the words mean and how their meanings form (or should form) our understanding of God.

He makes a strong case—and he returns to it like a motif running throughout the book—that when Moses demands to know the name of God, the typical rendering of God’s response (“I am that which I am”) should more correctly be, “I will be that which I will be.” That’s not a subtle difference. All at once our picture of God who is unchanging, unmoved, and unmoving, becomes a God who is flexible, responsive to new situations, and in dynamic partnership with his creation.

What I found provocative is the author’s refusal to box God into our Western enlightenment categories: God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient—all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing—and unchanging. He says such a God is simply not to be found in the Bible. There God appears in dialogue with humanity, alive and responsive to the created world. He understands why atheists hate the God usually presented to them. He has little use for that God also, but reverence for God “according to God.”

Reading the Bible with Schroeder as guide, we meet a God who regrets (the flood of Noah), who wrestles (argues) with us (Jacob), who changes his mind (Moses convincing God to spare the Israelites), and who gives and takes away and gives again (Job).

I couldn’t absorb all this in my first reading, so I’m going to read it again. Few books compel me to do so.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue
Edwin H. Friedman
New York: The Guilford Press, 1985

A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix
Edwin H. Friedman
New York: Seabury Books, 2007

Friedman’s Fables
Edwin H. Friedman
New York: The Guilford Press, 1990

Where was Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation when I needed it? It’s out of print now, published in 1985, but fortunately still available in used books at Amazon.com. I would have missed this one if it hadn’t been for a highly regarded minister friend who said, “This is a must-read.”

He said it revolutionized his pastoral counseling and his view of church leadership. It didn’t do that for me. Rather, it confirmed some of my longstanding convictions, the primary one being that churches (Rabbi Friedman would add synagogues, other organizations of all kinds) function like families, with all the blessings, privileges, frustrations, hidden emotional agendas, and intergenerational complications appertaining thereto.

Friedman’s major sections deal with family theory (understanding how families function), individual families within the congregation, the congregation itself as a family system, and the personal family of the clergy member (whether priest, rabbi, or minister). While his writing verges on the academic and cannot be skimmed through, each successive chapter repeats basic premises and offers enough case studies that after awhile there comes an “aha!” moment.

He offers practical suggestions to keep leaders from being captured by their followers, family members (of every generation) from manipulating or abusing one another, everyone from thinking the real issue is the so-called “reasonable” or stated one rather than the emotional or hidden one.

There are dysfunctional families. There are also dysfunctional churches. The dynamics, he cogently argues, are the same.

My long-favorite metaphor for the church is “the family of God.” Not that our behavior in church is always godlike. It isn’t. But it’s always like family.

Reading this book is like conversing with an intelligent, perceptive, unpredictable friend. Some of Rabbi Friedman’s counseling techniques—such as repeating information gained in the counselor’s office to the person the counselee has been critical of—strike me as extreme. As he recounts the incidents, though, his “tattling” seems to work. He’s not proposing we break confidences. He’s shifting the responsibility off the shoulders of the counselor and onto the offending and offended persons, often with positive effects.

His techniques are not for the timid, certainly not for what he calls the “undifferentiated” leader—the leader whose ego is so involved in and dependent on his congregation or family members that he cannot act independently, even when not to do so is endangering relationships and himself/herself. The antidote to such ineffectiveness, in addition to becoming a more independent personality, is to move into a less anxious mode, even while being more “present” to members of the congregation and family. A tall order, yet exactly the right prescription.

I’m going to read this book again, taking better notes next time. A few more sessions with this family counselor will make a better leader (and father/husband/grandfather) out of me.

Full of Insight

Well, Generation to Generation didn’t satisfy. Not because it isn’t a good book, but because it is such a good book. I wanted to read more by this wise man, so I turned to A Failure of Nerve. It is one of the most insightful books on leadership I have read.

It doesn’t differ all that much from the first one. Same themes, same warnings, same call to decisiveness and healthy self-differentiation, but with reflections written after 10 more years of thinking about the subject.

The author was an ordained Jewish rabbi and family therapist who worked in Washington, D.C., for 35 years. He founded Bethesda Jewish Congregation. Ah, how like churches are such synagogues.

Friedman’s family and friends completed A Failure of Nerve, most of which he wrote before his 1996 death. Once again he calls for separating oneself from the emotional miasma encircling all leaders; being certain of one’s values and vision; taking risks and being vulnerable; and expecting resistance and even sabotage from opponents (and the more successfully objectives are met, the fiercer that resistance and sabotage will be).

Several years ago I retired after a 20-year pastorate, and then retired again after 13 years as a small university president. Reading the author’s analysis of the leadership challenges in family, congregation, corporation, and university brings back memory upon memory. The man has been there. He feels our pain.

He describes the failure of nerve in America that undercuts leaders “who try to stand tall amidst the raging anxiety-storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading all the institutions of our society—a regressive mood that contaminates the decision-making processes of government and corporations at the highest level, and, on the local level, seeps down into the deliberations of neighborhood church, synagogue, hospital, library, and school boards.”

Sabotage is inevitable, “not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether the ‘territory’ is a family or an organization.”

The effective leader is “someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others, and therefore be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing.”

What the real leader needs, then, is not more information; too much of it can paralyze. Friedman’s ideal leader shuns the quick fix, provides calmness, clarity, and decisiveness. He exhibits stamina for the long haul, and accepts personal responsibility and rejects blame placing. “The emphasis here will be on strength, not pathology, on challenge, not comfort, on self-differentiation, not herding for togetherness. This is a difficult perspective to maintain in a ‘seatbelt society’ more oriented toward safety than adventure.”

As I said, these are familiar words to one who has read Generation to Generation. But they bear repeating, if only because these qualities seem so rare in our culture of anxiety.

Full of Delight

And now for dessert.

After the solid meat of Generation to Generation and A Failure of Nerve, we turn for a refreshing repast of parables to Friedman’s Fables. Here are the same lessons, but offered in digestible, delightful morsels that leave a pleasing—even if provocative—aftertaste. If you didn’t understand the Rabbi’s message in the other volumes, you will here, if only because of the helpful study guide sold with it.

I’m glad I read the books in this order, and without the discussion questions. Fables would have left me puzzled, the morals often not obvious. With the background of the earlier reading, though, they are immediately apparent.

And what are the morals? Here are a few:

“The Bridge” — When things start going really well, watch out.

“The Friendly Forest” — Reasonableness is the natural manure of terrorism.

“Round in Circles” — The most difficult habit to break is breaking the habit of others.

“Raising Cain” — The Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

“The Power of Belief” — The way to cure an ostrich is to make him afraid of the dark.

“Attachment” — The umbilical cord is infinitely elastic.

Jesus taught in parables in which everyday incidents are fraught with eternal truth. Dr. Friedman’ simple stories have similar power.

Twenty-four fables are here, all helpful.

Enjoy your dessert.

LeRoy Lawson serves as international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth
Richard J. Foster
New York: HarperOne, originally published in 1978

In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership
Henri J. M. Nouwen
New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989

Communicating for a Change
Andy Stanley and Lane Jones
Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2006

Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend
Andy Stanley
Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012

Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples
Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger
Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2006

Recently Milligan College and Christian Standard asked veteran ministers on behalf of those beginning their ministerial journey, “What are the top five books that must be read to give encouragement, advice, and counsel?” An amazing array of nearly 300 titles were submitted. Only 68 books were mentioned more than once. The top five received from 11 to 13 votes. I agree that all of these are worth studying. Here are my thoughts, beginning with Book No. 1.

Submission and Celebration

I was surprised to see Richard Foster’s The Celebration of Discipline at the top of the list. I read it when it first appeared in 1978. It helped me then. Its relevance hasn’t diminished.

Three of the five books promote pragmatic, energetic, businesslike churchmanship. In contrast, Foster’s immersion in the classic Christian disciplines reminds us that often in a determined walk with Christ, less is more, weakness is power, submission is freedom, and discipline leads to a life of celebration.

My favorite chapter extols the discipline of service. I too often stumble in practicing the more inward ones like meditation, prayer, and fasting. Quietness does not keep easy company with my metabolism. In serving, though, I can do and in doing feel a closeness with the Lord.

My point is this: if someone like me, with a will to walk with God but without a natural affinity for doing so, can find encouragement to experiment with—yes, and experience the joys of—the less naturally compatible disciplines (inward, outward, and corporate ones), then it’s no wonder that Foster’s modern classic receives the top vote as a must-read for young pastors. There’s something here to help everyone.

Leading by Serving

The best part of Henri Nouwen’s little book In the Name of Jesus is the epilogue. Here his mentally disabled friend Bill Van Buren from Daybreak (the L’Arche community for mentally disabled communities to which Nouwen moved following his Harvard professorship) helps him deliver his speech for the Center for Human Development in Washington, D.C.

The professor undoubtedly impressed the audience with the cogency of his remarks; his simple friend Bill, though, stole the show. Nouwen counseled against the temptations that ensnare leaders (“the desire to be relevant, the desire for popularity, and the desire for power”); Bill unconsciously displayed the genuine power of irrelevance, weakness, and simple love.

Read Nouwen’s speech for its insights into servant leadership. Read of Bill’s partnership in the gospel to learn equally important lessons from one who is unschooled—but learned in what really matters.

One Thought, Messy Lives

Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change clears up a mystery for this older reviewer. For years the big name in Atlanta was Charles Stanley. His sermons were eagerly heard all over America—and beyond. Then his tragic divorce sent him into eclipse. But the Stanley name soon reemerged bigger than ever. Only this time it was attached to Charles’s son Andy.

Was the young man riding on his father’s coattails? Was it just another case of “like father, like son”? No, to both questions. If young Stanley had published only one book, this one would be enough to prove he has uncanny insight into what is required to speak to and be heard by his own generation. That answers the “coattails” question. Andy stands on his own merit.

The second question? No, he’s quite unlike his father, whom he calls the master of the pointed sermon (you know, like the infamous “three points and a poem”—a saying he doesn’t attribute to his dad). In place of the traditional deductive sermon, designed to teach the Bible, he proposes thinking of the sermon “outline” as the route of the journey you are leading others along.

The first half of the book is pure fiction, a story in which a truck driver/preacher undertakes the task of teaching a young pastor how to connect with people and not merely preach at them. In the second half Stanley spells out his five-point sermon outline:

• Me—the preacher starts here but then quickly moves to

• We—the common ground shared by preacher and congregation. Then comes

• God—what’s revealed in Scriptures, the truth to be applied to and by

• You—the hearers. Then the final note of inspiration in which

• We (all of us) imagine a future in which we actually live this message.

Since people carry only one idea away from any sermon, anyway, Stanley’s argument for the one-point sermon makes good sense.

Two books by Andy Stanley in the “best five” list! It would be easy for a writer like me to resent a success like Stanley. Except that instead of resenting, when I finished reading I felt like singing the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Of course, I couldn’t do that, because Handel is so yesterday! And not being yesterday if you wish to build a church to reach today’s unchurched population is what Deep and Wide is all about.

That means, among many things, inviting in and accepting people who are a mess—which is just about everybody, isn’t it? So you offer truth and grace, in equal measures. As Stanley says, “Either you were a mess, are a mess, or are one dumb decision away from becoming a mess.” It’s when we are at our messiest that Jesus takes us just as we are. So does his body, the church, when it’s being true to its calling.

Sometimes Stanley shakes me up, as when he reports that his church requires candidates to agree to be filmed before they can be baptized. No scriptural precedent for that one! But such powerful testimonies their videos make.

The point is that everything his church is and does is about the disaffected, unconnected person—the person Christ came to save. While the content of worship services, including the preaching, is true to the gospel and rooted in the Word, the experience is tailored to appeal to non-Christians. As the author says repeatedly, our purpose is not to babysit the model that once may have been attractive but has grown stale, even a turnoff, over time.

North Point Ministries (33,000 people meeting each weekend in seven Atlanta-area churches—plus 15,000 more in 25 churches outside metro Atlanta) warns churches not to be so in love with its model of doing things that it accidentally abandons its mission. Here’s the key to staying on target:

Marry your mission.

Date your model.

Fall in love with your vision.

Stay mildly infatuated with your approach,

For a lasting, fruitful, ever-renewing ministry, stay married—to your mission.

Good plan.

It’s Simple!

The last book of the five is an old friend, one I’ve used in teaching church leadership: Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger’s Simple Church. All organizations are threatened by a natural drift from the simple vision that energized their founder to the often paralyzing structures and multiplied programs that thwart their attempts to grow and respond to a changing environment. Simple Church calls churches back to that original simplicity.

“To have a simple church,” the authors advise, “leaders must ensure that everything their church does fits together to produce life change. They must design a simple process that pulls everything together, a simple process that moves people toward spiritual maturity.” It’s all so, well, simple.

To achieve it, though, “the leadership and the church are clear about the process (clarity) and are committed to executing it. The process flows logically (movement) and is implemented in each area of the church (alignment). The church abandons everything that is not in the process (focus).”

Abandonment. That’s where courage comes in, as anyone knows who has ever tampered with the status quo.

Andy Stanley makes his appearance in this book, also, his North Point Church held up as a model of simplicity. “The reason North Point is able to do things so well is because they have chosen ‘to only do a few things.’”

And do them well.

You’ll want to check out chapter 8, “Saying No to Almost Everything.” That means reducing special events, combining new events with existing programs, rethinking Christmas services and youth events, and choosing to use special events strategically.

It’s simple.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

Fermat’s Last Theorem
Simon Singh
London: Fourth Estate, 2002

Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
Edward J. Larson
New York: The Modern Library, 2006 

Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science
Ian Sample
New York: Basic Books, 2010

Confession is good for the soul, the saying goes—and it is. Whether it is good for the column is quite another matter.

Today’s books are held together by a common theme: things I don’t know. I am way, way out of my field here. But just as when driving you get lost and find yourself drinking in sights and sounds you’ve never seen or heard before, so sometimes dipping into books whose authors and subjects are new to you can do the same.

Mathematics

We’ll start with mathematics.

As I was planning for my senior year of high school, I asked my minister whether I should take algebra II or world history. I had already felt called to become a preacher, so I wanted my preacher’s counsel. He knew what I didn’t, that I’d be studying history the rest of my life. So he recommended math.

I didn’t take his advice, and I’ve regretted it ever since. To make up for my ignorance, I crack open a history of math book from time to time. I seldom understand the math, but the history fascinates me. Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem is my latest attempt.

One of mathematics’ many fields is called numbers theory. It attracts devotees who have fallen in love with numbers as numbers, who find certain of their configurations and combinations beautiful in themselves. Out of such beauty comes practicality, as in the algorithms that govern our computers; out of it also comes a host of puzzles.

One of the most daunting of all such puzzles is known as Fermat’s last theorem, which states that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two.

Don’t worry if you can’t solve it. Nobody else could for 350 years, from the time amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat in the 17th century proposed it in a note he scribbled in the margin of his copy of an ancient Greek text (Arithmetica by Diopohantus). The note wasn’t discovered until after Fermat’s death, preserved in a book by his son. Fermat claimed he had discovered a proof that the so-called Diophantine equation has no solution—but he didn’t offer that proof.

So for centuries mathematical sleuths hunted for it. And failed. And failed again. Not until Princeton University Professor Andrew Wiles, working primarily on his own, triumphed in 1995, and in effect, brought an end to an era. Singh wraps his book around Wiles’s obsession, building suspense as a good whodunit does, until by the climax no other outcome is acceptable. Professor Wiles must prevail.

A friend of mine read an interview with Wiles. “I remember him saying that he wasn’t the brightest mathematician in the world,” he wrote me, “but that he did have the ability to stay with a difficult problem for a long, long time . . . nibbling away at it . . . leaving it and coming back to it . . . viewing it from different angles,” and finally solving it. You can’t help cheering for such a man.

What really captured me in Fermat’s Last Theorem was not the math; it was the stories of commitment, of humility, of religious fervor, which drives men of science like Andrew Wiles.

Evolution

Let’s tackle evolution next.

One semester, Mr. Whitney, my high school biology teacher, challenged his sophomore students to contract with him for our grades. Average work was worth a C, better work and more of it earned a B, and going all out could get you an A. I opted for the A.

My project was to write a paper on evolution. I didn’t know anything about it but I knew I was against it. To make my case I read pretty widely for a sophomore, interviewed several experts, and eventually turned in a 60-page tome.

I got my A. And Mr. Whitney—not then but later, when I realized the extent of the man’s integrity—got my admiration. A convinced evolutionist, he must have disagreed with everything I wrote. Yet he heard me out, rewarding my diligence, even while questioning my conclusions. Not every student is treated so respectfully.

The subject was evolution, but the larger lesson learned was an educational one—to be certain to hear all sides of an issue, to read and listen to authors and commentators you agree and disagree with before rushing to judgment. Mr. Whitney modeled this for me.

It was with him in mind that I picked up Edward J. Larson’s Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory. My teacher would have liked this book. Larson succinctly traces the great evolution debate from its early (earlier than Charles Darwin) proponents to today’s political shootouts as creationists (or intelligent designers) and evolutionists try to protect tender young minds from the “other side.” Along the way he introduces prominent names (Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, Ronald Fisher, James Watson and Francis Crick, et al.) and briefly details the developments and arguments among evolutionists and between them and their creationist opponents.

If you pick up this book, stay with it until the final pages. Larson brings the reader up to date on recent discoveries in genetics, the field that explains why we look like our ancestors—and why it’s so hard to pin down flu viruses. Helpful information.

So much has happened since my high school years. Evolution helped me fill in some blanks. I found myself reading respectfully. Mr. Whitney would be proud.

Physics

A third huge hole in my education is physics. I chose chemistry instead. No harm done, I thought, since I wouldn’t be using this science as a minister.

What was I thinking? In my lifetime human beings have been to the moon and back; we’ve probed Mars, developed nuclear power (for better or for worse), populated cyberspace, and gone subatomic. The absolutist world of Newton has yielded to Einstein’s relativist one. Remember when the smallest divisible things were atoms? Now we talk about quarks and protons and neutrinos and. . . .

And the Higgs boson. We aren’t even sure it exists. It needs to, though, if scientists are going to resolve some inconsistencies in nuclear physics. Scientists conjecture there is a large elementary particle that is critical in turning energy to mass (hence the title of Ian Sample’s Massive). It is so critical, in fact, that governments are spending billions constructing immense “colliders” so they can shoot particles at each other to see what happens.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe and the Tevatron at Fermilab in America are competing for the honor of being the first to discover Higgs boson. If it exists.

Almost 50 years ago, Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh asked the simple question that has had physics in an expensive uproar ever since: why do most basic particles have mass? Why aren’t they like light particles, which don’t? Higgs guessed that particles get their mass (or at least part of it) by interacting with a so far undetected field. They want to detect it. They’re calling it Higgs boson in his honor. They think it’ll be heavy (by atomic standards) and have a very brief life, something like a hundred trillionths of a trillionth of a second!

The hunt is on.

Why have I written so unauthoritatively about three books that betray my ignorance? To be honest, this has been a spiritual exercise for me, a reminder of the prayer of the Breton fisherman, “O, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” I may be tempted, from time to time, to feel a little puffed up. I have a college education. I preach and teach and write. Some people may think I’m somebody or that I know something.

In case you are one of those people, I wrote this column for you. Now you know better.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City. Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.

By LeRoy Lawson

Honest Questions, Honest Answers: How to Engage in Compelling Conversations about Your Christian Faith
David Faust
Cincinnati: Standard Publishing, 2012

Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds
Sanjay Gupta
New York: Wellness Center, 2009

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Laura Hillenbrand
New York: Random House, 2010

David Faust is known: pastor, preacher, author, columnist, editor, professor, university president, and national Christian leader. We don’t have a more prominent leader in the Christian churches/churches of Christ.

His reputation is reason enough to read Honest Questions, Honest Answers. It’s not why I read it, though. There is simply no one whose “take” on practical Christian living I listen to more carefully. His is a vibrant, positive—cheerful—faith. But not an untested one. He has taken on some very tough jobs (college presidency, anyone?) and somehow, in spite of the slings and arrows he has suffered, keeps smiling.

This book isn’t about the struggles of the faith, however, but about the struggles of the mind. How can you keep believing in God in an increasingly secular culture? How can you speak of a good God when evil looms everywhere? How can you stand the company of Christians when so many of them are phony? And just who is God, anyway?

This is not a text for the college classroom. The answers aren’t going to satisfy skeptical scholars; the book is designed for church discussion groups, for sharing with sincere seekers. It’s one man’s testimony offered in the hope of helping others. You probably won’t have all of your questions answered; mine weren’t. But I enjoyed the conversation.

Cheating Death

From now on, when CNN summons chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta to the camera to explain a new medical development or ease the viewing audience’s anxiety over the latest health crisis, I’m going to pay closer attention. The good doctor is pretty easy to dismiss: he’s far too young and good looking for someone my age to take seriously. The truth is, however, the man knows some things. Not only that, he can tell a good story. He narrates his vignettes with the sure hand of a novelist.

Cheating Death is not a new book; it was published in 2009. It has sat on my bookshelf for far too long.

Reading it has been a humbling experience. I have long grumbled over the medical profession’s resistance to letting people die. Doctors go to extraordinary lengths, employing the latest technologies, to keep even comatose patients hooked up to life support. “We don’t have to be afraid of death,” I’ve mentally shouted at them.

Gupta would shout back: “Right, we don’t have to be afraid of death. On the other hand, we want to be very certain the dead are actually dead before we give up on them.”

His book is about the moving line in the sand between life and death, the search for the right definition of “dead.” How do we measure? No heartbeat? Brain dead? You may think you know—until you read his stories.

The tales he tells would in an earlier day have been called miracles: a skier who was submerged for an hour in a frozen Norwegian lake—and lived to tell about it. A brain surgery patient—comatose, vegetative, apparently no longer with us—who now tells his own story. A remarkable surgical procedure on an unborn baby’s defective heart. A young man whose chief weapon is prayer—whose prayer and those of his doubting doctor father and others are answered.

Gupta lobbies for doing away with the breathing component of CPR, advocating just compressing the chest instead. For this, as in all his other observations, he turns to the science behind the recommendations. It turns out there is scant statistical evidence that the forced breathing technique increases the chances of survival.

He relies on the science, but he relinquishes none of the awe that healing elicits. Whether he is talking in wonder about life-after-death experiences or the effect of prayer on healing or a patient’s suddenly waking up and taking nourishment after a couple of decades in a coma, Gupta searches for the medical explanation while admitting there is probably more to the story.

A major theme is time.

When the heart misses a beat, an hourglass starts running. Up to now, we’ve been measuring time in seconds and minutes, an hour or two at most. CPR might stop the falling sand for a few minutes. Zeyad Barazanji and Mike Mertz are alive because someone used those precious minutes to pump on their chests, keeping blood and oxygen going to their vital organs. Anna Bagenholm got an extra three hours. She’s alive because she was doused in a freezing stream, and her metabolism slowed enough that there was time to get her to a hospital before too many cells inside her brain and heart could die. Seconds, minutes, hours. . . .

Here is what motivates the good doctor: “For all the progress we’ve made, we’ve still only scratched the surface when it comes to cheating death.”

Rediscovering Life

Well into the first half of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, I found myself thinking of Indiana Jones movies with their rush of spine-tingling, life-threatening, credulity-bursting episodes. There is a difference, though. In the theater you could always remind yourself it’s only a movie. The episodes in Unbroken are for real.

In childhood and youth, Louis Zamperini is fascinating . . . a defiant, courageous, mischievous troublemaker—but with an amazing gift. The boy can run, so fast that in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler wanted to meet him, so fast that all who knew him expected him to bring home the gold in the Tokyo Olympics.

But with World War II looming, there would be no Tokyo games. Instead of running, Zamperini was gunning as a B-24 bombardier in the Pacific Islands. For a while he defied odds in heavy enemy fire, his crippled plane somehow getting back to base. His second B-24 was doomed, defeated by mechanical failure. Of the 11 crewmen, only three survived its crash into the sea, floating in life rafts, subsisting on raw fish, an occasional bird, and rainwater—and dodging Japanese Zero plane and shark attacks. Amazingly, two of the three washed ashore 47 days after the plane went down.

But far worse lay ahead. Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known as “the Bird,” was waiting for Zamperini. “The Bird was a sadistic corporal whose greatest love was torturing POWs.

[In the prison camps, the] guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. . . . This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. . . . Without dignity, identity is erased.

And “the Bird,” though only a corporal, was the worst.

After the war, when Zamperini was asked to reflect on his POW days, he became silent, then finally said, “If I knew I had to go through those experiences again, I’d kill myself.”

Afterward Zamperini nearly died of alcohol poisoning. “Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.” He escaped into the bottle.

But keep reading. This is about, as the subtitle says, “survival, resilience, and redemption.” I could hardly keep going through some of the chapters—the horrors are so graphic. Then, when freedom comes, and Louie’s posttraumatic stress syndrome (the label sounds so innocuous but covers such suffering) takes over, you wonder how much more the man can stand. But keep reading. God’s in the story. And Billy Graham. And new life.

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. He also serves as a Christian Standard contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee.