From Man in the Mirror to MAN ALIVE, author Patrick Morley hopes new book will help men leave “spiritual mediocrity” behind.

Best-selling author Patrick Morley says that the desire to make a contribution and leave the world a better place is a “primal” need. “We have a raw, restless energy that is different from women. It needs to be channeled, chiseled, transformed.”

Morley estimates that as much as 90 percent of Christian men lead lukewarm, stagnant , often defeated lives. And he believes these men hate the spiritual mediocrity they’re mired in. But the typical response, says Morley, is for men to lose heart, go silent, and anesthetize their pain.

According to his research, 80 percent of men are so emotionally impaired that not only are they unable to express their feelings, they are even unable to identify their feelings.

This statistic, one assumes, goes hand in hand with the next one reported in his book: Sixty percent of men are in financial trouble, paying only the monthly minimums on their credit card balances. In addition, readers learn that 50 percent of church-going men actively seek out pornography, and that 40 percent of men overall get divorced, which affects one million children a year. One third of America’s 72 million children live in a home without their biological dad.

The residual effect of this physical absenteeism of fathers, writes Morley, is a practical absence of mothers. “Essentially, one person must now do the work of two. As a young woman who grew up without a dad said, ‘When my mom and dad divorced, I didn’t just lose my dad. I also lost my mom, because she had to work long hours to support us.’”

Patrick Morley asserts that men who lead powerful, transformed lives do things differently than their lukewarm counterparts. “In business, we call these the ‘differentiated success factors.’” He continues: “Jesus made a direct connection between knowing the Bible and leading a powerful life.” Morley insists that the reason lukewarm men lead lives of error is that they don’t know the Scriptures to begin with. Not knowing the Scriptures, in turn, means these men don’t know the power of God.

“Their capabilities don’t equal their intentions,” writes Morley. “Without the right training, their soil becomes bare, stony, and full of weeds.”

Transformed men, on the other hand, “truly hear and understand God’s Word and produce a harvest.”

The author’s conclusion therefore, is that combing the Scriptures is easily the number one factor that differentiates men who have tapped into God’s power.

In the chapter entitled “Every Man has a Story” Morley examines the subject of community and how it affects the lives of men. “Most men live in isolation.” Patrick Morley is quick to distinguish isolation from being a hermit. While we talk to other men during the day, and may have a lot of acquaintances, our relationships tend to be shallow. When not talking about work issues, Morley says, men usually stick to news, sports, and weather.

To keep this real, he asks, “do you know the names of your friends’ children?” The author also asks his readers to think for a moment about the men in their lives they know best—the ones they call best friends. “Have you been in each other’s homes?”

The isolation, according to Morley, begins for men when they encounter the “ouch” factor that goes along with becoming a man. The “ouch” factor includes the put-downs, cut-downs, sarcasm, snarky remarks, critical spirits, disrespect, disloyalty, lies, insults, betrayals and jokes made at your expense. “We don’t need to go through these painful experiences before we think, It’s just not worth it. Then we shut down and become islands.” While Morley points out that some men become stronger islands than others, they all become emotionally isolated. “It just seems easier to go it alone. We live, work, play, and even worship in communities of strangers.”

Patrick Morley’s MAN ALIVE is set for release in March 2012.

James Bryan Smith contends that the early eighteenth-century Methodists were one of the purest examples of the power of accountability in community. Their leader, John Wesley, would preach to countless people, seeing thousands of conversions. Wesley’s outdoor preaching to the masses was encouraged by his longtime friend George Whitefield, himself a preacher to even larger audiences and who saw far greater numbers of conversions.

According to Smith, a theology professor in Wichita, Kansas, the biggest difference between the two historic preachers was in how they instructed people to live after conversion. Whitefield, Smith writes, had no plan and simply assumed that people who gave their life to Christ would naturally find a church and live out the Christian life.

By contrast, it was Wesley who insisted that people join what were then called “societies.” These Methodist societies encouraged people to attend several times a week to hear Wesley’s (or some other minister’s) preaching. Attendees were also asked to join a class, which consisted of twelve students and one leader. The purpose of the weekly class was for the attendees to come and share candidly about the state of their souls. In fact, Smith writes, Wesley was so serious about faithful, regular attendance that anyone who failed to attend a meeting would be banned from future meetings unless they approached Wesley himself with the reasons for their absence.

“Though Wesley’s practice might not work in today’s world, it certainly did in his time,” Smith declares in his book The Good and Beautiful Community (2010 InterVarsity Press). “He offered people a method (hence the name Methodists) to grow in Christlikeness in the context of communities. The movement spread rapidly and continued to grow in astounding numbers. He asked a lot of his people, but he saw a lot of transformation.”

The work and the legacy of Wesley lives on. George Whitefield, however—the book points out—left no such legacy. Despite his giftedness as an orator and evangelist, Whitefield never started an actual movement. It was a fact of which he was painfully aware.

Smith writes that Wesley believed that preaching like an apostle “without joining together those that are awakened and training them in the ways of God is only begetting children for the murderer.”

James Bryan Smith shares that he spent two weeks one summer working with Dallas Willard, assisting him in a class he was teaching on spirituality and ministries. The lessons learned about spiritual formation, especially in the context of community, were abundant. “Dallas Willard believes that in any given church approximately 10 percent of the people are ready to grown and willing to make an effort to make it happen.” Smith says that Willard thinks that the church puts too much emphasis on trying to light a fire under the 90 percent and neglects to challenge the 10 percent who are sitting idle but wanting to help.

James Bryan Smith is the director of the Christian Spiritual Formation Institute in Wichita and an ordained United Methodist Church minister. In addition to The Good and Beautiful Community, his other Apprentice Series books include The Good and Beautiful Life and The Good and Beautiful God.

In this book, Smith shows his readers how to bring spiritual formation and community engagement together. “Apprentices of Jesus are not part-time do-gooders,” he writes. “They live in continuous contact with the kingdom of God and are constantly men and women in whom Christ dwells.” His books seeks to offer spiritual practices that root new, true narratives about God and the world in our souls.

Jesus Mission Author Says Being Born Again Is Not What Most of Us Think

 In his book The Jesus Mission (2011 Waterbrook)  Steven Scott tells the remarkably true story of Jason, a survivor of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. Starting his workday that Tuesday morning in 2001 on the 104th floor of the South Tower, Jason heard what he describes as a big whoosh. From his window, he witnessed the horrific scene that included a giant hole in the World Trade Center’s north tower. Jason and his assistant headed to a stairwell and began the long flight down hundreds of steps. When they finally arrived at the sky lobby on the 78th floor, Jason and his assistant heard a series of announcements coming over the building’s PA system. “This building is secure. Please return to your offices immediately.” The announcer also declared that the explosion in the north tower was “an isolated event” and that no danger was posed to the south tower.

While his assistant started to head back up to their floor, Jason didn’t quite believe that his building was safe. As Steve Scott puts it, “he didn’t feel right about going back to the 104th floor. It was as if a voice were warning him, ‘Get out of the building as fast as you can.’” Although he tried to convince his assistant to join him, Jason would make the trek to the bottom of World Trade Center Two alone. Overweight and out of shape, Jason hurried down the remainder of the seventy-eight floors while his co-worker and other friends waited for the elevator to take them back up. Jason had made it down exactly one floor when he heard and felt a terrible explosion.

“The impact was so violent,” Scott writes, “that it felt as if the tower swayed to the ground and then sprang back up.” Everyone in the stairway with Jason was thrown down. But the urgency of this new situation was enough that they resumed their long trip down.

It turns out that this second explosion, the one that occurred in the south tower, was caused by the second hijacked plane, whose wing cut through the 78th floor, killing Jason’s friends as they waited for the elevator to take them back to their offices.

“Once on the ground, Jason felt he had to run as fast as he could to get far away from the building The voice told him to keep running, and so he did.” Scott wraps up the story saying, “After questioning the Port Authority’s instructions (to remain in the building and return to his office) Jason had survived the worst day of his life.”

Steven Scott uses this true story from 9-11 to illustrate what he calls The Danger of Trusting the Wrong Authority. It begins a subject covered by three chapters in The Jesus Mission. The chapter titled Being Born Again is Not What Most of Us Think poses the question: Are you ready to risk your eternal destiny on your definition?

Scott reminds his reader that Jason’s friends and co-workers did exactly what their trusted authorities told them to do. The authorities, he clarifies, acted in good faith, but their actions were based on the only information available to them. And did their actions, based on this limited, and eventually incorrect, information lead to the deaths of hundreds? Thousands?

This same tragedy, Scott insists, is being repeated with millions of sincere church members and professing Christians—but with infinitely worse consequences. “People who followed the Port Authority’s instructions paid a terrible price for their misplaced faith,” Scott writes. He also says that an even more terrible price will be paid by millions who entrust their eternal destiny to the guidance of sincere religious leaders. “These religious teachers and pastors continue to teach that there is an accepted formula for receiving eternal life,” the author says. “However, Jesus did not give us a formula.”

Instead, Steven Scott argues that it is Jesus Himself that defines terms like “born again.” A second birth is a spiritual one and, according to Scott, a spiritual birth is not a mere act of the human will, but is initiated by God, independent of a person’s will or impulse. Since it is an act of God, Scott argues, its exact time of occurrence can’t be calculated by anyone on earth. Scott also insists, however, that when a spiritual birth takes place, it creates an effect and produces evidence that can be seen by others.

Scott writes: “Formulas have their place, but when it comes to eternal life, our tendency to fall back on formulas has steered untold numbers of people wrong.” Scott says that while well-meaning Christians often teach that praying a certain prayer or walking down a church aisle and “accepting Christ” produces a born-again event that Christianizes a person that Jesus—when asked directly about eternal life—said nothing of the sort.

Steven Scott asserts that the formulaic teachings have it backward. “Most of the supporting Scriptures that are used to defend a certain prayer or baptism...are taken out of context. They are broadened to apply to something beyond what their context specifies.”

For people choosing to follow Christ in the first century, the idea of confessing, believing, and receiving was a totally different commitment from what we know when compared to how these terms are used today. During New Testament times, anyone who was a Roman citizen was required to have only one “lord,” that being Caesar. So for someone then to publicly confess that Jesus is their Lord was to commit treason against the government. At the same time, Scott tells his readers, to believe in Jesus and His claims was to knowingly abandon all the rights of Roman citizenship. “They were trading a respected and highly valued citizenship in an earthly empire for a life of ridicule, rejection, and the real possibility of imprisonment and execution.” So basically, for the first-century Christians, the notion of confessing and believing equaled total abandonment to the person and ways of Christ. And it was costly.

For Steven Scott, the primary way that a person can know he has been born again is evidenced by fruitfulness. He quotes John 15:5 and 1 John 2:3-6 to support his assertion.

Chapter seven continues with incredible examples of what Scott called “God’s birthing process.” But this, and the preceding two chapters are almost a sidebar clarification in a book that claims that Christ completed twenty-seven missions while on earth and compels you to take up the four assigned to you.

Steven Scott is the best-selling author of The Greatest Words Every Spoken, The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, and The Richest Man Who Ever Lived. An entrepreneur whose start-up companies have earned billions in sales, Scott says he learned the laws of success by studying Proverbs. His resume includes co-founding Total Gym, The American Telecast Corporation, and Max International. The Jesus Mission is available here.

Barna president offers insight into why the church is losing the next generation

David Kinnaman, in his new book, You Lost Me, writes that pop entertainer Katy Perry embodies the first, and most common, category of a Christianity dropout—the Nomad, the spiritual wanderer. “For these young adults, faith is nomadic, seasonal, or may appear to be an optional or peripheral part of life.” Kinnaman says that at some point in their teenage or young adult years, Nomads like Perry disengage from attending church or significantly distance themselves from the Christian community.

Katy Perry is the daughter of Penecostal ministers and grew up singing in church, speaking in tongues, and eating “angeled” eggs, as opposed to “deviled” eggs. Once she embarked on a career in pop music, the Nomad in her wanted to try everything that her strict upbringing had kept off-limits.

According to Barna, the estimates are that two-fifths of young adults with a Christian upbringing will go through a time of spiritual nomadism. Other Barna research indicates that half of all born-again adult Christians say they have gone through a prolonged period in their lives when they felt very distant or spiritually removed from God.

Kinnaman writes that nomadism among the Mosaic generation is less of an intentional choice and more of a “slow fade,” an increasing detachment that took many months or years. “For some, faith was never deep; they were ‘in the building’ but never really committed to following Christ.” For other Nomads, Kinnaman declares the opposite is true. Their spiritual nomadism follows a personal history of intense commitment. The book is thorough in pointing to several characteristics of the nomadic mindset.

First, Kinnaman writes that Nomads still describe themselves as Christians, not having disavowed Christianity, but no longer committed to churchgoing. Second, they believe that personal involvement in a Christian community is optional. Third, the importance of faith has faded, yet most are not angry or hostile toward Christianity. Last, Kinnaman argues that these Nomads are spiritual experimentalists, finding meaning and spiritual stimulation from a variety of activities in their lives.

When Nomads describe their faith journey, fourteen percent say they made an emotional decision to be a Christian early in life that didn’t last, while twenty-three percent say they used to be very involved in church but feel they don’t fit in anymore.

While Katy Perry says she values spiritual ideas and pursuits, she isn’t sure how they fit with her adult identity. She also sees her experimentation and exploration in very positive terms. “To grow up and come from something different than what you are now and to spread your wings . . . I think it’s a beautiful thing.”

In You Lost Me, David Kinnaman defines the other categories of Christianity dropouts, Prodigals and Exiles. Nomads, he’s quick to point out, walk away from church engagement but still consider themselves Christians. Prodigals, on the other hand, actually lose their faith, describing themselves as “no longer Christian.” Kinnaman actually deals with both categories (Nomads and Prodigals) in the same chapter, drawing distinctions between each. Nomads, he says, wrestle with their faith, while Prodigals reject their faith or switch the objects of their faith. Exiles, the third category, grew up in the church and are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but are also energized to pursue God-honoring lives.

“One hallmark,” writes Kinnaman about the Exiles, “is their feeling that their vocation (or professional calling) is disconnected from their church experience. Their Christian background has not prepared them to live and work effectively in society.” Their faith, he says, is “lost” from Monday through Friday.

Kinnaman says his use of the term “Exile” comes from the Old Testament biblical narrative involving Daniel, Ezekial, and their less famous friends. He thinks the metaphor of exiles works especially well, given the modern-day North American parallels with Babylon. He writes that today’s western culture is indulgent, distracted, idol following, and hedonistic. “The time and place may be different, but the tension of living in-but-not-of lives describes the challenge for the faithful both then and now.

Recently released, David Kinnaman’s You Lost Me is available now.

A look at the new book by Chad Young, Authenticity

Chad Young says his passion is helping students learn what an authentic relationship with Jesus Christ looks like. A staff member with Campus Crusade for Christ for nearly a decade, Young currently serves as the director for the South Carolina Lowcountry with a scope of twenty-five college campuses and seventy thousand students.

In his new book, Authenticity: Real Faith in a Phony, Superficial World, he writes as a person who has struggled with a worldly lifestyle and the distractions of living in a busy culture. According to a recent study by the Barna Group, the number one reason people reject Christianity is a lack of “authentic Christians” among their peers. Chad Young says there are six major reasons why postmodern young adults have a negative view toward Christianity, which is perceived as being: 1) hypocritical, 2) too focused on getting converts, 3) anti-homosexual, 4) sheltered, 5) too political, and 6) judgmental. Chad goes into more detail on these six points in the introduction of his book, a section titled We have a problem.

Year after year, Young writes, Campus Crusade for Christ surveys college students, asking them two questions: Who is Jesus? and: What do you believe is the message of Christianity? He says that many of these recorded answers confirm some of the major misconceptions people have about Christianity. This is a regrettable fact for Young, who recognizes that college students are the next generation of leaders of our communities, our churches, and our country.

“A Christian life that doesn’t look any different from the world’s way of living,” writes Young, “is falling short of the fulfillment and happiness that God longs for us to have—and it’s probably turning off people to God’s good news as well.” Young says all this within a context of self-admission. “I wish I wasn’t part of the problem, but unfortunately I spent years living as a hypocritical Christian who turned others away from God. I was part of the problem.”

Authentic Christianity, according to Chad Young, begins with authentic people who are willing to be themselves. He writes that authentic people also relate with real love toward others and enjoy a genuine relationship with God.

Young states that as Christians, often our greatest struggle involves spending time with God. He shares that the average student in high school tries to feed his heart with exciting but empty satisfaction, going from thing to thing, searching for that joy and intimacy that the heart desires. Doing so, Young reveals, will often lead that high school student to addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, popularity, or whatever else the world may offer. He says that some students even become “masters of disguise” at hiding these things from their families and Christian friends.

In Authenticity, Chad Young insists that it is only when we spend time with Jesus, remaining in Him, that we are transformed into people who bear the fruit of the Spirit in our everyday lives.

“It all starts with prayer,” Young asserts. How we pray, he says, reveals our view of God and also affects our view of God.  “If we were truly convinced that ‘everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened,’ then we probably would be praying all the time!” In Young’s view, this is why prayer is the most essential ingredient in becoming a more authentic follower of Jesus, as we seek to see God as He truly is and promises to be.

Expanding on this point—that prayer reveals our view of God— Chad Young dissects the Lord’s prayer, highlighting the specific meaning of each line and giving examples of his own life of the passage’s personal application. “As you grow in your prayer life,” Young tells his reader, “be careful that your prayers are Christ-centered, not self-centered.” He also quotes James, who wrote in his epistle, “You do not have because you do not ask.” Young believes James is implying that our failure to pray deprives us of what God was already prepared to give us.

The book Authenticity is divided into thirteen chapters and three main sections. Parts one and two cover the two great commandments, while the last covers the Great Commission. Chad Young is a graduate of both Clemson University and Georgia Tech. After working in the paper industry, he went into full-time ministry. Young has also written a discipleship training manual and is a frequent speaker for retreats and conferences.

Order his book Authenticity here.

Book Review for: A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions (edited by Dallas Willard)

In 1992, a chaplain named Kelly Monroe led a small group of Christians at Harvard who were inspired by the idea that the school’s motto--Veritas (truth)—was more than a historical anomaly. The group hosted the university for a whole weekend of lectures and discussions that explored some of life’s most important questions. The goal was to restore the university as a setting for pondering deeper questions, searching for real answers, and developing community around the quest for truth. Thus the Veritas Forum was born.

Now twenty years later, more than one hundred universities in North America and Europe have hosted their own Veritas Forums. Thousands of students and faculty have participated in this quest for truth helping to restore meaning in the academy.

Daniel Cho remembers being a freshman sitting in the crowd at the first Harvard forum back in 1992. Now the Executive Director of the Veritas Forum, Daniel says his life was profoundly shaped by the coherence of life, truth, and beauty in Jesus Christ that he tasted over that weekend within the community of seekers.

In the book A Place for Truth (2010 InterVarsity Press) Dallas Willard, along with Cho, has collected some of these remarkable transcripts featuring outstanding Christian intellectuals that deal with questions about truth itself, and several truths in particular. “The Veritas Forum,” Willard writes in the book’s introduction, “is interested both in the current status of truth on campus, and in how the basic claims of Christianity are now treated there. Its aim is to restore the university to its age-old character as a “place for truth.”

When the Veritas Forum made its way to Yale University in 1996, it was Richard John Neuhaus’s turn to bring “light and truth” (appropriately enough, the English translation of the University’s motto: Lux et Veritas). Neuhaus, in a lecture entitled Is there Life after Truth?, poses the question “Why should God have become humanum, to become one of us?” He answers, “To assert truth in public. It’s the great task of our generation, to learn how to do it persuasively and winsomely, and in a manner that does not violate, but strengthens the bonds of civility.”

Os Guiness describes 1989—the year the Soviet Union fell—as the “Year of the Century.” He remembers some of his favorite scenes of that extraordinary time: the dismantling of the Berlin wall, Soviet gun barrels filled with flowers, and the knocking down of the statues of the men-gods—Marx, Lenin, Stalin. Guiness says his favorite image that year was the nightly scene in November, when more than three hundred thousand packed Wencelas Square in the Czech capital of Prague to listen to then-dissident Vaclev Havel as he painted the contrast between the “Velvet Revolutionaries” and the Soviets. As Guiness recounts, the very quick-witted Czech crowd chanted: “We are not like them. We are not like them.” Some of the contrast, he says, was in the fact that the Velvet Revolutionaries would not reply to violence with violence. Perhaps a more striking dissimilarity was that the Soviets, Guiness says, were people of propaganda and lies, whereas the revolutionaries were people of truth.

“We realize how they were aware that there were only two ways they could bring down the Soviets,” Guiness reports in the Veritas Forum at Stanford University in 2005. “Either they had to trump Soviet power with equal or more power—” (which would have been unthinkable as the Velvet Revolutionaries were only a handful of dissidents— “or they had to counter Soviet power with another type of power altogether.” The dissident counter to the muscle-power of the Soviets, according to Guiness, was the power of truth. And he tells the 2005 Vertias Forum attendees at Stanford University: “And the unthinkable happened. They won.”

But Guiness also says that while the West applauded the tremendous courage and principled stand of the Czech dissidents of 1989, in many parts of America there isn’t a similar solid view of truth on which anyone could make such a stand today.

He sums up the prevailing opinion on holding to a truth-based worldview this way: “Anyone who believes in an objective truth, or an absolute truth, is Neanderthal and reactionary.” To this opinion, Guiness arugues that, “far from being Neanderthal and reactionary, truth is a very simple, fundamental, human gift, without which we cannot negotiate reality and handle life.” He asserts that truth is absolutely essential for a good human life.

“Equally important,” argues Guiness, “truth is absolutely essential for freedom.”

Guiness says that he’s been on campuses where today it is simply worse to judge evil than to do evil. This outcome appears to be a result of what Guiness, in his Veritas Forum presentation, calls the two challenges of truth. “There are two ways we can go. And we’re always tempted by these two: One way is to shape the truth to our desires. The other way is to seek to shape our desires to the truth.”

Os Guiness and Richard John Neuhaus aren’t the only scholars A Place for Truth records from the various Veritas Forums that have taken place on campuses. Timothy Keller, popular speaker, author, and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, spoke on “The Exclusivity of Truth” at the University of Chicago, which hosted a Veritas Forum in 2008. Keller focuses on the exclusive truth claims in religion, and the five ordinary ways people deal with the subject.

Francis Collins, speaking at CalTech in 2009, presents “The Language of God,” a talk that deals with The Human Genome Project, DNA, and his reasons why scientific and spiritual worldviews don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The book even showcases a debate called “Moral Mammals.” At this 2009 Veritas Forum held at MIT, Peter Singer and John Hare debate whether atheism or theism provides the best foundation for human worth and morality.

The “Sense of an Ending,” which the book clarifies was a multi-media lecture-performance with integrated images, sound clips, and illustrations at the piano, was given by Jeremy Begbie at UC Berkeley in 2001. The speaker admits that the title of the talk is purposely similar to a 1960s book by Frank Kermode. “In a lot of narrative fiction, the ending gives the whole story a unity, gathering the strands together, resolving the discord and dissonance into what [Kermode] calls a “grand temporal consonance.

N.T. Wright is also recorded giving his talk “Simply Christian” at the Veritas Forum at Georgetown University in 2006. “The Whole Gospel for the Whole Person” was the subject of Ronald Sider’s presentation in 1995 at Harvard (the university of the original Veritas Forum). Astronomy was the background of scientist Hugh Ross’s talk at Michigan in 1995.

A Place for Truth is available here.

David A. Horner’s Mind Your Faith Purports to be a Student’s Guide to Thinking and Living Well

David A. Horner (D.Phil, University of Oxford) says that his new book Mind Your Faith is the result of some fourteen years as a student in undergraduate and graduate university education.

It’s worth noting that he concurrently conducted thirty years of nearly continuous university ministry in the United States and Europe. His brother, and long-time Campus Crusade staff member, Bob Horner, has also devoted his entire life to engaging students in secular universities with the person of Jesus Christ in creative, winsome, and compelling ways. David says that growing up in the shadow of his older brother Bob, he developed a love of the university and a desire to influence it.

The university world, he writes, can be a confusing place, filled with many competing worldviews and perspectives. With his book, David Horner hopes to restore sanity to the collegiate experience and give students essential tools for thinking contextually, logically, and “worldviewishly.”

As president of the Illuminatio Project, David’s aim is to bring the light of a classical biblical vision of goodness, truth, and beauty into the thinking of the church and culture through strategic research and communication.

In the book Mind Your Faith, Horner discusses the impact of the Veritas Forum. Founded at Harvard University in 1992, Veritas (which happens to be the motto of Harvard—Latin for “truth”) sponsors public forums at secular universities to engage students and faculty in discussions about life’s hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all life.

Apologetics, writes Horner, is based on a Greek word found in 1 Peter 3:15, apologia, which means “rational defense.” He says that Christian apologetics is the art and science of explaining and defending the truth claims of the Christian worldview.

As to why apologetics and general ministry on college campuses are so vital, the book points out this statistic: In 2010, 6.7 percent of the world’s population held college degrees—up from 5.9 percent in 2000. As of 2007, 40.4 percent of American adults aged 25-34 held at least a two-year degree or higher, which put the United States in the top 11 globally in post-secondary education.

As to the spiritual demographics of these American college students, Steve Henderson (author of the Christianity Today article “A Question of Price Versus Cost”) says: “More than 52 percent of incoming freshmen who identify themselves as born-again upon entering a public university will either no longer identify themselves as born-again four years later or, even if they do still claim that identification, will not have attended any religious service in over a year.”

According to Horner, part of the issue comes down to worldview. A worldview, he defines, is the set of beliefs, attitudes, and values that shapes the way we see the world and our life. “Your spiritual and moral well-being in the university and beyond, then depends crucially on how you think about what is real, about what is important and valuable, about how to live and why.”

Horner also says that college is a marketplace of ideas. “Our absence from the university disengages a thoughtful Christian presence from the give-and-take of the university’s marketplace of ideas.” Horner says this absence—and resulting disengagement—limits the perspectives to which students and faculty are exposed and the possible impact that biblical truth can have on them.

At the very outset, Horner seeks to clarify the target of his information. He states that Mind Your Faith is written primarily for those who are (1) university students or college-bound high school students, (2) followers of Jesus who aspire to grow and flourish as his followers while in college, and (3) attend a secular university.

Horner also addresses the question: Should I attend a Christian or secular university? He says that it depends on a number of factors, including what you want from your college experience and what opportunities are available. But Horner stresses in Mind Your Faith, that of prime importance are the ideas you embrace. “Ideas have consequences; what we believe will determine how we behave, and ultimately who we become.” He shares that to understand the nature of the Holocaust, we must see that it did not begin at the death camps, but in books and classrooms and courtrooms and cafes—in short, the marketplace of ideas. Horner soberly reminds us that the origin of this dark moment in history lay not in the activities of Nazi thugs but of bookish intellectuals and their students.

In a chapter somewhat circularly titled The Truth about Truth, Horner reminds the reader of the historical Christianity of many of the country’s oldest universities. “The most common epigraph over entrances to American university libraries is a statement by Jesus: ‘The truth shall set you free.’” Its Latin translation Veritas Vos Liberavit also serves as the motto of Johns Hopkins.

The way to find common ground: Think contextually.
Assumptions, writes Horner, are underlying ideas that are not explicitly stated but are crucial for understanding those that are. “Often the most important ideas are unarticulated.” Horner argues that thinking well involves being aware of this and asking good questions that can help bring them to the surface. He even astutely points out that in the Gospels, Jesus is asked 183 questions. He asks 307. Horner even insists that asking thoughtful questions is a general life skill, one that can help those who struggle with making friends to draw people in.

Horner also assigns to worldview the three big questions, which he says are: What is real? Who are we? What is good? He says that these big questions and their answers share certain connections. He also insists that each distinct worldview falls into one of three categories—theism, naturalism, and pantheism. But Horner adds that many thinkers today have added a fourth category of worldview: postmodernism. A leading thinker of postmodern thought, Lyotard, writes that he defines postmodern as "incredulity toward meta-narratives."

From part 1 of the book--Mind, Mind Your Faith moves to the equally large topics of Faith and Character, providing sound and cogent arguments that any college student should be able to employ when the temptation to waiver in his faith presents itself.

David Horner is professor of philosophy and biblical studies at Biola University in California. He also serves as a research scholar for Centers for Christian Study International, an effort to develop intellectual Christian communities within secular university contexts.

A couple of years ago Robert Scott and a Muslim scholar friend shared a platform at a London university to talk about the “reasonableness” of their respective faiths. Scott says that his friend, Asad, had the idea to show secularists that they could reason with one another and explain how their respective faiths had a reasonable foundation. The point was to challenge the ideology of atheists, who assert that people of faith are irrational and dangerous.

The talk drew a mixture of atheists, Christians, and Muslims, which was precisely the point, says Scott. He describes an encounter with a Muslim student afterwards, who came up to him and asked, “I hope this doesn’t sound too silly, but where do Easter bunnies come from? Are they in the Bible?” Scott asserts that the question, however bizarre, highlighted a certain amount of confusion in the questioner’s mind.

Robert Scott also recounts another episode in which he was hosting a Pakistani family in his home. They asked a different question: “Why, when we have so much in common, do you eat pork?” He says a female Bengali friend made a similar point to his wife: “Why, when you are respectable and modest, don’t you cover your head like me?” He even admits that another friend asked: “Why do you have Christmas trees in your house, when they’re a pagan symbol?” Scott explains that many Begalis believe that trees themselves contain evil spirits and, believing this, they therefore refuse to walk in the woods. So, obviously a tree is a dangerous thing to bring into your home!

Robert Scott believes there are two broad themes that emerge from these questions. First, he says, is the problem of cultural symbols, which he argues that many Muslims are confusing with biblical Christianity. But the analysis doesn’t end there. He admits that the second issue is that of outward practices. Western Christians don’t tend to adhere to rules about food, drink, and clothing—unlike Islam.

Scott writes that what further complicates the second issue is the fact that some Christians across the world today do have such outward practices, as did other Christians in the past.

As a results, he argues, many Muslim people think that a lack of outward practices means that many Christians living in the twenty-first century Western world aren’t truly living biblical lives—and are not pleasing to God.

These and other matters are addressed in a book titled Questions Muslims Ask: What Christians Actually Do (and Don’t) Believe. Author Robert Scott oversees international outreach at St. Helen’s Bishopgate Church in London, where he hosts meetings for better understanding with Muslim and Christian partners. Peter Riddell, formerly professor of Islamic Studies, London School of Theology, says the book “focuses upon real questions posed by Muslims to real Christians on a regular basis.” Questions Muslims Ask is being published by InterVarsity Press and is currently in the editing stage. The expected release date is January 2012.

At the counter of a South Carolina pharmacy a young husband stands to pick up his wife’s prescription. He turns to go, after the cashier hands him back his change. As he looks down, he makes a pleasant discovery. The cashier had returned to the young husband much more in change than he was owed in the transaction. In a moment of honesty, the young man returns the incorrect change and walks out the door. What makes this story a but different from many you’ve heard—or perhaps even experienced yourself—is that the young husband really could have used the money. He’s been out of work for a while, and he and his wife are getting desperate. The incorrect amount of change he’d initially received could have been used to buy groceries, some breathing room, and—in a sentiment of unselfish love—a little something for the young man’s wife. Initially, he’d been tempted to see the money just that way. Still, having done the right thing in the end, he feels like a loser. When he arrived back in his vehicle—and old red pickup truck—he can’t even bring himself to mention the incident to his wife as he hands her the prescription.

At the same time the incident at the pharmacy occurs, across town a woman is driving toward a KFC restaurant. Her name is Darlene Wilkinson and she and her husband Bruce are about to embark on a speaking tour of Africa. Their son David currently lives there and, upon being asked what his parents can bring him from the States, he immediately comes out with “Kentucky Fried Chicken hot sauce!” Not wanting to deprive her son of his only request, Darlene bound for the KFC to deliver the unusual order.

As Darlene chatted up the KFC cashier, a young woman walked in asking, “How much for a glass of water?” Surprised that KFC charged for water, Darlene learned from the cashier that the restaurant had to pay for the cup. Thirty-seven cents was the charge. As the customer explained her need for the water—she needed to take some medicine—she only managed to unearth a quarter from her purse. That gave Darlene an opportunity to step in and provide the thirty-seven cents. Grateful, the quiet young woman thanked Darlene and walked out of the KFC.

Carrying her bag of Africa-bound hot sauce, Darlene also left, regretting that she had not responded to the young woman’s need faster. Darlene then discovered that she was parked right next to the vehicle that the young woman was now seated in. This is how she described the events of that day to her husband Bruce, which he has written of in detail in his new book The God Pocket (2011 Multnomah).

“With the bills from my God Pocket in hand, I opened my car door and gently tapped on her window. When she lowered it, I asked if she would do me a favor. ‘I’ve been carrying around some of God’s money,’ I said, ‘and I believe He would like me to give it to you.’ That was all. Then I handed her the money.”

The young woman can’t believe what’s happening, Bruce writes. The young man behind the steering wheel, next to the young woman, is staring at the money in his wife’s hand, tears rolling down his cheeks. “You’re not going to believe this,” he begins.

As you’ve probably already deduced, the young couple in the red pickup truck in the KFC parking lot is the same couple that had driven away from the pharmacy on the other side of town, where the husband had given back what many would have accepted. “Look at this,” Bruce records the young man saying, “God used someone we don’t even know to bless us with far more than I gave back!”

That God moment was brought to you by something that Bruce Wilkinson calls The God Pocket. In his book by the same name, he insists that this is how God works to meet needs—God usually partners with a person. He writes, “Our God chooses to rely primarily on human partners to get funds to people in need.” He says it may seem odd, but reminds his readers, hasn’t God chosen to spread the gospel in the same way?

Wilkinson insists that every day and all over the world, God sends out a symphony of invitations for people to partner with Heaven. The God Pocket idea, he says, came as the result of explaining an eye-opening verse in 1 Timothy. “Let them do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share. As Wilkinson explains it, “Ready to give, willing to share,” became the mantra, not only for their God Pocket experiment, but for others as well.

The book recounts other stories from a variety of people, who were “nudged” by God to give a stranger a hand up. He also shares the principle that, according to Scripture, those who commit acts of compassion upon the poor are lending to the Lord. The key word is lend. That denotes that God plans to pay them back. Some the payback will be in the form of replenishment of the God Pocket., but always in terms of eternal reward. Often, Wilkinson says, it’s both.

In a chapter titled The Generosity Conspiracy Wilkinson talks about the potential impact of believers who make themselves willing and alert to giving opportunities like these. “God wants to put a face on giving—and the face He has in mind is not yours or mine but His.”

Wilkinson not only shares stories involving The God Pocket concept, but lays out practical tips and advice on how to have your very own God Pocket ministry, including how to discreetly carry one, how to flesh out God-ordained giving opportunities, and how to transfer the funds with the least amount of awkwardness for both parties. Pre-order The God Pocket by Bruce Wilkinson here.

New Book Asserts that Scripture Seeks to Capture Our Minds, Not Merely Educate Them

Christopher Webb went down into his basement a few years ago, opened a ragged cardboard box he used for storage, and pulled out two battered and scratched biscuit tins. Inside were all the letters his wife—then girlfriend—Sally sent him during the year they lived apart. As the time, he was in his final year of study at Aberystwyth University, on Wales west coast, and she was finishing her masters degree at Dundee, on Scotland's east coast. As he puts it, “In those distant days before the advent of cell phones and email.... we relied a great deal on the Royal Mail to keep our relationship alive.”

The letters, Christopher recounts, were numbered in the hundreds, bundled together in random order, and each one represented only Sally’s half of their long-distance correspondence that year. “It’s hard now to piece together the lines of conversation,” Christopher says. After more than twenty years, he has difficulty assigning faces to some of the names mentioned in the letters. The news Sally shared with him seemed like some “garbled code,” incidents long since forgotten. But, he says he has more pleasure just holding the letters and remembering what they represent. He’s content to let others come and be theorists with the letters. He writes, “I read them as a lover. It would be impossible to come to them any other way.”

In the same way, Christopher Webb encourages readers of his new book, The Fire of the Word (2011 Intervarsity Press) to learn to come to the Bible as lovers and not simply theorists.

Webb also writes that if the whole Scripture is going to become a place of encounter with Christ, we may need to experience a shift in perspective. Jesus, he shares, doesn’t even seem to appear as a character in the biblical story until somewhere around the thousandth page. “Almost four-fifths of the narrative of the Bible is over before we ever get to the stable at Bethlehem.” Web asserts that having the end of a story makes the beginning make more sense on a subsequent pass. “Events and remarks we hadn’t noticed the first time take on a fresh significance. Characters emerge in a new light.”

It is indeed a “shift in perspective” with which Webb presents his book. Each chapter closes with a reading of specific passages of Scripture—the text of each chapter having primed the reader for the substance, or desired approach of the Word.

In a chapter titled The Yearning of God, Webb writes descriptively of encountering love in Scripture. “We can read the swathe of historical narratives as successive acts in a great morality play...” But Webb sees a problem with this approach to Scripture: it constantly throws us back in our own meager and insufficient spiritual resources to transform ourselves. He insists that only when we truly understand God’s delight in us will Scripture become a text that captivates us. “We even begin to read those dry commandments and regulations in a different light.”

Webb tells the story of Benedict of Nursia, sixth-century monastic founder, who expressed that even law can be an expression of love. Christians, Webb states, are apt to describe the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture as “the law,” a set of burdensome restrictions God imposed on the Israelites. But Jews, he points out, speak of those same books as the Torah, which denotes the teaching, wisdom, and instruction needed to live well. “They see the words of the Sinai Covenant not as a dragging weight, but as a gift...”

Webb also concedes that being “holy” doesn’t seem very desirable to many people in our contemporary society. But he shares that our English word for holiness is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word hal, from which come the words hale and health. He clarifies that the root idea the word expresses is integration, completion, or wholeness. “As God’s grace draws us into an ever fuller life of sacrificial, self-giving love, we increasingly become the people we were created to be, people who fully reflect the central character of God.”

Perhaps the beefiest chapter in the book, 7, Anatomy of the Soul, is where you’ll find a thoughtful blend of both the spiritual and the philosophical, where the subject of the human soul is described through the lenses of history’s renown thinkers—men like Plato and Aristotle, the Apostle Paul, Ignatius Loyola, and Thomas Aquinas. Like sitting in a first year philosophy class, we learn ancient opinions and arguments as to the unique nature of the human mind—or soul (psyche)—which Webb describes as the place where imagination, memory, and reason combine, and is the part of our being that, through interaction with the five senses, enables feeling and interpretation of data expressed by the body (soma). It was Paul, Webb reminds us, that goes beyond body and mind to present the concept of spirit (pneuma). Paul also, according to Webb, draws a connection between the spirit, the will, and the heart. Webb says that it was the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which sought to place emotions and feelings at the very center of the human experience and has left us with a legacy that states that the heart is the seat of emotion and passion.

But, Webb states that for Paul, the emotions, desires, and drives that we associate with are actually hard-wired into our bodies as a whole—not a center for our personality, but a means by which that personality is expressed. For Paul, Webb writes, the heart is the seat of the will, the place we form our intentions and purposes. While Webb contains that self-absorption and navel gazing are rarely helpful occupations, that a little self-knowledge in this area can be indispensable as we seek to orient our whole person toward life in Christ.

Christopher Webb has been the president of Renovare, a Christian ministry of spiritual formation since 2007. He’s also an Anglican priest, speaker, professor, writer, and “new monastic.” He has also ministered in a variety of churches, including a “church for the homeless.” He’s taught in seminaries and colleges and currently lives in Colorado. Pre-order your copy of Fire of the Word here.