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.

Marriage mentors Jim and Barbara Grunseth compare getting married to piloting a 747 jet. The uniform and décor, they insist, do not qualify you; instead the flight training is what should be focused on. They say that while planning the wedding is not unimportant, preparing for the marriage is infinitely more important.

Their newest book I’m Getting Married! (release: September 2011) promises to prepare an engaged couple’s heart for a lifetime. Also the authors of marriage books Home to Home and Remember the Rowboats, Jim and Barbara Grunseth have been focused on ministering to couples for several years. Jim even has a Masters degree in Counseling-Psychology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. While their other books focus on couples that are already married, this one seeks to ground pairs who are ready to take the nuptial leap.

Their insights are unique. The very first chapter, abruptly titled Don’t Get Married, cautions readers that spiritual growth is a necessary prerequisite to a successful marriage.

Not surprisingly, Jim and Barbara also tackle the mother of all marriage issues, finances, in a chapter they title Finances—a Blessing or a Curse. “First, you must learn to balance your checkbook each and every month.” A Personal Financial Plan, they write, should have three sections: a spending plan, a giving plan, and a saving plan. To soon-to-be-married couples they also offer this warning: Never allow your wedding and honeymoon expenses to thrust you into debt. In addition to avoiding debt, the Grunseths also suggest that engaged couples plan to pay off their credit cards in full every month.

Chapter 7 covers the needs of the future mate. Some points are obvious, such as: Your future mate needs blessings, not insults. Some may seem a little counter-cultural, like their admonition to the woman that she affirm her husband and “let him lead.”

In I’m Getting Married! the Grunseths even offer practical tips which, they say if practiced by couples with teachable and humble hearts, prevent breakups. They include the suggestions to “hold hands everywhere” and to have the same bed time.

The book also describes three levels of intimacy, the highest of which, say the Grunseths, is Spiritual Intimacy. As for the next level, Emotional Intimacy, Jim says that one rule that he and Barbara live by is the Ten Minute Tiff Rule. “When you have a spat or heated disagreement, agree with God...to come together and resolve the tiff and forgive or ask forgiveness within ten minutes.” He says that some couples never resolve or reconcile their tiffs soon enough. “We met with one wife recently who slept in a separate room for a week because she and her husband were still stewing in the juices of grudge holding, resentment, and unforgiveness.” Jim admits that he and Barbara spend almost no counseling time on Sexual Intimacy. “When you address the problems in the top and middle levels, the ground level issues become resolved.”

In I’m Getting Married! the Grunseths also insist that the weekly date for married couples is necessary and that they themselves guard this time. The urgency of other good activities and demands, they say, will rob couples and, in time, they will drift apart.

Other principles they cover include how best to deal with in-laws and how to balance your relationships with the demands of children, church, work, and community. The book is available here.

“Men seem to be wired in such a way that pornography hijacks the proper functioning of their brains and has a long-lasting effect on their thoughts and lives.” These are the insights of William M. Struthers, an associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. There Dr. Struthers teaches courses on behavioral neuroscience, men and addictions, and the biological bases of behavior. His theoretical research is in the area of neuroethics, the biological bases of spirituality and personhood, and the nature of integration in psychology.

In his 2009 book Wired for Intimacy How pornography hijacks the male brain (InterVarsity Press) Struthers shares that repeated exposure to any stimuli results in neurological circuit-making. Repeated exposure to pornography and the objectification of the female body also change the way our brains see each other. Struthers says that while teaching an upper-division psychology class at Wheaton, Men and Addictions, he spent a significant amount of time exploring findings about men’s struggles with pornography and compulsive sexual behavior. The evaluation was meant to determine if a person could become addicted to porn and if it should be classified as a clinical problem.

The invitation to hordes of college-aged men turned up a defining result: They confided in Struthers that they felt “trapped” by their inability to stop consuming pornography—not just guilty, but trapped.

Struthers also says that he was flabbergasted at the economics and demographics of the adult entertainment industry, whose statistics he studied as part of the research. In some estimates, the financial size of the worldwide sex industry is around $57 billion, with $12 billion coming from the United States. And there is little debate that the availability of pornography has dramatically increased over the past twenty-five years. “My internet service provider’s home page,” Struthers reveals, “is littered with dating services (”Hot Singles in Your Neighborhood Looking for Love”) and my sports web sites have galleries of scantily clad cheerleaders.”

As to the students in his study, he says it became apparent that many of them were dealing with significant emotional and spiritual wounds that had resulted from their experience with pornography.

How Pornography Works
William Struthers says that, just as food is consumed and digested by the body, pornography is consumed by the senses and digested by the brain. “Pornography and our response to it alter our brain in a way that is difficult to undo,” he writes. “Pornographic images are inherently different from other signals.” He says that images of nudity and sexual intercourse are distinct, different from what we take in as part of our everyday visual experience. And he adds that the male brain, in particular, is built like an ideal pornography receiver, wired to be alert for these images of nakedness.

In the chapter titled, Your Brain on Porn, we read that a man’s brain is a sexual mosaic influenced by hormone levels in the womb and in puberty and molded by his psychological experience. As a result, Struthers claims, the male brains are very different in the way they detect stimuli, process information, and respond to emotions. He says “men detect sexual cues more rapidly when it comes to nakedness or sex-related stimuli” and seem to be more sensitive to visual cues for sexual arousal. Struthers writes that as men fall deeper into the mental habit of fixating on sexual images, the exposure to them creates neural pathways. Over time, these neural pathways become wider as they are repeatedly traveled with exposure to pornography. He says that the neural circuitry anchors this process solidly in the brain.

The bad news for men with repeated exposure to pornography is that it creates a one-way neurological superhighway in which a man’s mental life is over-sexualized and narrowed. It is Struthers’ assertion that the underlying key to this is the understanding that the brain is simpler than we think. While he concedes that is is an incredibly complex organ with an astronomical number of connections and cells, Struthers believes the brain’s major structures and functions are organized rather simply.

Processing the Sexual Image
Visual perception, neurologically speaking, follows a straightforward path. When the eye picks up the visual signal, it sends a neural signal to the LGN (lateral geniculate nucleus) part of the forebrain. That signal, writes Struthers, is then relayed to the visual cortex of the brain’s occipital lobe at the back of the head. “Men viewing a nude woman spend more time looking at her body and less time at her face,” Struthers observes. But he also says that, contrary to popular belief, there does appear to be a difference at how men look at a woman having heterosexual intercourse. While men still spend a significant amount of time looking at a woman’s body, they also carefully examine the woman’s face, presumably looking for her response to the sexual act. “Men are more preoccupied with a woman’s sexual arousal than they are given credit for,” Struthers comments, somewhere between profound insight and tongue-in-cheek humor.  

He also shares that the visual cortex and its primary outputs are more active in men than in women when they view pornography. The increase in hypothalamic and VTA activity is likely correlated to the release of dopamine fueling the salience of sexual signals. What this means is that when men view pornography, they experience increased anxiety and tension, resulting in an increase in amygdala activity. This is the same response in the brain that men experience when they’re shown statements suggesting sexual infidelity by their girlfriend. Sexual tension, Struthers writes, increases amygdala activity which the orgasm releases the stress of. A reader might conclude from this that the addictive power of pornography, beyond sexual and cultural, is the stimulation the nervous system becomes used to after repeated aggravation and tension and the relief and pleasure brought about by the release of said tension.

Struthers also explains the role of mirror neurons. These are the “monkey see monkey do” neurons in the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobe that involve the perception of a witnessed behavior. “If you see someone grab a pen, neurons that would correspond to his or her grabbing a pen are activated in you as well. It’s as if the cortex says ‘I can do that’ and mirrors how it would actually do it.’” Mirror neurons are related to pornography in that the brain reacts to the viewing of a pornographic movie in such a way as if the viewer were the person engaged in the sexual act. To deal with the arousal the porn creates, the brain mirrors and heightens the arousal, creating even more tension, causing the increased sexual drive to scream for an outlet.

Unfortunately, according to Strathers, responses to pornography flow through the same neurological viaducts through which feelings of love, longing, need, and romance are experienced. In other words, because men have in their brains the specific hard-wiring for intimacy than can be alternatively stimulated by responses to pornography, a perfectly legitimate desire is replaced by a destructive addiction. But, Struthers insists that by better understanding the biological realities of their sexual development, men can cultivate healthier sexual perspectives and interpersonal relationships. Order your copy of Wired for Intimacy.

 In their book How We Love Our Kids, the 5 Love Styles of Parenting (2011 Waterbrook), Milan and Kay Yerkovich define five different parenting types. The first type they describe is the Avoider parent. It was a role that Kay Yerkovich admits she played with her kids for thirteen years. “I had no idea then, but looking back, I can see how the bonding injuries from my childhood shaped how I parented in countless ways.” Most often, the author asserts, Avoiders grow up in homes where mastery and performance were valued with a consistent underlying message of hurry up and grow up, with independence prized and dependence discouraged.

The book even offers an assessment to help the reader determine if she is an Avoider. Questions like Does it seem as if my spouse has more emotional needs than I do? and When someone is very emotional, do I find a way to escape? help identify the Avoider parents. According to the Yerkoviches, the Avoider types can be identified when their children are mere infants.

Kay tells the story of Sandy, who walked into her office toting a six-week old in a carrier. Sandy’s blunt admission that she was “not cut out to be a stay-at-home mother” revealed that she was, in essence, feeling trapped. “She was competent, devoid of emotion, and task oriented,” Kay says of Sandy. “Women who are Avoiders often have some ambivalence about being a parent.” Kay Yerkovich explains that women Avoiders don’t feel a maternal instinct, and it’s difficult for them to adequately prepare for parenting, as they tend to dismiss their fears.

When Avoider moms or dads become parents for the first time, the Yerkoviches say, they are thrown into a world they could not have imagined. “Babies are tightly wrapped packages of constant needs and emotional demands.”  According to the book, Avoiders have some common childhood traits. For instance, Avoiders (as children) never felt particularly close to their parents and grew up in a family where everyone pretty much did their own thing, keeping to themselves.

On the other hand, there is the Pleaser parent. Milan and Kay say that while Pleasers can be wonderful parents, they err toward overprotection of their children. They also avoid conflict and are afraid of criticism, confrontation, and disapproval. The authors also insist that for Pleasers, anxiety is a way of life. “Peace and approval are their highest values, and they’ll do most anything to preserve them.”

According to the book’s Pleaser assessment, Pleasers are not only the givers in relationships, they have a knack for anticipating and meeting their spouse’s need. Pleasers also tend to over-commit and strive to win a critical or angry parent’s approval.

Milan and Kay warn that, as parents, a Pleaser’s protectiveness can hold an entire family hostage. “Over-attentive, they become distressed easily. They often need a lot of reassurance that the baby is okay and are nervous about doing everything right.” The book also argues that there are real challenges for the spouse of an insecure parent. Because Pleasers can be softies for children to exploit, it often forces the other parent to play the “bad cop” role. The bad cop therefore becomes the prosecutor, the child becomes the victim, and the Pleaser becomes the rescuer.  The Yerkoviches warn that this little triangle does not lead to wonderful marital intimacy.

Vacillator parents are described as parents whose moods are governed by the level of preoccupation they’re experiencing. When a parent is frequently occupied, children often misbehave and increase their attempts to be seen and heard. While desiring to feel special and connected, Vacillators simultaneously don’t trust loving attention to last or fill them up.

Some of the relationship signs of a Vacillator, say the Yerkoviches, are that they fall in love instantly, but end up being disappointed, and that they love the feeling of making up after a fight. “Vacillators don’t mean to be moody. They’re simply unaware of how often their current relationships are reminders of the feelings they had as kids.” According to Milan and Kay, it is unexamined injuries that contribute to the Vacillator’s preoccupation and reactivity and the mood swings between feeling good and bad. The book reports that when Vacillators are preoccupied with relationship difficulties, they’ll ruminate on possible scenarios, assuming they know the motivations and intentions of others.

The most distinct characteristic of the Vacillator parent is that they are mixed-message senders. One mixed message they send is the Affection/Aversion dichotomy. “Come here, sweetie, I need a hug.” Then, "Not now, I’m busy. Go play.” As for the Vacillator dads, the authors propose that they may be workaholics, preoccupied with stress, and like to brood about their disappointments with spouses and friends. They can be lots of fun and genuinely connect sometimes—but only when they’re in the right mood.

For those who can identify with the next parent type—the Controller—the Yerkoviches offer this insight: Overwhelmed by anxiety and humiliation, childhood was a prison for these poor kids. Those who are dominated, the book insists, will eventually dominate others—control or be controlled. For Controllers, the assessment alludes to traits involving paranoia (my spouse and kids do things behind my back and that infuriates me) and vice or addiction (I tend to use alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, or overspending to feel good) and career choices (I’ve changed jobs frequently).

While Controllers enter adulthood telling themselves that their childhood is behind them, their unresolved issues play out in their relationships as spouses and parents. “Shame at being incompetent or inadequate,” say Milan and Kay, “can be suppressed under anger and rage.” The Yerkoviches also warn (future spouses) that many Controllers have managed to keep their anger somewhat in check until they marry and/or become parents.

For those parenting with a Controller, the book foretells that these spouses may lose their personhood, appear childlike, or be forced to perform sexually, experience unwanted pregnancies and STDs, even be terrorized and battered. “Sometimes they might initiate sex to tame the beast,” Milan and Kay Yerkovich write in their book. In their years of counseling, the Yerkoviches have also observed that spouses of Controllers surprisingly don’t want change. “They tend to dig in their heels and balk at any help or possible change to their lives.”

Lastly, How We Love Our Kids defines the Victim parents—so dominated that they have trouble knowing who they are or what to think. Stuck as a child, the Victim parent is often more like an ineffective big sister or brother, dodging the angry parent. A Victim would rather suffer mistreatment by a spouse than be alone. Victims also exhibit nervousness even when things are calm. Their anxiety awaits “the anger to come.”

Able to check out or disassociate when stressed or overwhelmed, the Victim parent is literally unavailable to their infant at these times and “not all there.” The Victims are also more prone to be tolerant of intolerable living conditions and are used to extreme behavior. Many times, the Victim parent has chosen for a spouse the same type as the parent who traumatized the Victim as a child. One of the more dangerous characteristics of a Victim parent, the Yerkoviches say, is a tendency to sleep a lot, seeking distance from the kids and leaving them for extended periods.

Also, Victims often make excuses for the abusive spouse or accept blame for their outbursts of anger. They can also shift the blame to their kids, making them feel responsible for setting off the out-of-control parent.

How We Love Our Kids not only explores the 5 types of parenting, but also looks at how each parenting style plays out with different types of children. Order your copy from Amazon....

 

 When Crawford Loritts was twelve years old, he says he experienced a “defining moment.” It was what his father did and what his mother stopped doing that marked him deeply for the rest of his life. And he says it happened in less than five minutes. In the foreword of Dennis Rainey’s latest book Stepping Up, Crawford tells a story that took place at his family’s rental property where he, his parents, and his two older sisters spent a Saturday painting. “So I had to somehow figure out a way to be free of what I thought was an unnecessary burden,” Crawford recounts.

His ace in the hole was his mother. He was sure that she, being more sympathetic toward her son, would rescue him from spending his Saturday doing something he would rather not. After his mother explained to his father that Crawford didn’t need to be painting with them all day, but should be enjoying himself with his friends, his father quickly responded.

“Sylvia, I got this. That boy someday is going to be somebody’s husband and somebody’s father. There are going to be people depending on him. He has got to learn how to do what he has to do and not what he wants to do.” For the first time, Crawford’s mother nodded in agreement and decided not to rescue him.

The first parts of Stepping Up: A Call to Courageous Manhood include stories of heroism, often from war or the military. In a chapter titled What Robs Men of Courage, Dennis shares the story of the Arlington National Cemetery guards who weathered the storm of Hurricane Isabel in 2003, which had slammed into the east coast. As the edges of Isabel passed through Washington, D.C., the storm prompted the president and members of Congress to find safer quarters. The soldiers guarding the Arlington cemetery however remained at their post despite being given permission to leave.

Dennis Rainey says that, as men, all of us face decisions in life that demand courage. Big or little, complex or straightforward, these choices matter a great deal. In his estimation, one courageous decision leads to another. Tomorrow’s integrity, Rainey believes, depends on today’s bravery. In Stepping Up, he identifies five stages of a man’s journey through life, from boyhood to adolescence, manhood, mentor, and patriarch. He calls men to reject passivity by embracing courage. Order your copy here.

“You and all the members of your church, Christian, are finally responsible before God for what your church becomes, not your pastor and other leaders--you.” In his book What Is a Healthy Church, Cambridge-educated, Washington DC-based pastor and Mark Dever writes: “Every single one of us who is a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ will given an account for whether or not we have gathered together regularly with the church, spurred the church on to love and good deeds, and fought to maintain a right teaching of the hope of the gospel.” In his book, Dever also carefully yet definitively pushes the envelope, saying that if you would rather reach books about the Christian life, it may be time to stop and consider again what the Bible says a Christian is. After getting your attention, the book also promises to reveal what God’s ultimate purpose for churches is and why the Bible must guide our churches.

Expositional preaching.
Expositional preaching, Dever says, presumes that God wants the church to learn from both Testaments as well as from every genre of Scripture—law, history, wisdom, prophecy, gospels, and epistles.

According to Dever, expositional preaching also requires careful attention to the context of a passage, because it aims to make the point of the biblical text the point of the sermon. “A preacher’s ministry must be characterized by this very form of submission to the Word of God.” Dever goes so far to say that preaching is the fundamental component of pastoring. But Dever also warns that every method of preaching, however good, is open to abuse. An essential mark, he says of a healthy church, is sound Biblical theology. “Otherwise we will interpret individual verses to mean whatever we want them to mean.” He also asserts that pastors should teach sound doctrine, that is reliable, accurate, and faithful to the Bible.

Complex or controversial.
The book also gives advice on how the church can expect to deal with complex or controversial doctrines. “Too often today, the consumer-driven and materialistic culture around us encourages churches to understand the Spirit’s work in terms of marketing and to turn evangelism into advertising.” Dever observes that sometimes it’s tempting to present some of the real benefits of the gospel as the gospel itself. “Yet,” he says, “presenting them as the gospel is presenting a partial truth.” Dever believes that when we present the gospel less radically, we simply ask for false conversions and increasingly meaningless church membership lists, “both of which make the evangelization of the world around us more difficult.”

Understanding evangelism.
In the chapter titled, A Biblical Understanding of Evangelism, the author writes that if our minds have been shaped by what the Bible teaches about God... then a right understanding of evangelism will generally follow. His position is that evangelism is principally accomplished through teaching and meditating on the gospel itself, not through learning methods for sharing it.

One sign he says that a church may not have a Biblical understanding of conversion and evangelism is that its membership is noticeably larger than its actual attendance. In the these cases, Dever argues, the cause is often that evangelism becomes whatever we can do to produce a verbal confession.

Biblical membership means salvation affirmation.
By calling someone a member of your church, Dever clarifies that you are essentially confirming that that individual has your endorsement as a Christian. “As our church has grown in its healthiness, the head count on Sunday mornings has once again exceeded the number on our rolls.” A recovered practice of careful church membership will, Dever states, have many benefits, including making the witness of our churches to non-Christians more clear.

In all, What is a Healthy Church carefully lays out nine marks of a healthy church, covering topics from those already mentioned in this review to others you’d expect on such a list. But Mark Dever emphasizes from the very beginning that these marks are the responsibility of all the church members, not just pastors and leaders.

Order your copy here.

 Not unlike some of Josh McDowell's previous well-known apologetics works, this Coffee House Chronicles book, Is the Bible True...Really?, is written more like a play, set in Dallas, Texas inside a Religious Studies class in the fictional Opal University. The opening interaction between Nick, a freshman from a Bible belt town (and family and church) and Dr. William Peterson sets the stage for an intellectual battle over the reliability of the Bible. But unlike most apologetics texts, it also finds balance with the human and emotional element as well.

As the story continues with Nick conversing with a female friend he'd met at orientation, he finds that there are students who've already been moved away from the fundamentals they grew up with--in large part due to the teaching of Dr. Peterson. His friend Andrea, seeking to re-enforce the arguments put forth in Nick's class, shows him a Youtube video entitled Zeitgeist, the Greatest Story Ever Told, which depicts a plagiarist Christianity simply borrowing from other religious stories that were circulating years before Jesus’ birth. At first, Nick eschews the content, reasserting his belief that the Bible is God’s Word. He even tells his friend, “God’s Word is not going to come back void and I trust His Spirit speaks through me even when I don’t know what to say.” But as the weeks pass, he becomes discouraged. He finds it difficult to reconcile his beliefs with what we is learning in class.

The progression of Nick’s story isn’t unlike many young college students who arrive on campus full of faith and exuding conviction and then, after being gradually worn down by antithetical arguments, succumb to doubt, temptation, and unbelief—in that order. While Nick could not agree with outright atheism, he felt betrayed by Christianity.

The “betrayed” young man ascends higher in Dr. Peterson’s academic class and even enrolls in a Textual Criticism class, where he plan to write a paper refuting the Bible and Christianity. It’s at this point that another character enters the story, a former college football standout, studying for his doctorate, whose scholarship places him in a teaching assistant role to Nick’s professor, Peterson. It is Jamal Washington, by whom Nick is at first star struck, that responds to Nick’s doubts in ways that contrast to the more simplistic answers his former Christian friends had given him. Jamal makes himself available to Nick as well as to Dr. Peterson, whose semester-long absence from school is due to a terminally ill family member. Jamal's and Nick’s quality time discussing the intellectual aspects of the Biblical reliability debate draws in some of Nick’s friends who have also found skepticism since their arrival at Opal.

Between casual meetings over lunch or coffee and the impressive classroom lectures, one of which is scrutinized by a contemporary of Peterson’s, Jamal manages to share a wealth of convincing evidence as to the Bible’s reliability. Over time, it not only serves to restore Nick to his faith, but motivates him to be evangelistic, even with his professor, whose sister’s passing serves to soften him and make him more open to spiritual matters.

Is the Bible True... Really? presents plenty of documented (but unknown outside of academia) proofs of the Bible’s accuracy and even helps debunk the myths presented by the other side. The academic portion can be weighty in some parts of the book, but overall the human interest generated by the story’s handful of characters makes it a much quicker read than most apologetics works of this quality.

Is the Bible True... Really? (2011 Moody Press)

The author of Living Close to God considers himself to be spiritually handicapped. Of his book, Gene Edwards says it’s a journey in the search of a spiritual life for Christians who are not spiritually inclined.

The man considered to be the dean of the home-church movement says he was raised in the home of a laboring man and that, like his father, Gene is a natural doer. He insists that he is not, by nature, a spiritual person. “I was converted while in college,” Edwards writes. Upon graduating, Edwards was called to the ministry and entered seminary all in the same week. “What was instilled in me by my denomination was the importance of winning others to Christ. That fit the doer in me perfectly. Evangelism was my consuming passion.” Edwards shares that his sole interest was to turn the world upside down and win everyone on earth to the Lord Jesus Christ.

His story of zeal is then followed by this caution: No young believer should ever rise quickly in the ministry. After being a pastor, graduating from seminary, and then writing a best-selling book on evangelism, Gene Edwards was soon leading city-wide campaigns which sent Christians out to knock on every door in the city in an effort to lead people to Christ. While he says his zeal never faltered, he reached a point where he had to choose between two paths: He could either continue in his ministry or come to know Christ better. Edwards declares that he could not do both. “It is far more important to me that I come to know my Lord in living reality than it is to be in ministry without it,” he once wrote in a note to himself.

As Edwards dedicated himself to the search of how to know God better, he happened upon some surprising secrets. He even begins his book by asserting that is possible to be fully devoted to prayer and never actually fellowship with the Lord. Edwards admits that his greatest problem in this area is that when he came before the Lord, his mind would always wander. Worse, he often fell asleep.

To those who think that simply reading more—about spiritual matters—will assuage the longing, Edwards reminds them that many of the early followers of and believers in Jesus were illiterate and had no such luxury, but managed to grow in Him anyway. He also writes that Jesus makes things simple, and people responded to him as to no other. “God makes Himself known to us in simple ways.” He also states that being a theologian is not in any way a passport to spirituality. In fact, Edwards believes that it can be a hindrance. He writes, “my illiterate grandfather had a walk with Christ that would put a Christian mystic to shame . . .  Do not look down in simple things. Embrace them.”

As Gene Edwards consciously sought to transition his quiet time from “prayer” to fellowshipping with God, he found the first key to achieving that was slowing down his thoughts, to quiet the inner man. He also says he discovered that this new way of praying would lead to a “two-way conversation. I never dreamed of having a two-way conversation with Christ. Surely, that was not only impossible, but it was a thought that never really crossed my mind.”

Edwards encourages his readers to slow down as they read and pray Scripture and to see what Heaven is saying in the first person. In a chapter titled Out of the Heart of Christ Came Revealing Words Edwards asks the question, “Were actual words spoken in eternity?” He explains that the Lord came to the earth and used words that tell of a divine relationship. Physical words became something that had higher meaning and had a miraculous effect: they could become an experience with the Lord and food for our spirits. More astounding still to Edwards is his discovery that we are promised the ability to know Christ in the same way He knows the Father. Then, Edwards says, he discovered the word walk. Finding out what Christ’s words—words with physical definitions like eat, drink, and breathe—meant in the spiritual realm would become his spiritual “handles.”

The very next chapter he devotes to helping readers learn how breathing can become both physical and spiritual. Gene Edwards continues to be practically descriptive throughout the next chapters as he expands on the spiritual nature of walk and addresses those who think they’re too busy to fellowship with God. The book concludes with a forty-two page, seven-session study guide. Pre-order Living Close to God When You're Not Good at It from Amazon.com.

A young journalist living in New York City, Alisa Harris enjoys writing in quirky coffee shops. In her very personal memoir Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics (2011 Waterbrook Press) she talks of how she grew up in a family that actively fought injustice and moral decay in America. As a teen, Alisa believed that putting the right people in power would save her nation. “In early childhood I had waged spiritual war with little thought of earth, and as a teen I threw myself into political war with little thought of heaven,” she writes. When girls Alisa’s age were coveting Juicy Couture handbags, she was buying a George W. Bush tote bag, t-shirt, and stickers.

Alisa Harris spent much of her childhood with her family picketing abortion clinics. She remembers her mother, her father, and herself lifting their signs as high as they could, with even smaller siblings hanging on to the backs and shoulders of her sign-wielding parents. Alisa says she wrote her book for other ex-culture warriors who, like her, grew up with signs in their fists and are trying to figure out what to do with their now-empty hands. She says that like her, they were raised to be activists, and, like her, they probably felt lost as their belief in the nobility of the culture wars faded away.

To a younger Alisa, it was impossible to be a “Christian” without also being a conservative Republican. “Since Jesus declared, ‘I did not come to bring peace but a sword,’ I believed it was my Christ-like duty to polarize.” She tells of how she attended a church where everyone was not only a Republican, but a Republican who submitted to her parents’ biennial cajoling to man the GOP phone bank in favor of pro-family candidates. “We did not attend public school or listen to rock music or wear faded jeans or watch movies made after 1955...or make friends with those who did any of the above,” she shares candidly.

Alisa also confesses that she spent a year at community college believing that standing up for Jesus meant making herself “the most obnoxious student in class.” But she eventually burned out doing the blowhard spiritual thing. “The belligerence drained me. The confrontation made my classmates aloof. I ran out of arguments and fled to a more like-minded college to escape the exhaustion of constantly defending my faith.”

Lest you think that Raised Right is an essay on losing faith, this is where it should be pointed out that Alisa Harris’s story is anything but. Her book also provides a fascinating glimpse into the worldview of a younger generation of faith—followers of Christ who believe that the term “Christian” is not synonymous with a single political party or cultural issue.

As she moved into adulthood, Alisa confronted unexpected complexities on issues that had previously seemed clear-cut. As she set about evaluating the strident partisanship she had grown up with, she began to consider other perspectives while staying true to the deep respect she held for her parents and for the Christian principles that had always motivated her.

Raised Right chronicles the 2007 Hillsdale College graduate and her worldview metamorphosis against the backdrop of history-making world events like the War on Terror and the 2008 presidential election and beyond. But the unfolding of events also includes Alisa’s defining day-to-day encounters after she moved to New York City. “In a city where hedge-fund managers hustle past homeless people every day,” Harris writes, “poverty is always close.” She also asserts that living during a recession brings the plight of the poor and disenfranchised even closer. She recounts running around midtown Manhattan, seeing an old, grizzled black man in a wheel chair, his legs amputated, begging for something to eat. An hour or so later, Alisa rushed down the subway stairs and hurried past him as he sat on the ground at the foot of the stairs, in the subway filth, making the same plea. “I used to think that anyone who was poor had only himself to blame,” Alisa admits, “that America is a magical and glorious place so overflowing with opportunity that anyone who’s struggling is simply not working hard enough...or would really just rather buy drugs than pay rent.” Alisa even researched stories about whether shelters have beds for every homeless person in New York so she could prove that the resources were available but people chose not to use them. She says, “when you believe hardship is a person’s own fault, it’s easy to look right through their suffering.”

The publisher insists that to read Alisa’s book is to meet the new breed of Christians shaping our culture. At the very least, Raised Right will prompt you to consider more deeply what it means to affirm Christ-like justice, mercy, and righteousness in the current cultural landscape. Readers will also end the book with a deeper understanding of how the new generation of Christians approaches the intersection of faith and politics.

Raised Right author Alisa Harris has worked as a college instructor in writing and journalism. Her pieces have also been published in WORLD, the Detroit Free Press, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Farmington Daily Time.

Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics is set for release September 6.