“I read in airports-waiting for appointments-before I go to bed. Sometimes I’ll thumb through a book, and if it grabs me, I’ll run with it.”
Last year I read Jim Conway’s Men In Midlife Crisis (David C. Cook). Experiencing some very painful midlife problems myself, it seemed as though Conway were speaking directly to me. At the same time, I began to recognize how extensively a midlife crisis affects both Christian and nonChristian men. The workaholic, the affair, the marriage knot, the fading and dying dream-are presented in a fashion that obligates the reader to see fragments of his own experiences scattered throughout Conway’s thoughts. He tells how midlife personality changes of a husband can devastate the wife. She has looked to him for leadership, and suddenly he is unable to function as the leader. He wants to lead, yet he feels he must turn to her for security. In Conway’s words, “He is like a sailboat caught in a deep fog offshore, without a compass and without wind to move him even if he wanted to go.” The book provides practical solutions for dealing with midlife crisis; but it was even more of an aid to me in identifying problems in my life, which I thought were spiritual, as those shared by many men going through this period.
I was again sensitized to ghetto life by reading Home Is a Dirty Street (Third World Press, Chicago) by Eugene Perkins. The author paints a realistic portrait of what it’s like to grow up in the ghetto. Kids there never have the opportunity to just enjoy life; they have to learn how to defend themselves, how to fight, and how to survive. When the street is the home, a sixteen-year-old is really twenty-one in terms of experience. Perkins graphically discusses the kind of language ghetto children use and why they use it; the book speaks in raw terms. But for anyone involved in urban ministry, there’s nothing like it. It should be used as a textbook for summer urban ministry programs.
Since one of the main goals of my ministry is to develop leaders, I found Thomas Gordon’s Leadership Effectiveness Training (Wyden Books of Harper & Row) very helpful. It’s not a “Christian” book; yet its pragmatic, no-intellectual-garbage approach to problem solving and communication skills for leaders is unmatched. He analyzes, discusses, and summarizes topics such as getting people to work with you, evaluating others without damaging their self-esteem, and making meetings productive and enjoyable. In one chapter Gordon outlines the typical situation of a leader correcting the performance of a subordinate who has done a task incorrectly, and then lists ten negative responses to watch for. He emphasizes that little learning will occur until leaders learn to acknowledge their subordinates’ feelings daily. Principles such as these are crucial, especially in the development of lay leadership.
George E. Ladd’s book The Presence of the Future (Eerdmans) not only changed my understanding and application of Scripture, it revolutionized my preaching. It’s the best book I’ve found for illustrating the implications of God’s kingdom for modern church and society. Ladd differentiates between the kingdom and the church with a parable. He likens the kingdom to drawing a net that catches both good and bad fish, which eventually need to be sorted. The kingdom of God is similar in that it’s not now creating a perfect fellowship; it is gathering men and women together, some of whom are not true sons of God. At a future time, when the church will go through judgment, the true will be separated from the untrue, and the remaining fellowship will be without blemish.
Finally, a much lighter and very practical book I’ve found useful is The Contagious Congregation (Abingdon) by George G. Hunter III. He does a good job in wrestling with the concept of evangelism as it relates to the local church, and he challenges the reader to do the same. He feels many Christians naively believe that most people become Christians as a result of a single witnessing session initiated by a total stranger. Seeds are often planted that way, but usually conversions result from the nurturing that takes place in church worship services and fellowship groups. The book is valuable for helping readers see the components of contagious fellowship, and why they are essential to evangelism.
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