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Eldredge's recurring message is simple: When you give yourself to Christ, God makes your heart good. Your heart matters to God. Liberate your heart and its deepest desires, and your love for God will explode.

To many in his growing audience—The Sacred Romance has sold about 700,000 copies, and Wild at Heart has surpassed a million—Eldredge is 21st-century evangelicalism's heart surgeon.

Dan Allender, one of Eldredge's mentors during his graduate education, has delighted in his former student's emerging ministry. Allender believes Eldredge stands in a literary stream—along with Kierkegaard, Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton—that appreciates Christianity as passion. "In many ways, I see John as the answer to Nietzsche's statement that Christians are both idiots and weak," he said. "John's voice really is a call to the yes of the gospel."

To others, however, he is dangerous. Just go to Amazon.com and look up the many reader comments on his Wild at Heart. Among the notes of exuberant praise, one also finds comments like these:

"Sadly, the Gospel of Jesus Christ contradicts every one of the above points of John Eldredge's gospel."

And "Any man who takes his wild ideas to heart will believe God is not sovereign (p. 30ff), man's deepest problem is not sin (p. 60ff), he needs to save his sons from their mother because she will 'emasculate' them (p. 64ff), woman's core being is 'seductive' (p. 36), only the male is given dominion by God in Eden (p. 48)."

As one reader put it, "As I looked over the reviews of this book, I noted a real polarization: guys either loved or hated this book."

So who is this man who in transforming himself aims to transform the meaning of discipleship in evangelicalism?

Getting American evangelicals out of their La-Z-Boys and climate-controlled shopping malls and into God's wild creation was central to the work that Brent Curtis and Eldredge dreamed of doing together. Curtis died pursuing that vision in 1998, and his death could have prevented the work that Eldredge now does under the banner of Ransomed Heart, which is based in a nondescript but cozy building in Colorado Springs.

Curtis and Eldredge met each other when Eldredge sought counseling and spiritual guidance. Eldredge called his mentors Allender and Larry Crabb, asking if they would recommend any counselor in Colorado Springs. They sent Eldredge to Curtis. Counselor and client soon became blood brothers. They discovered a mutual desire to combine counseling with public speaking and wilderness retreats, directed toward rescuing people's hearts from the ennui and passivity that they found common in modern Christianity. They both had long dreamed of centering their work on a ranch. Curtis and Eldredge were holding their first retreat for men, a forerunner of today's Wild at Heart basic training courses, when Curtis died. He was standing on rocks 80 feet above the ground, and the rocks gave way.

In his books, Eldredge repeatedly describes a wound that has pained him throughout life: His father's alcohol-induced emotional absence convinced Eldredge that he was on his own and could not fully give his heart to anyone. Losing his best friend nearly drove Eldredge permanently into the familiar darkness of that wound.

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August 2004, Vol. 48, No. 8