Some Significant Books of 1971: Part 3: Practical Theology

Surveying significant 1971 books in the “practical ministries” area has been an exciting and frustrating task. Exciting, because letters to thirty-six publishers brought a flood of catalogs, release notices, letters, and review copies of new books, plus even a few sets of galley proofs. Frustrating, because the sheer weight of words has made it necessary to make some tough decisions—decisions not to mention books that probably would be mentioned if only a single topic (such as church renewal) were to be surveyed in this article.

I’ve tried to establish criteria for selecting books to mention. The first has been this: if a reader has a limited budget for books, and a limited amount of time for reading, which book or books in each area seem most helpful?

But “most helpful” demands definition. Here are the questions that determine for me whether a book is helpful: (1) Does it make me think? Some books that I disagree with theologically—disagree with so drastically that I can’t accept either premises or conclusions—are still tremendously helpful because they make me probe my own theology, and push me to spell out its implications. So most assuredly many books in this review will not be safely evangelical. And in mentioning them I will not be giving my own or CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S stamp of approval. (2) Do they get toward the guts of an issue? I can’t get enthusiastic about books that seem to be illustrational jewels strung together on invisible string. I feel a need for books that examine issues in an explicitly stated and developed theological or theoretical frame of reference. Thus a counseling book that records Pastor Joe’s fifteen years of experience but does not explore the nature of counseling, the counseling relationship, and such tough questions as how biblical truth is communicated in counseling, is one I’ll quickly set aside. (3) Does it expand awareness? Here I reflect a slight aversion to things said last year by someone else but now recast and recovered for new release. I want the kind of probing exploration in print that helps me see new relationships, new areas for personal growth, new ways to apply myself in ministry.

So there are the criteria. And now, with advance apology to publishers and authors whom I have purposely or inadvertently left out in this admittedly subjective approach, here is a list of helpful books that appeared in 1971 in the practical fields.

COUNSELING Among the varied offerings in this field recently, I felt closest to Jay Adams’s Competent to Counsel (Baker). He seeks to start with biblical presuppositions, and develops what he calls a “nouthetic” approach—attempting through God’s Word in “personal conference and discussion” to “bring about personality and behavioral changes in the direction of greater conformity to biblical principles and practices.” In Human Presence (Judson) by pastor and counselor Jim Ashbrook will probably be criticized by some as too “humanistic.” But as an exploration of the deeply human interactions in counseling it is helpful and thought-provoking.

Fortress Press has a series of “Pocket Counsel Books” under the editorship of William E. Hulme. These sixty-page books on such topics as When Marriage Ends, Drinking Problem?, When Someone Dies, and Helping Your Troubled Child are designed as supplements to person-to-person counseling. Written in a non-technical vocabulary, they give insight and help to persons in need and open up the counseling conversations. I think most pastors should look over each title of the series.

Several 1971 books on death and dying are especially rich. One is Gladys Hunt’s The Christian Way of Death (Zondervan). Another is Joe Bayly’s paperback, The View From a Hearse (David C. Cook). Both are worth reading, and worth having on hand to give to those recovering from (or about to experience) death in the family. Bayly’s simple thoughts and deep faith are shared from his own experience as a man well acquainted with grief, who knows the comforts of Christ in bereavement.

Of the many marriage-counseling helps produced last year (see a CHRISTIANITY TODAY review of many of them in November 19, 1971, issue), the two most noteworthy were God, Sex, and You: An Evangelical Perspective (Holman) by M. O. Vincent and Walter Trobisch’s I Married You (Harper & Row). I’d like to share the latter with a couple either about to be married or troubled in their marital relationship. Trobisch’s narrative approach communicates basic biblical concepts about marriage and relationships in a beautiful and gentle way.

CHURCH RENEWAL I think 1972 will be a “swing” year in the renewal movement. The past has seen us move through several book waves: a wave of criticism of the institutional church, a hesitant wave seeking to develop an ecclesiology (this has by no means crested yet), and now the first swellings of a wave of reports of significant pastoral experience with renewal in the local church. Journey Toward Renewal (Judson) by William R. Nelson and William F. Lincoln is a report of several years of ministry in a Rochester, New York, Baptist church. While I won’t line up with the authors’ ecclesiology, this overview of five years’ personal struggle in a large urban church, “written for laymen and clergy who want to be used by God as change agents within traditional churches,” is bound to be helpful. (Preview: look for David Main’s Full Circle [Word] and Bob Girard’s Hang Loose, Brethren [Zondervan], both scheduled for release soon. They are excitingly written, deeply revealing accounts of pastors and churches in the process of renewal based on a solid, biblical ecclesiology.)

An interesting addition is Bob E. Patterson’s The Stirring Giant (Word). Its 307 pages draw quotes from books and periodicals and organize them under such headings as “What’s Wrong With the Church?,” “Theological Bases for Renewal,” and “Emerging Strategies For Inward Renewal.” The book suffers as any would that extracts tidbits from context and arranges them without regard to the author’s theological or theoretical orientation. But aside from the dangers of indigestion presented by such a mixture, the book also suffers by ignoring some of the conservative publishers (like Zondervan) and periodicals (like United Evangelical Action and Moody Monthly) that have presented significant renewal material and viewpoints. Still, the book is a hardy sampler you may want to have on hand.

Finally I’d like to mention Stephen W. Brown’s little work, Where the Action Is (Revell). It doesn’t offer any great new insights, but it does reveal struggles of a young pastor to develop a healthy and biblical self-image. I’m somewhat convinced that the first step toward renewal in many churches must be the pastor’s honest evaluation of just who he is—and who he isn’t.

WORSHIP Renewal thinking has been nudging us toward a reappraisal of worship, just as it has been insistently calling for a reappraisal of preaching. Evangelicals haven’t responded with much enthusiasm in either area. But two books on worship that may help us probe a little deeper are Jay C. Rochelle’s paperback Create and Celebrate! (Fortress) and James F. White’s New Forms of Worship (Abingdon). Each presents a viewpoint more liturgical than some of us have. But each does spend about a third of its space exploring the nature and meaning of worship. If worship in your church troubles you, you may not feel these books give answers, but they may point you toward some of your own.

FAMILY LIFE The past few years have brought greater emphasis on the family and its role in the Christian growth of both children and adults. None of last year’s crop of books seems to me to compete successfully with older standards, but a few do rate mention. I was most impressed with David Augsburger’s little book, Cherishable: Love and Marriage (Herald). Billed as a book “for husbands and wives who want to explore creative relationships,” it is both sensitive and potent.

Concordia has released a revised edition of Oscar Feucht’s Helping Families Through the Church. Revision has not been extensive, nor have bibliographies been carefully updated. And “the church” remains undefined. Still, the book is a standard one, and any pastor who missed it first time around will want to pick up the 1971 version. Feucht also served as editor of another project of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Family Life Committee, a book called Family Relationships and the Church (Concordia). This book, organized historically, explores family living psychologically and sociologically and is far less “practical” than Helping Families.

Finally, two of the books written for laymen as stimulants to group discussion or personal guidance should be mentioned, primarily as examples of extremes. Wallace Denton’s Family Problems (Westminster) is full of good insights but reads like many of the secular texts I’ve surveyed. On the other hand, Larry Christianson’s The Christian Family (Bethany Fellowship) seeks a biblical base for understanding the home, and locates it in the authority and function structures of the family. The result is a system containing much truth, but with that truth distorted by the failure to see that authority must be understood as a function of a distinctive relational life-style.

MISSIONS AND EVANGELISMChrist the Liberator (Inter-Varsity) contains messages from Urbana ’70, including John Stott’s expositions of the upper-room discourses and a variety of speakers on issues in world evangelization. The Third World and Mission (Word) by Dennis Clark offers a provocative challenge by an experienced, well-traveled missionary and evangelical leader. Missionary biography has had a great influence on the Church, so Helen Manning’s story of modern-day martyrdom in West Irian, To Perish For Their Saving, and John Pollock’s story of L. Nelson Bell, A Foreign Devil in China (Zondervan), rate mention too.

The best and most practical book on evangelism in ’71 is Richard Peace’s Witness (Zondervan). The book is a manual for use by “small groups who are serious in their desire to learn how to share their faith” to use during an eight-week training and sharing experience. It is one of the few to attempt to blend the supportive dynamics of the small sharing group with a clear focus on witness and personal evangelism.

YOUTH Books on youth culture and ministry deserve a category of their own. Probably the most read of the 1971 crop will be Billy Graham’s The Jesus Generation (Zondervan). Zondervan also released The Untapped Generation by David and Don Wilkerson this past year. While neither book makes a major contribution to youth culture literature, each has something to commend it. Dr. Graham has maintained good rapport with youth through the years, and his healthy concern for them and positive attitude provide a good model for other adults. The Wilkerson book comes from years of experience with teens and has many illustrations from life as well as documented data. Both books are more about youth than for youth.

Drugs are still with us, and the very brief paperback The Drug Bug by Palmquist and Reynolds (Bethany Fellowship) is a good primer for someone who wants a little practical information without in-depth discussion. Charlie Shedd offers Is Your Family Turned On? Coping With the Drug Culture (Word), which is basically a helpful potpourri of comments by young people themselves.

The big shift in youth culture marked in 1971 was toward spiritualism and the supernatural. Several of the year’s books refer to this in chapters and illustrations, but the best whole book was Stars, Signs and Salvation in the Age of Aquarius (Bethany Fellowship) by James Bjornstad and Shildes Johnson.

Several booklets under the Victor imprint of Scripture Press offer short but solid content on youth issues. Finally, Wilkerson’s Jesus People Manual (Regal) is a tough-speaking, well received book on what commitment means.

ADULTS Emphasis on the youth culture should not detract from ministry to adults. This is an area that has been revitalized, particularly by the small-group movement. Bergevin and McKinley present an updated adaptation of the Indiana Plan in Adult Education for the Church (Bethany Press), and Robert C. Leslie surveys Sharing Groups in the Church (Abingdon). Each of these is limited in value, the first by cumbersome machinery and limited goals. Martha M. Laypoldt (who earlier wrote Forty Ways to Teach in Groups) now presents a slightly schizophrenic paperback, Learning Is Change (Judson). The first part seems to be a guide for group exploration of learning, with suggestions for personal reflection and group exercises, but the book gradually drifts toward the more traditional “how to teach adults” structure for the Sunday-school teacher (as illustrated by the disappearance of both “reflections” and “exercises” in the last chapters). Still, the first eighty pages of the book are valuable and provocative. My own Creative Bible Study (Zondervan) was written as a guide to small-group and family Bible study. It is designed to help the many small groups stimulated by renewal to sink the roots of their sharing deeply into the Word of God. In a day when small groups drift so easily into a pattern of relationships limited to the horizontal, Creative Bible Study seeks to help restore and establish the vertical.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Professional Christian educators should make good use of the massive tome Research on Religious Development (Hawthorn), edited by Merton Strommen, which has had a major review in these pages (December 17, 1971, pp. 25–28). Two other books are significant for the questions they raise. C. Ellis Nelson’s Where Faith Begins (John Knox) explores the process by which faith is communicated. This is really vital stuff. We evangelicals need to question the transmissive “classroom model” of education that has dominated our attempts at communication, and to develop a biblically and theologically rooted model of education to replace a present system that owes more to secular educational practice than theology. I see exciting breakthroughs in Christian education when we begin to ask the right questions, and to probe the Word of God for insight, understanding, and answers. Robert Dow’s Learning Through Encounter (Judson) gives a rationale for experiential education but sees learning and growth and God all as summable in interpersonal relationships. Each of these books, from an evangelical position, has a terribly inadequate view of faith, of the goals of Christian nurture, of the Bible, and of revelation. Each still holds to a view of revelation that is personal, and not propositional, in which selfhood but not Truth is expressed. At any rate, I think Nelson particularly is important, and I hope we evangelicals will read him, and then begin to ask ourselves the questions he is exploring.

PREACHING I include this category only to assure you that it wasn’t overlooked. I did read several books on preaching, with growing discouragement. All of today’s emphasis on renewal has failed—and should fail—to push the pastor out of the pulpit. But it should also force us to ask some brutal questions about the function of preaching, how God intends us to use the spoken Word in the Church, and whether there can be a theology of preaching that flows from our understanding of the nature and purposes of the Scripture. Surely the tired old books on titles, parts, illustrations, persuasion, and so on have always begged these questions. But evangelicals have not addressed themselves to the issues. Perhaps in 1972 we’ll see some vigorous efforts to reestablish the importance of the pulpit ministry and to give some needed perspective. I certainly hope so.

Lawrence O. Richards is assistant professor of Christian education at Wheaton College Graduate School. He has the B.A. from University of Michigan and Th.M. from Dallas Seminary and is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern.

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