I picked up Josh Harris’ latest with the eager expectation that I might be using it in personal discipleship with other guys. Harris is the pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, MD. This book was billed as a one that, well, “dug down deep.”

I anticipated that the book would take basic Christian teachings (doctrine) and helpfully unpack them for those eager to learn. It did do that, but the unpacking was definitely of an autobiographical nature. Perhaps I should have taken the subtitle seriously – “Unearthing What I Believe and Why It Matters.”

The first couple of chapters recall Harris as a Christian poster boy author of fame that tries to live down his I Kissed Dating Goodbye notoriety now that he’s a pastor. It seems that he really struggled with the Christian attention and fame that he received as a result of that book. It was interesting, but again, it was a segue from what I hoped to be able to use and receive from the book.

While there are some helpful chapters, it really never digs down deep. However, two chapters stood out as being worth reading:

1. Chapter 4: Ripping, Burning, Eating - This chapter does a great job exposes how we use the Bible (and how we ignore it when it doesn’t line up with how we prefer to live). In it, he expounds on how “doctrine” is NOT a bad, stale word. Rather, doctrine means truth, teaching, or standard, and without doctrine, we will quickly orient our lives around our own preferences.
2. The last chapter (11) on “Humble Orthodoxy” is one of the best in the book. It urges us to not seek “rightness” on an issue but to seek righteousness. Too many folks in the church would rather win an argument than a soul.

Harris is on the money (as far as my theological tribe is concerned) about how he explains the teachings of the church in this book. It’s very readable. However, you may want to check out other resources for a more thorough and deeper treatment if you’re really curious. In addition, if you’ve read Dug Down Deep and have a different opinion of the book’s impact or contribution, I’d love to hear it.

Tim Challies has long been one of my favorite Christian bloggers. On top of being an excellent designer, he’s a great practical theologian. He’s not afraid to write lengthy, in-depth entries where most of the blog world has succumbed to short “sound-byte” type content in order to keep skimmers. He wants thinkers, real readers. Not those who might scan his material for whatever their current itch is.

I was excited last year when he revealed his work in progress was on the topic of spiritual discernment. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, and after finally getting around to reading it last month (my mom ordered it for me for Christmas), I was not disappointed.

He pulls no punches in lambasting the Western church for having a childish faith in Christ rather than a to-be-commended childlike faith in Christ. In the first chapter, he takes to task those who would denigrate “theology” as being for seminary-trained, boorish, and argumentative types. Rather, he states unequivocally, theology is for every Christian.

Good theology helps us all to know and understand the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, left and right. Only by knowing truth as revealed in God’s Word are we prepared to avoid know and identify falsehood.

In firm but loving tones, Challies lays out the challenge of discernment for today’s church. He says we must become discerning because there is more falsehood and half-truths than ever before wafting through the airs of Christianity, competing for our attention.

Whether it’s the latest faith-healer, prosperity teacher, multi-mansion owning pastor or stadium-crusader, how is the church to know who are teaching truth and who are masquerading as shepherds when they are actually spiritual wolves?

To make matters worse, Christians, for the most part:

• Have a secular worldview. (A study by Barna says that as few as 9% of professing Christians have a biblical worldview.)
• Have a low view of Scripture. Quoting James Montgomery Boice: “Inerrancy is not the most crucial issue facing the church today. The most serious issue, I believe, is the Bible’s sufficiency,” Challies commented,

[Christians] forsake biblical reason in favor of feelings, voices, visions, or other subjective means of supposedly knowing God. This is a deadly error, for spiritual discernment must be founded upon God’s objective revelation of Himself in Scripture.

• Have a low view of theology.
• Have a low view of God.

When we think wrong thoughts about God we soon serve Him in wrong ways as well. We must get our theology right!

I was not disappointed with Tim’s first effort at publication. In fact, it’s destined to become a must-read in this crucial area of church health. He puts forth such a compelling argument for the urgent recovery of biblical discernment that I would encourage every believer – but especially every Christian leader to read it.

We do indeed live in a day where folks are eager to have preachers, teachers and flamboyant personalities simply affirm how they’re already living. Paul had powerful words for his protege Timothy who would be called upon to continue communicating and demonstrating the Gospel in a society much like ours:

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
2 Timothy 4.1-4

Here’s the scene: a pastor is deeply frustrated about the steady degeneration of his society. In addition to this, churches are in sad shape across the country. Members of churches are self-consumed and refuse to be held accountable for their spiritual lives. They actually get offended when a pastor seeks to point out issues, sins or rebellion in their lives.

In addition, churches are splitting left and right. Some entire groups won’t tolerate other groups. The pastor continually warns that such division will only discredit Christianity as a whole in the eyes of society.

To make matters worse, many pastors have abdicated their role as spiritual shepherds and simply seek to preach and teach bland self-help material, passing it off as the Gospel of Christ. They avoid controversial matter, for fear of offending someone. They do not seek to discipline nor disciple their members, nor are they training leaders to carry on the work of the ministry.

You may be thinking that this sounds pretty normal. However, Richard Baxter addressed these concerns and many others in his book The Reformed Pastor during the mid-1600s. I wrote a while back about the importance of learning from “old dead guys,” and I stand by that. If you haven’t read any Christian books published prior to 1900 recently, your Christianity is certainly skewed, and you may even be guilty of what John Piper calls “chronological snobbery.”

Baxter has been called the “Prince of Preachers,” and this book (one of his more than 168 works!) is a demonstration of his deep burden for the beauty of the bride of Christ, his careful articulation of theology, and his extremely practical approach to Christian living and leading.

For pastors who avoid discipline (or church members who decry it), Baxter said:

The tempter surely has gained a great victory when he gets but one godly pastor of a church to neglect discipline… if it were well understood how much of our pastoral authority and work consists in church guidance, then it would be also discerned that to be against discipline in the church is tantum non to be against the ministry. Again, to be against the ministry is to be absolutely against the church. And to be against the church is near to being absolutely against Christ. 

Sir Stephen James, writing of Baxter, said, “Men of his size are not to be drawn in miniature.” I am afraid that any attempt to summarize this book or the man in one-entry blog would do just that. I highly encourage any Christian leader to read, digest, and allow this book and its hard-hitting practical advice to reform your ministry. At the very least, it’s a humbling evaluation tool.

This small book by Baxter would cause large waves in the evangelical pool if but half of the pastors in your area would read it. It is a great discussion tool for practical and personal ministry. Much of the book was originally written to be an address to a group of protesters – Protestants. Baxter does not pull any punches. When talking of ministers’ communion with one another, he says:

Do not grow strange to one another. Do not say that you have business of your own to do when you should be at any such meetings or other work for God… Even if you could do without the benefit of such meetings, yet the church and our common work required them. Do not then show yourselves condemners or neglecters or such necessary work. Distance breeds strangeness and foments dividing flames and jealousies. Communion will prevent or cure this… Ministers have need of one another. 

Before one thinks that Baxter doesn’t have much to offer the Christian layperson, I would urge anyone with the desire to learn to read the book as well. It has so much to say about the attitude and practice of laity as well as pastors.

Considering that Baxter was both a political leader and prison frequenter during his tenure as pastor should interest you as you do more research and reading into his storied ministry. I, for one, am putting one book on my wish list: A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter.

According to Wikipedia, Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted is, “without doubt, his most famous and enduring contribution to Christian literature… This slim volume was credited with the conversion of thousands and formed one of the core extra-biblical texts of evangelicalism until at least the middle of the nineteenth century.”