Book Reviews

For churches planning new or expanded facilities, The Next Step (Riverstone Publishing) by Bill Chegwidden is an excellent resource for discovering how to plan, design and build churches. The author is an architect whose firm has worked with more than 350 churches, and that experience informs this helpful guide.

N.T. Wright is widely known as a leading theologian, but his new book Small Faith, Great God (IVP) offers us a picture of Wright as a preacher. This second edition of an excellent book on the Christian faith (first published in 1978) grew out of sermons that Wright preached in various congregations. Readers today will find it an insightful and useful study of the role of faith in the life of the believer.

Pastor Blayne Banting has written Take Up and Preach (Xulon) as a guide to studying a biblical passage and moving toward the preaching event. His work on the Homiletical Bridge will be a useful guide to many preachers.

As the New Atheists aggressively promote their own views in the public square, it is important for Christian leaders and thinkers to offer resources for believers in engaging such issues. Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow have provided a helpful resource in their book Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists (Kregel). In addition to the work of the authors, they have included supplementary material by several well-known authors and apologists, including William Dembski, Gary Habermas, Darrell Bock and others.

What does the Bible say about healing? In the new book Healing in the Bible: Theological Insights for Christian Ministry (Baker Academic), Frederick Gaiser examines a variety of biblical texts which engage the subject of health and healing. He discusses the significance of the texts for the contemporary church's understanding of this topic.

The roots of evangelical faith predate the Reformation, and in Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy (IVP Academic), editor Bradley Green and a team of top scholars share essays about the most influential early and Medieval Christian thinkers. Among the theologians discussed are Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas. This is an excellent collection and a worthwhile addition to any pastor's library.

In recent years, a flurry of outstanding books has been published on the topic of expository preaching. A team of Southern Baptist pastors and professors now add their own contribution to the field with their new book Text-Driven Preaching.

Memorizing Scripture can be a powerful devotional tool for the believer, according to pastor Joshua Choonmin Kang. In his book Scripture by Heart: Devotional Practices for Memorizing God's Word (IVP), we learn again the spiritual depth that can come through Scripture memorization.

We can learn a lot from the questions Jesus asked, according to Stan Guthrie in his new book All that Jesus Asks: How His Questions Can Teach and Transform Us (Baker Books).

In his new book Costly Grace (Leafwood Publishers), Jon Walker revisits Dietrich Bonhoeffer's classic book The Cost of Discipleship to explore the challenge of living in grace and walking with Christ in our own day.