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License To Thrill
...The examples Wilkinson gives of miraculous answered prayers include the evangelizing of Long Island in six weeks and the taking over of the island of Trinidad for Christ (you may have missed these, but never mind)....

...Laurie Beth Jones is less inclined to promise "miracles," if only because she believes Jesus’ advice as a life coach should be transparent to anyone’s understanding and easily applicable to anyone’s life. Her Jesus, Life Coach follows other best sellers such as Jesus, Entrepreneur and Jesus, CEO. A "life coach" is similar to a psychotherapist, only with the intention of encouraging the client toward greater success in the future rather than digging around in the same old painful past.

Jones offers short snippets for chapters, crafted for devotional-style reading in a single sitting. These typically open with a cute vignette from her own experience, then draw a conclusion for how to be more successful in life or business, and finally show from scripture that Jesus teaches his "staff" (the disciples) the same lesson, on the way to making them into "lean, clean marketing machines." Jesus himself "practiced focused thinking." His "get behind me Satan" was a keen diagnosis of Peter’s disproportionate "need for human approval." Jesus gave his followers each their own "Individualized Education Plan," as any coach would. Jesus’ spat with Mary at Cana shows he was "very conscious of his boundaries." My favorite example from this collection of campy, patronizing readings of scripture: "Even from the cross he was delegating: ‘Mary, this is your new son, John.’"

I wish such uses of scripture were self-evidently ridiculous, but Jones’ sales success suggests they are not. Suffice it to say that an American business person whose "Individualized Education Plan" for himself included such "positive confrontation" with authorities that he and his "staff" wound up summarily excluded by their co-religionists and tortured to death by the state for high treason would not likely unearth the desire to go and do likewise from many "customers." Never mind how Jesus and his disciples wound up; Jones is doing swimmingly.

JOHN ELDREDGE’S Wild at Heart is the most substantial of the three, even if that’s not saying much. Jesus’ plan to make us happier, Wild at Heart declares, is for men to be men again. Eldredge looks around at the men in his church and describes them as "nice" and "boring." He sees them wallowing away at jobs in cubicles and at various spare-time amusements in the suburbs and insists that what’s missing is men’s specifically masculine hearts. God designed man with three great needs: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to save.

So how shall men recover their battling, adventuring, beauty-saving hearts? By watching lots of movies, engaging in various extreme and outdoor sports, participating in devotional exercises in which God speaks to you directly, and by having a wife who wants to be rescued by a manly man and sons who want to test their strength against their father by wrestling and pursuing games involving guns.

Eldredge refers to popular films more than any other source in his book. This is not accidental. Movies portray manly battles in a safe way. Braveheart, Gladiator, and Henry V come in for particular praise. Eldredge writes about what he "heard" from the Lord at one point in prayer: "You are Henry V after Agincourt...the man in the arena, whose face is covered with blood and sweat and dust, who strove valiantly...a great warrior...." The Lord himself is a "warrior" in Exodus and covered in blood in Isaiah, and Christians who would point to Jesus’ turning of the other cheek run the risk of being "emasculated." To show the importance of saving a beauty, Eldredge points to various James Bond and Indiana Jones films, in which getting the girl is crucial to being the hero. In all this he asks: Isn’t a few minutes of any one of these films a great deal more thrilling than a lifetime in the average church, where most men are chipper but boring, and women unloved and tired?...