Retroactive Reviews! Book Edition!

In the spirit of Trying Something New, I am revisiting several albums, books, movies, and so on that I once dismissed as worthless or sinister in hopes of finding some value to allay the hate in my heart (haha, I said that WAY too melodramatically). One example was making myself listen to Coldplay's "X&Y" and admitting that it wasn't as wholly painful as I first thought. Still not good, but not irredeemably awful.


The other day, I read "The Prayer of Jabez" by Bruce Wilkinson. For years, I have seen posters with this tiny portion of Scripture (from 1 Chronicles 4) and felt a continual dislike for the materialistic and mechanistic gospel which posits "ask God for stuff - GET stuff." So I wanted to see for myself how exactly Wilkinson uses this passage. First the good.

• I appreciate that Wilkinson re-imagines "enlarged territory" as enlarged and extended ministry opportunities rather than the big houses and big churches I expected.
• Wilkinson writes that the asking shows a dependence on God, and that if you don't feel helpless but for God, then you're not doing it right.

But the bad:

• A mechanistic view of prayer and God/deified vending machine.
• Removed responsibility/guilt from man and exporting it in toto to the spiritual realm of angels and demons (this was implied, and prevalent elsewhere - like Frank Peretti).
  
• "Success" = nothing short of high numbers of converts (e.g. his telling a youth group that they fail if they do not bring 100 kids a night to Bible study).
• Self-centeredness of prayer (e.g. God answering his prayer and delaying his flight so he had longer to get to the airport, with no mention of the people that surely missed their next flights!)
• Treating this prayer like "secret wisdom" that allows you to tap into God's blessings reservoir.
  

Overall, this wasn't as blatantly material as I had heard, but the God presented seems to exist only to give us stuff. There is a strong emphasis on ministry and bringing people to the Lord, but I don't see much Gospel or "why" we serve God.

So the message of this book was not what it is today, but it is easy to see how it has been watered down and mistranslated into putting forth a defective God that panders to a self-centered semi-religious type of consumers. The message is now a catechism of catering. In fact, Derek Webb once talked of Wilkinson (a few years after the book) coming to a convention of Christian retailers telling them that, once asked, God would bless their Christian sub-culture bookstores and bring them heaps of cash.

Because isn't that why Jesus died? To make us rich?

Summary: not worth the time (even though it was two hours), but not evil. Just misguided.