Review: Where are all the Brothers? by Eric C. Redmond

July 1, 2008 – 2:56 pm by sntjohnny. Filed under Blog, General.

A review of Where are all the Brothers?  Straight Answers to Men’s Questions About the Church. Buy from Amazon.com for $9.99.  The Review is below.

---

Book Description

In this unique book, Pastor Eric Redmond confronts the important question of “Where are the black men in the African-American church?” with a candid approach that combines wisdom with a conversational tone.

Instead of side-stepping issues, Redmond converses with readers about some of their reasons for not going to church—the church seems geared toward women, the preacher is just an ordinary man, Islam appears to offer more for the black man, organized religion is not necessary, churches are just after your money—and approaches their skepticism with respect but also with corrective truth. On these and other topics, Where Are All the Brothers? speaks about the things that men think about in private or discuss at the barbershop when it comes to church and religion, challenging them to reexamine their long-held assumptions.

About the Author

Eric C. Redmond is pastor of Hillcrest Baptist Church in Temple Hills, Maryland. A former assistant professor of Bible and theology at Washington Bible College and a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, he is the 2007-2008 second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He blogs at The Council of Reforming Churches and A Man from Issachar.

Product Details

---

Pastor Redmond has produced a punchy little book that covers nine areas where people, men in particular, give reasons for not going to ‘church.’  These nine areas are broken up into nine days, and Pastor Redmond invites the reader to invest just ten minutes a day for nine days to hear his answers to their objections.   Each chapter is just a few pages long and definitely manageable, even for those who protest that they don’t like to read.   By necessity the book only touches lightly on each topic, but I was impressed to see authors like FF Bruce and CS Lewis brought to bear in the ‘Further Study’ sections.  Those who want to go deeper will be able to.

Pastor Redmond writes with a distinct audience in mind that is evident from the beginning.  He wishes to address the questions that men ask, but black men in particular.  Their absence from the African American Christian community is something he highlights and wishes to remedy.   Still, apart from one chapter, I’d say that the book could be useful for most men.  That chapter is an evaluation of Islam versus Christianity and the sense among black men that Islam is more ‘manly.’

Here are the chapters:  “Isn’t the Church Full of Hypocrites?”  “Wasn’t the Bible Written by Men?” “Isn’t the Church Geared Toward Women?” “Isn’t the Preacher Just a Man?”  “Doesn’t Islam Offer More for Black Men?” “Aren’t Some Churches Just After Your Money?” “Is Organized Religion Necessary?” “Jesus Never Claimed to be God, Did He?” “What to Look for to Find a Good Church”  There are two appendici- Appendix A is “The Fulfillment of Old Testament Prophecies about Christ in the New Testament” and Appendex B is “The Church Does Not Welcome Homosexuals.”

There is some pretty impressive apologetical reasoning bundled into some of these chapters.  For example, Pastor Redmond confronts the objector illustrated in ‘Jesus Never Claimed to be God, Did He?’ with the implicit assumption that the objector is making, which is that it evidently matters to the objector whether or not he really did make the claim.  If he did, and he backed it up, then no more excuses are tolerable!  The chapter on Organized Religion is probably one of the best defenses of ‘Organized Religion’ I’ve seen packed into just a couple of pages and I thought the chapter confronting the notion that the church is geared toward women was right on:  the Church really is geared toward women.  Pastor Redmond thinks that more men about will help fix that. 

I do have some complaints, minor though they are, and with the caveat that as his target are the black men absent from churches his unique audience they may be even more minor.

In the chapter on ‘Organized Religion,’ after his admirable argument in defense of ‘organized religion,’ Pastor Redmond makes the following comment,

But more importantly, the church, though it has organization, functions primarily like a living organism and a family.  …  It is also a family of brothers and sisters who are to love one another and consider the needs of others more than each of their own individual needs.

I couldn’t help but think that it is precisely because the Church does not function like this that Pastor Redmond needed to write his book.  The pastor does a good job admitting the validity of the charges he’s answering (if there is any validity) but I sensed that in this paragraph the pastor is really putting his finger on the real objection, or a sizable part of the real objection.   It is clear to me that if the churches were more like living organisms and families that a lot more cynics would be persuaded to Christ.  We could start, I think, by reversing the national trend of choosing an organizational structure that so closely resembles the corporate world.  Pastor Redmond might object that this is outside the scope of the book, and perhaps it is.

One of the longest sections in his book is his response to the charge that the ‘preacher is just a man.’    Pastor Redmond lays out a fairly comprehensive case for the Biblical case for the pastoral office, but in my experience, skeptics and cynics aren’t really interested in the Biblical case for anything.  Again, this might have to do with a different set of experiences, but I would think that a page or two on the ‘priesthood of all believers’ would have helped undercut the objections (I’ve seen) usually posed against Christianity based on the pastoral office.

Another minor complaint, and again arguably outside the scope of the book, was the conclusion in his chapter responding to the apparent femininity of the church, where he insists that Christianity really is manly.  Earlier in the chapter he admitted that “All in all, the whole concept of church- Sunday worship, weekly activities, and membership- seems like one big women’s society, with (in most cases) a man at the helm with a message to get women to follow what he says.” (pg 34).

I certainly concur, but I am not convinced that he will have persuaded cynical readers that his concluding paragraph is much different then what he agreed was ’skewed’ in today’s congregations:

It is because  you, and many brothers like you, are needed to fill places at church and take their God-given, Scripture-prescribed roles as leaders- as pastors, elders, preachers, teachers, deacons, older men who are respected, wisdom-giving example setters, disciple-makers, loving husbands, and nurturing fathers.

I think for a lot of men, they’d want to see how this is substantially different than a ‘big women’s society.’

It is my belief that Pastor Redmond is itching to write about these matters and I suspect he has lots of ideas on how things ought to work.  He very honestly admits to the fact that there is truth to many of the criticisms his hypothetical objector is making.  I think he probably could have cast a vision for the ideal to further undermine the objections he is responding to.

In conclusion, this is another book that I think pastors would be wise to keep on their shelf.  Not just for black men, but white men, and honest seekers from either gender.  At just $9.99 it makes an affordable investment.  I would suggest that said pastor also had on their shelf some of the other books that are listed in the ‘for futher study’ sections and would hope that there would also be follow up.  The book will provide plenty of starting points for such a follow up, making it a nifty tool to have on hand.