« Back to Issue 45

Jesus Mean & Wild: the Unexpected Love of an Untameable God

Author:	Mark Galli
Published By:	Baker (Grand Rapids, Michigan)
Pages:	207
Price:	£8..99
ISBN:	978 0 8010 7157 7

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

I warm to the theme of this book. It really is time that the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”, with whom many readers of Ministry Today grew up in Sunday School, was consigned to the forgetfulness of history. This reviewer has always felt that Jesus was a man’s man, not the rather feeble individual portrayed on many images of him and in many books about him.

So I came Mark Galli’s book with high expectations and was not disappointed. The author, a Presbyterian Minister and Senior Managing Editor of Christianity Today, writes with easy fluency, giving us a real page-turner of a book. He brings examples, stories and verbal imagery from the distant past (e.g. Francis of Assisi, John Chrysostom), from the more recent past (Tsunami), from the Bible and from his own experience to challenge us to present the Jesus of the gospels who is a real human being - militant, strong, dynamic, charismatic and commanding.

Anyone who thinks Jesus is for wimps, women and children needs to read this book. Galli opens up the gospels in such a way as to present a Jesus who would be entirely comfortable cheering on our local rugby team on a Saturday afternoon and who would then stay for the victory party in the evening, without for a moment compromising his integrity or his single-minded intention to draw all men after him.

Buy it, read it, use it for sermon material, and maybe, just maybe, we can begin to win men for Christ.