HAPPINESS UNDER ONE ROOF
Reinhold Bietz, Pacific Press Publishing Association, Mountain View, California, 1977, $1.95.
Reinhold Bietz grew up on "Happy Home Farm" as one of nine children. Breakfast was sometimes just wheat that was brought in from the barn and cooked to a porridge, but though the diet may have been austere at times, the relationship between the parents and their large brood never was.
The book is basically about people who live in families and how they can get along better and live more happily. There is not a great deal of new material here, but the message is presented with much charm, sprinkled liberally with stories and anecdotes both old and new. It is good, sensible, interesting reading—no, it is more. It is like having a face-to-face talk with a good, sensible, interesting man.
Preachers reading this book will identify with the author. He puts into words—sometimes fairly strong, but always kind—just what the Adventist minister needs to impart to his congregation.
Bobbie Jane Van Dolson
HOW CAN I GET THEM TO LISTEN?
James Engel, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1977, 185 pages, $4.95.
Engel takes liberties with a little doggerel by Kenneth Boulding and notes:
Christian communication is like a blunderbuss.
For all our muss and fuss,
We fire a monstrous charge of shot,
And sometimes hit but mostly not.
This book is about how to hit, so to speak, on the first shot. It is not about preaching, or even talking. So don't catalog it under "Homiletics" if you shelve it before reading it. Put it under "Communication Strategy and Research," right next to What's Gone Wrong With the Harvest? an earlier book by Engel written in collaboration with H. Wilbert Norton, both of the Wheaton College graduate school's Billy Graham graduate program in communication.
To comfort ourselves, despite our limited successes, with the thought that Jesus would have spent all for a single soul is to confuse His motivation with His method.
With this book, Engel presents a very readable introduction to the methods of the social sciences and to their application to evangelism. "All the creative finesse and media muscle in the world will go for naught if we are not speaking to the audience where they are," he explains. And finding out where the audience is, is what this book is about.
The book is filled with examples taken from the more than eighty communication research projects done by Engel and his students at the Wheaton graduate school over the past five or six years. Most of the studies were done for mission projects in developing countries, and confirm that the research strategies are applicable across many cultures.
Engel argues that good stewardship requires good planning, and good planning requires good research. Planning and research, though, are no substitute for reliance on the Holy Spirit. And vice versa. It is the combination of both the research and the reliance on the leading of the Holy Spirit that should distinguish the Christian endeavor from other endeavors, he writes.
Engel makes that claim with the authority of one who has been professor of marketing at both the University of Michigan and Ohio State University. He continues as a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Marketing, and his recently updated marketing textbook remains a standard in his field.
Some will find his model of the spiritual-decision process a bit mechanical. I do. Nevertheless, it has real learning value.
Engel's treatment of statistical inference, however, is well done and very easy to follow.
The principles found in this book are as pertinent to a pastor as to the highest-ranking church leader.
William Garber
