It was 11:30 PM Thursday, I was getting into bed when I suddenly remembered that about twelve hours previously, I had received a delivery — a white cardboard box — which I had never got around to opening. I knew it contained books from David C. Cook, but decided to walk back to the living room to open the package.
The book that caught my eye was Reborn to be Wild: Reviving Our Radical Pursuit of Jesus. I had never heard of Ed Underwood. Never heard of the book.
The back cover offered this question:
Why did the Jesus Movement stop moving?
I was hooked. By midnight I was about 50 pages in, and I was up early on Friday morning to squeeze in another 50 pages before heading out of town.
Underwood was part of the Jesus People scene in California. No not that Jesus People scene in 1972. He was there for the earlier grassroots events that sparked the whole thing in the late ’60s, 1968 in particular.
He tells his story. But he weaves lots of good scripture into his text. It’s a book that is autobiographical in nature. It’s a book that has teaching as a primary goal.
And I’m hooked. And this isn’t even the book review I’ve yet to do when I’ve covered the next 200 or so pages. Here’s a sample:
Picturing Revival
One sentence inside the story of Paul’s work in Ephesus describes its impact in words I would use to tell people what happened in the Jesus Movement. “And this continued for two years so that all who dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts 19:10a)
Nowhere in the entire Bible is there another report of the love and knowledge of Christ growing so quickly and deeply into a culture. In only two years everyone living in the Roman province of Asia — today’s Asia Minor — had heard the word of the Lord Jesus. It’s amazing to me that most of the people who speak in order to help us understand God’s Word, try to explain it away.
In one of my “only for preachers and other smart religious people who know Greek” books about Acts 19:10, the author drones on about how the time reference is obviously hyperbole because it really isn’t possible for God to do something that big, that fast. He concludes that Paul must have meant to say, “a lot of people” instead of “all.” In bold red ink, I wrote in the margins, “That’s because you’ve never seen revival.”
I have and it moves just that fast and it penetrates just that deep.
The book releases in June in paperback from David C. Cook. In the meantime, here’s their rundown:
A long-time pastor ponders why the Jesus Movement stopped moving…and challenges all generations of believers to the radical commitment that fuels revival. Long before becoming a pastor, Ed Underwood was a “Jesus Freak”–a young man transformed by the Jesus Movement in the 60s and 70s. He and his friends threw their hearts into a revival they thought would change the world. But somehow, the Jesus movement stopped moving. How did these radically committed young people morph into today’s tame, suburban evangelicals?
That’s the question that sparked this passionate, provocative book, which aims at nothing less than fanning the flames of enduring revival today. Underwood draws on his personal revival experience and his study of the New Testament to expose six seductive lies that can easily sidetrack a movement and affirms five life-changing truths that can keep it going.
Ed Underwood is a pastor and author whose life was transformed by the Jesus Movement and has never lost his passion for revival. He oversees the ministries of the historic Church of the Open Door in Southern California.
Thinking Out Loud 