Book Reviews . Volume 09 | Issue 06

Once Upon a Tree

– Calvin Miller

This book review was submitted by Dr. Franklin Kirksey.

Dr. Calvin Miller shares in Once Upon A Tree: Answering the Ten Crucial Questions of Life (Calvin Miller, Once Upon A Tree: Answering the Ten Crucial Questions of Life (West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing Co., Inc., 2002), pp. 196-197), “Recently I preached a sermon to a large gathering of evangelicals in which I referred to hell, the destiny of those who die outside of Christ. While the reference was made in passing, I was told afterward that the reference ‘marred’ my presentation. We have arrived at a here-and-now theology, it seems, in which every transcendent category is lost.”

Dr. Calvin Miller explains in Once Upon A Tree: Answering the Ten Crucial Questions of Life (Calvin Miller, Once Upon A Tree: Answering the Ten Crucial Questions of Life (West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing Co., Inc., 2002), p. 198), “In a sense, the church-growth movement has contributed to this loss of transcendence. It has majored on the gospel that twenty-first-century people want to hear rather than on the one they need to hear. Many of the megachurch pastors speak with pride of building multi-thousand-member churches with a gospel that is ‘user-friendly.’ To start these churches, they often, of their own admission, asked their community constituency what kind of church and sermons it would take to get them to attend church. Once the community had dictated what the church must be to get their support, the church determined to become all its constituents demanded.”