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Invitation to Take Up and Read

were Christians, to which we said yes. Palau, with the typical zeal and wit of a popular evangelist, quipped, ‘I want to come for the ten per cent!’ I thought to myself, ‘What we mean is, ninety per cent are born Christians; the other ten per cent are born-again Christians!’ Nominalism is the religion of the Christianized parts of India’s North East. Given that milieu, Raih’s monograph is a desperately needed and timely book. It is extensively researched, with a large amount of data collected through interviews and questionnaire-responses from more than a dozen Baptist churches in a major city in the North East. It is also carefully designed, interweaving these contextual resources generated through qualitative research with standard textual resources on preaching. The book is also systematically structured, moving from (what we may call) generation of the data, to description of the data, to interpretation of the data, to interlocution with the data, to prescription and recommendation in the light of the data. All of this is done in a very lucid and accessible language and style. For the research, most of the face-to-face interviews were with pastors who are pseudonymous; and the questionnaires were for participants who remain anonymous. One wonders how different the findings would be if it was the other way round. If I were the pastor of a church, it would be a little awkward (not to mention ego-busting) for me to be personally interviewed about the correlation between my preaching and my congregation’s nominalism. Of course, my congregation’s nominalism is in spite of my preaching and because of the previous pastor’s preaching! Or, if I were a typical lay church member, I would simply have no idea how to respond to a technical question such as ‘What types of sermon structures are preached in the churches? Narration/Expository/ Testimonial/Topical/Textual/Others.’ One also sniffs an ‘intellectualist’ approach to spiritual formation in the work. A major recommendation is that ‘Pastors trained to teach the Bible’ will make ‘Churches grow in understanding and application of the Bible,’ ending with the result of ‘Individuals, families, and communities transformed’ (p. 288). However, this approach to discipleship, much beloved of evangelicalism, has a small but fatal flaw: Its emphasis is on the impartation of information that produces thinkers and knowers, rather than the formation of embodied persons that produces agents and actors. Students of homiletics, pastors, and researchers, both from India’s North East and elsewhere, will, however, benefit greatly from reading this very fine volume.