Three books I read just after seminary had a critical impact on my thinking and kept me from succumbing to the Evangelical deus ex machina.1

But first, some explanation of the world I lived in.

Bill Hybels was all the rage back at home, where I grew up just down the road from Hybels’s Barrington. Lots of people with itching ears found he was saying what they wanted a preacher to say and doing at Willow Creek what they wanted a church to do. In fact, he told everyone that was his key to success—finding out what people wanted and doing it.

So the sheep were tuned to his siren song and leaving their smaller, less sophisticated churches. The Hybels machine grew and grew.