Written by Freddie Floyd Jr., IT’S TIME TO GROW offers advice grounded in scripture and is intended to “[shed] light on the importance of emotional and spiritual growth by fostering stronger bonds with […] loved ones.” The book’s sixteen chapters, whose treatments of their subjects are rooted in evangelical beliefs, devote themselves to such relationship issues as listening, commitment, and self-control, as well as how to attain godliness in a relationship.

One of Floyd’s strengths is an ability to place himself in his readers’ position. His writing style is an easy, confident mix of the authoritative (his knowledge of scripture seems to approach the encyclopedic) and the demotic. He uses vivid machine and computer imagery as a metaphor for the workings of the brain and its ability to accept new ways of thinking. He also speckles his arguments with mundane examples all readers can relate to, such as invoking a clutch basketball game to demonstrate the importance of concentration.

Much of the advice offered is laudable, but an observer of the evangelist movement might be given to wonder how helpful it is to clothe such advice in messaging that saddles the reader with masses of guilt for innate impulses, and furthermore obliges them to accept literalist interpretations of the Bible that are, at the very least, highly questionable. It is not hard to see how a quote like this, “The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband” (from 1 Corinthians), which Floyd Jr. approvingly invokes, can be appropriated for manipulative ends. Floyd Jr. is also selective in his quotations. To his credit, he is alert to the danger that, in a twenty-first century America already deeply riven by assaults on women’s rights, it is dangerous to peddle the line (which has lately gained ground among some evangelicals) that wives should defer to their husbands in all things. He therefore asserts that “There is no place in Scripture where God teaches or tells women to be second-rate or inferior to men.” However, he has nothing to say about Ephesians 5, which instructs wives to “submit to their husbands in everything,” and notes that “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” Such is the bind of evangelists, who in their rush to heed the Bible’s teachings all too often end up defending the indefensible.

In IT’S TIME TO GROW, Floyd Jr. claims not to be proselytizing. “I am in no way attempting to convert anyone to my belief system,” he writes at one point. If the book’s intended audience is indeed members of the New Testament Church, as is implied in the introduction, then little here will rankle. But those unsatisfied with the logical contradictions that are part and parcel of literalist interpretations of the Bible will be hard-pressed to accept many of the pronouncements contained here.

Though containing some useful advice, Freddie Floyd Jr.’s IT’S TIME TO GROW selectively quotes from the Bible to support its recommendations.

~ Craig Jones for IndieReader