Best-selling author John Eldredge sometimes finds it ironic to be speaking to large audiences about Jesus and the Christian faith. "It's sort of like sending Paul to the Gentiles," he says. "Why would you send an unchurched guy to church?"
Raised in a pretty typical American home, without any church background, Eldredge had a conversion experience when he was 19 years old. He majored in theater in college, and a few years later, he and his wife started a theater company, Last Minute Productions, which staged classics, but also original works by contemporary Christian writers. The company aimed to integrate a faith perspective into theatrical performances.
Eldredge then earned a master's degree in counseling at Colorado Christian University. That transition was pretty natural, he says, because "to be in theater you have to be a kind of psychologist, for you're always trying to understand character and motives." After many years of private practice, he founded Ransomed Heart Ministries in 2001, the same year in which he published Wild at Heart (Thomas Nelson), which has sold over two million copies to date. In that book, he focused on the male journey, urging men to follow their desire to live a life of adventure and risk that they often abandon to embrace a Christianity that teaches them to be nothing more than nice guys. In 2005, he published Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul (Thomas Nelson), written with his wife Stasi, which offered a parallel to Wild at Heart, encouraging women to connect with their desire to be romanced, to play a role in their own adventures, and to display both inner and outer beauty.
Eldredge's new book, Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus (Hachette/FaithWords, Oct.) focuses on restoration and recovery, like his earlier books, but also seeks to illuminate the personality of a Jesus who has been lost in religious images of him as a kind of "girly ghost," an effeminate phantom haunting the halls of most churches but not found in the pages of the Gospels. "I couldn't take anymore of the distortions of Jesus Christ that the Christian churches present,” Eldredge says. “This book grew out a deep passion to set the record straight about Jesus."
Drawing on his experience as an actor, Eldredge offers playful and lively readings of several Gospel stories—such as the wedding at Cana, the road to Emmaus, the woman at the well—as he reveals what he sees as the true personality of Jesus. The stories show a Jesus who is constantly willing to risk his reputation, Eldredge says. "What strikes me about Jesus is that he is a remarkably true person; he never changes his personality to fit in with whatever crowd he finds himself. He is simply himself, and he never plays to his audience."
In the book, Jesus comes to life in a fresh way thanks to Eldredge's desire to break him out of the stained glass portrait where he's been trapped by traditional Christian churches. Jesus is constantly scandalous, says Eldredge: "There's a great irony that the man who hated religion the most has become the most religious figure on the wall of most churches."
Eldredge's winsome readings of the Gospels illustrate what for him is the key to discipleship. "If only Jesus' followers shared his personality, Eldredge says. “That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity." Eldredge has led retreats for many years, and he plans to build some around his book and to stage readings of many of the Gospel stories, as a way of revealing the many-faceted and often misrepresented personality of Jesus.
Henry Carrigan is the associate director of Northwestern University Press and the editor of eight books of Christian classics from Paraclete Press, including Teresa of Avila’s The Way of Perfection.
