Book Review: Dropping Your Guard

A Fair Trade Book (Get It While!)

(This is the original paperback edition I physically own. Online readers should know that Swindoll has written a new updated edition. The original is still a nice addition to a collection, and this web site will sell it on our usual terms as a Fair Trade Book. You should get the new edition, if at all possible--it's not all that much more expensive--to show respect to this writer. For serious students it's always fun to compare original and author-updated editions of one book...I've added the new one to my Wish List, too.)

Title: Dropping Your Guard

Author: Charles R. Swindoll

Date: 1983

Publisher: Word

ISBN: 84499-4178-4

Length: 191 pages

Quote: “[T]rying to play a part that wasn’t me led to nothing but greater fear and higher defenses.”

Should ministers have all the answers and confess no doubts or spiritual weaknesses? Do Christian believers need parent-figures to look up to more than they need one more fellow believer in their midst? Some Christians might say yes. “Chuck” Swindoll was not among those. In 1981 the silver-haired primary pastor and respected author followed up Improving Your Serve and Strengthening Your Grip with this “case for open relationships,” for church meetings that might feel more like town meetings or even recovery group meetings than like university lectures.

Personally, when I think of the word “open” in the context of people or their relationships, I’ve never thought of anything very desirable. When I think of people being “opened up,” I picture surgical operations. When I think of “open relationships,” I think of the later years of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s marriage.

That’s too bad—or it would have been, if I hadn’t tipped off in time that what Swindoll really had in mind was the sort of church where the pastor feels safe in saying, “Friends, I struggle with temptation just as you do, and I’m asking a few volunteers to stay nearby, during this family medical crisis, and help me resist the temptation to go out and get drunk.”

Or, “What a tacky TV character said about the way we ‘talk to God’ in prayer hurt my feelings as much as any of yours. In fact, even though I took my blood pressure pill this morning, I can still feel that dull headache of hypertension.”

Or, “Sometimes news items like this morning’s big story make me think that God’s got some explaining to do. If good, is He God? If God, is He good? I know the traditional answers to those questions, and sometimes they don’t satisfy me any more than they do some of you.”

For me, whether or not churchgoing has anything to do with spirituality is not all about the pastor. If I go to church to pray, my opinion of speakers and speeches is a distraction. I have, however, known some of those multitudes of people who don’t believe the people they meet at church are sincere. “He says, ‘God is right beside you in this time of trial, Mrs. Jones’! Look at that slick, conceited face! He doesn’t even believe God exists; he’s just saying what he thinks will keep that poor grieving mother giving him more money than she can spare.” People who say things like that may be helped by pastors who say things like the contents of Dropping Your Guard.

“How many congregations have you ever been a part of (or heard of) who regularly encouraged their pastor?”

“[A] Christian community should know that somewhere in it there will certainly be ‘a reasoning among them, which of them should be the greatest’.”

“If we have trouble with our car, we don't give up driving. If we have a roof that leaks, we don’t abandon the house...But...when a couple of folks have a conflict, only rarely are they big enough to stay at it and work things out.”

“[Men] can have lunch together for years and years and still limit their conversation to sports, politics, and dirty jokes.”

Then there’s the three-page story of the hilarity Swindoll shared with a couple of smartypants parishioners who caught him driving through a red light.

Because the ideal of “open relationships” based on the twelve-steps group model was such a fad in the late 1980s, I can state conclusively that simply releasing the expectation that pastors should be perfect is not going to solve all the relationship problems in church. People who liked the idea of telling each other everything they thought quickly ran into a need to reestablish some rules.

One rule I remember reaffirming for myself , after an awkward conversation in which I’d been very “open and honest” about a few relationship problems, was “It may be all right to tell people all the feelings and conflicts I have about my relationship with them, but it’s all wrong to mention any third parties. Even if I think it would be helpful for A to know that I’ve been in a situation similar to the one A’s describing now, I have no right to say anything that lets A know that B was involved.”

A rule a lot of men should have reaffirmed, but apparently overlooked, is “Watch your audience.”

In the early 1980s what we heard about “Sensitive New Age Guys” was good. They could back away from an ego-defending argument, consider the facts, and say, “Right, you have a point; let’s try it your way.” If caught with a tear in their eye, as it might be at a funeral, they could go ahead and shed that tear, rather than retreat into anger and start yelling at somebody for no reason. The original image of “Sensitive New Age Guys” was a very desirable one.

But then in the late eighties Sensitive New Age Guys started to get increasingly mixed reviews. By the 1990s we were being told that a suspiciously hasty study had found that women lost respect for those “opened-up” young men. Supposedly those men reminded us of our female friends...Bosh. I was there, and I remember the kind of thing that happened.

I did not lose respect for President Reagan when he shed a tear over the Challenger. I don’t know anyone who did. I thought more, not less, of Dale Earnhardt when he wiped a few tears (who didn’t?) the day Davey Allison died. I didn’t think a bit less of a young man I’ll call Mike who cried on my shoulder the night after his grandmother died. That was the kind of crying women do, the kind men might as well admit they do—the kind people do.

I did lose interest in a young man I’ll call Dave who was supposed to have met my flatmate and me at 5:30, and was familiar with local traffic patterns, and failed to allow time for those, and turned up at 9:30 crying real tears of frustration and low blood sugar. It was not that Dave reminded me of my “opened-up girlfriends”—heavenforbidandfend. I wouldn’t have counted a woman who was as selfish, irresponsible, and incompetent as Dave among my close friends, either. Guys like Dave weren’t revealing feminine qualities; they were displaying a lack of adult qualities.

Before the 1980s, guys like Dave were just as selfish and irresponsible and incompetent as Dave was, only instead of expecting to be forgiven if they cried real tears, they expected to be able to distract everyone from noticing their shortcoming by yelling, blustering, and bullying. So the crying was an improvement—sort of—but it still left these guys several miles short of Real Manhood, or Real Womanhood either.

I’ve seen a few ministerial meltdowns that represented a sort of congregational equivalent of Dave’s Last Date. Pastor Frozenfish, whose greatest natural talent for any kind of ministry probably consisted of his not being an extrovert, but who tried very very hard to reject this gift and pass for an extrovert, preached more than one whole “sermon” whose “text” was “What do youall want me to do, anyway?” Pastor Fishfingers didn’t burden anyone with the details of his sexual temptations, which was good, but he didn’t resist them well enough to stay out of jail. Some alternatives to wearing that mask of pseudo-perfection are not improvements.

On the other hand, many Christians trusted C.S. Lewis more, not less, because he wrote, “I have moods when atheism looks probable.” Many thought crying was the normal response to the Challenger disaster. The people who thought Jimmy Carter shouldn’t have mentioned having lust in his heart, mostly, said “Everyone already knows that.”

There are things a Christian can confess and still maintain respect as a spiritual teacher, and things s/he would do well not to confess if s/he wanted to maintain respect as a legitimate member of a twelve-step group for convicted felons. What Swindoll discusses are generally the kind of thing preachers, deacons, and choir leaders would do well to confess.

Dropping Your Guard is not for ministers only. It’s for whole church or Sunday School groups to work through together. The pastor, teacher, or other group leader answers the same questions everyone else does.

Like Swindoll’s other books, this one is full of Bible studies. “Open relationships” is not a biblical concept but Swindoll presents several passages that relate to his ideas about “open relationships.”

To buy this book here...as noted above, there are two options. You can still buy the original edition for your collection. It's still a good read, and if you enjoyed growing up in the 1980s it's a nice nostalgia trip. For that, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address as usual, and we'll send $1 to Swindoll or directly to a charity of his choice. Alternatively, buy the new book here as a new book for $10 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, and not only will Swindoll get his royalty payment per agreement with his publishers, but this web site will send $1.50 to him or his charity. If you're a serious collector, buy both for $15, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, and Swindoll or his charity get $2.50.

As regular readers know, what this web site means by the "per package" shipping charge is that you can jam in as many additional books as will fit into the package for one $5 fee. You could, for instance, add the original paperback editions of Improving Your Serve, Strengthening Your Grip, and Hand Me Another Brick, which were pocket-size books, plus Living Above the Level of Mediocrity, to the two editions of Dropping Your Guard, and pay only $5 for shipping. At this point this web site's prices would become quite competitive with what you'd get directly from Amazon.