What is God like? Is he the lofty Almighty of conservative religion, with power to stop heartbreaking human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, but who inexplicably declines to do so? Is he the callous Judge, offering the faithful a place in his heaven while summarily casting the faithless into everlasting hell? Is he the vain King on his throne, requiring us to stroke his ego by praising him—unceasingly—for his "awesome power"?
If this is the God we have been taught, it is no wonder that many people have come to realize that they do not like, let alone trust him. The simple certainties of their childhood no longer make sense. But the equally assured assertions of today's atheists also leave them cold. They want a personal connection with God—an honest faith that grows out of their own felt truth and touches them at the deepest levels of their being.
This book points the way. It dismantles the "angry, punitive God" of traditional Protestantism and beckons us toward a kinder, more welcoming God. This God does not ask us to grit our teeth and try our best to believe. Instead, this God meets us in our humanity, inviting our hearts to respond in genuine trust and love.

Author - Doug Frank

This is a beautiful piece of work, extraordinary for it spiritual and theological—as well as its psychological and sociological—insight. In the first half of the book, I thought, "This is the best and deepest diagnosis of what's wrong with American evangelicalism I've ever read." In the second half of the book, I thought, "This is one of the best and most moving accounts of Jesus' humanity and death that I've ever read."
This book will stay with me for a long time, and I will recommend it to many friends. In fact, I've already started making a list."
— Brian McLaren
Speaker (www.brianmclaren.net)
Author of The Secret Message of Jesus and
Finding Our Way Again-and other titles

"A Gentler God is a fascinating insight into the psychology of evangelicalism and the men who gave shape to it. Doug Frank carefully, lovingly uncovers the emotional damage that can result from clinging to an "immaculate-magical-almighty" deity, when our souls might be saved by the messy and merciful Jesus.
The author beautifully articulates a Savior who might break our hearts open—truly "save us" in a profound way not just from some deadly fate after we die, but from the "deathliness" and "hell" of living now, locked up in false pretenses, loveless fear and damning shame.
I wish everyone (I'm not exaggerating) would read this book."
— Debbie Blue
Pastor, House of Mercy, St. Paul, MN
Author of Sensual Orthodoxy and
From Stone to Living Word

"I have encountered many within the Christian community whose souls have been crippled by a distant, majestic, untouchable God. In A Gentler God, Doug Frank tenderly traces our destructive attraction to this false God while uncovering the earthy, vulnerable, shameless person of Jesus as the true revelator of unconditional Love.
If read as openly as it is written, this book has the capacity to release a kind of human freedom and vitality that each of us aches to embody. Doug Frank is a healer and this book a much-needed balm."
— Mark Yaconelli
Author of Wonder, Fear, and Longing and
Contemplative Youth Ministry

Reading A Gentler God is like listening to someone telling truths in a house filled with family secrets. Frank leaves no corner of evangelical theology and practice un-probed and un-narrated. His dogged pursuit of a genuine salvation event sends him back to the Bible to discover the good news of an authentically human Jesus and a God who treasures, rather than condemns, the "beautiful mystery of the self."
Frank touches a nerve so deep that evangelicals—both professed and disaffected—will feel something while reading this book. And this is precisely what Frank aims to do: to attend to the yearnings, betrayals and lost-loves of evangelicals. No other book has so aptly named, and met, the deep longings and deeper disappointments of wayward evangelicals.
— Shelly Rambo
Assistant Professor of Theology
Boston University

Doug Frank is kind and gracious and dangerous and fearless and honest—all at the same time. This is a book I'm convinced is going to help lots of people find liberation from the malevolent Being they never believed in in the first place.
These pages contain a lifetime of experience, wisdom, pain, healing—and, of course, resurrection. Deeply moving, extraordinarily insightful—this is a rare book.
— Rob Bell
Founding Pastor, Mars Hill Bible Church
Grand Rapids, MI
Author of Velvet Elvis and Sex God

"Doug Frank finds his model for a gentler God in the unpredictable, but welcoming Jesus of the Gospels. His exploration arises from his fundamentalist childhood, including his evangelical tradition itself.
Frank questions a loving God who tolerates eternal torture for those who fail. Instead, he points to the hospitality of Jesus, who confronts the "godly" and redeems life's failures. Frank's personal story makes his argument accessible, but he is also knowledgeable in the Bible and psychology. This is a book you don't want to miss."
— Margaret G. Alter
Author of Resurrection Psychology:
An Understanding of Human Personality Based on
the Life and Teachings of Jesus

"Jesus welcomed all to the table. Unclean outcasts and respected religious professionals alike were held in the grace of the God he knew. Doug Frank knows this God. And he knows this God through Jesus.
It was a painful journey. Raised and educated in American evangelical Christianity, Frank has experienced the soul-chilling terror of a God both condemning and cold. He knows the shame that festers before a capricious judge, and the self-doubt from the crazy-making insistence that such a Being is benevolent.
But Frank knows more. He knows a God who loves and feels. He reveals, through careful theology and stories from his soulful experience, how this God is at odds with the God too often proclaimed in evangelical communities, even though this "gentler" God is the very one these communities so deeply yearn for.
This book is a feast for all who have been touched by evangelical Christianity, whether traumatized or transformed. It welcomes the child scarred by condemnation and the dogmatic convert clutching after theological certainty. Indeed, like Jesus, it welcomes the scarred child and dogmatic covert in each of us."
— Frank Rogers, Jr.
Muriel Bernice Roberts Associate Professor of
Spiritual Formation, Claremont School of Theology
Author of The God of Shattered Glass

"A Gentler God is a labor of love, aimed at healing the common wound of Protestant and Catholic evangelicals. It's hard to explain "love" to veiled "hate" without sounding mean, but this book pulls it off. The gentleness with which Doug Frank deconstructs the Almighty of popular preaching and the schizoid salvation story of America's patriarchs could not be more respectful of th God of infinite love, the forgiveness of Jesus and evangelical tradition itself.
Nowhere does Frank take the tone of "educated and freed authority" who "knows better." With the improvisational humility of a teacher / healer who's worked with hundreds of wounded faithful—and suffered faith-wounds himself—Frank applies salves and bandages as soothing as the touch of a truly loving parent, the mercy of the Gospels, the wind on the plain of Mamre.
Welcome to the masterwork of a huge-hearted, evangelical son."
— David James Duncan
Author of The Brothers K
and God Laughs and Plays

"No one has shaped my understanding of the gospel more profoundly over the years than Doug Frank. He writes with passion, clarity and uncommon insight. The Jesus who emerges in these pages offers true rest to those wearied of the triumphalist God of American evangelicalism.
A wonderful, troubling book that offers a gospel for the disenchanted, for whom the church is just another dead building and God a nagging presence or a painful absence."
— Randall Balmer
Episcopal Priest
Professor of American Religious History
Barnard College, Columbia University

Less Than Conquerors by Doug Frank