In books, preachers send lessons beyond congregations

Southern Nevadans already know Jud Wilhite, Benny Perez and Randall Cunningham as three of the valley’s most high-profile pastors.

But, during the next few weeks, Southern Nevadans can get to know them as authors, too, as they preach beyond their own congregations to a worldwide audience through their latest books.

On Feb. 5, Wilhite, senior pastor of Central Christian Church, released “Pursued: God’s Divine Obsession With You” (FaithWords, $21.99), which last week held the No. 3 spot on The New York Times’ Hardcover Advice & Misc. best-seller list.

In his book, Wilhite uses one of the Bible’s lower-profile — and, frankly, one of its stranger — books to encourage readers to look at God’s relationship with them in a different way.

Perez, pastor of The Church at South Las Vegas, released “More: Discovering the God of More When Life Gives You Less” (Authentic Publishers, $14.99) in mid-January.

Perez builds the foundation for his book by telling of an intensely personal, emotionally devastating event his family experienced, and then explores growing in faith with God when everything around you goes bad.

And, in “Lay It Down: How Letting Go Brings Out Your Best,” (Worthy Publishing, $19.99, available March 26), Cunningham, pastor of Remnant Ministries, weaves his own life lessons — including those learned during his years as a standout University of Nevada, Las Vegas and pro athlete — in among inspirational messages and instructional exercises aimed at learning how to move beyond disappointments to make one’s faith stronger.

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The Rev. Jud Wilhite has written about a dozen books, some of which have been best-sellers on Christian book lists. This latest book marks the first time he has cracked mainstream national best-seller lists.

“I’m thrilled and grateful and humbled and very thankful,” Wilhite says, crediting his publisher and Central Christian Church’s launch team, made up of “several hundred people” for the achievement.

“We’ve worked together, prayed together, believed in the message and tried to get it out there,” Wilhite says. “But it’s always a little surprising.”

Perhaps even more surprising is that, in “Pursued,” Wilhite uses the comparatively obscure Book of Hosea to explore God’s relentless, loving pursuit of his people.

“It’s a very unconventional message,” Wilhite concedes.

Christians “believe Jesus dying on the cross is the greatest picture of God’s love for us,” he says, but the story of Hosea and Gomer “has got to be the second greatest picture of God’s love for us.”

In the Book of Hosea, “God asks Hosea, a prophet, to marry a prostitute and to have an ongoing marriage with an unfaithful woman,” Wilhite explains.

Their relationship is analogous to that of God’s relationship with his people, even as they are unfaithful to him and betray him.

At one point, Hosea has to go to “a seedy part of town and buy her back from her pimps, basically,” Wilhite notes, mirroring the way in which God tenaciously seeks to have a relationship with us.

Yet, Wilhite says, some run from God out of “this looming sense, (from) growing up or whatever, that God’s out to get me.

“I think a lot of people have this sort of idea that God’s like a traffic officer with the speed gun, waiting to tag you and write you up and let you have it for all the little things you’ve done.

“What God is really interested in is empowering me to be the person he created me to be,” Wilhite says, and not “chastising me for what I’ve done wrong.”

Running from God is a major theme of “Pursued,” Wilhite says. The other, this one aimed more at those who already are Christians, is that “we may not be running from God but running for God, trying to prove our worth, trying to run harder and faster and do good things and earn your way. That’s a different kind of running.”

The goal, Wilhite says, is to “just make people realize that they are loved and don’t have to run for God or from God.”

For Wilhite, the book’s message is a necessary one.

“Probably the No. 1 thing I hear come out again and again and again — this is among people who are believers; they’re Christians in orientation already — (is) this sense that God forgives people but I’m not sure he forgives me, or he loves people but I’m not sure he loves me.”

“I’m hearing stories all the time about people who are kind of diving into (the book) and are being impacted by it, and that’s great,” Wilhite says. “I’m so excited about that. What more could you ever want?”

Coinciding the book’s release, Wilhite launched a four-week series at Central Christian Church based on “Pursued.”

Readers also may visit the book’s website (www.pursuedbook.com) and participate in a free 14-day “email challenge” that includes a daily email devotional based on it.

One friend, Wilhite says, talked about how, after reading the book, “for the first time, they felt that they really understood that God loves them, and they felt that they really understand God’s love and they felt that in a different way.

“It was not about their temptations or their weaknesses or their failures or mistakes. It’s about God caring for them as they are and how empowering that is.”

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The genesis of the Rev. Benny Perez’s book, “More: Discovering the God of More When Life Gives You Less,” lies in the traumatic week before Easter he and his wife, Wendy, experienced in 2010 when the couple witnessed the miscarriage of their fourth child.

“We were in the doctor’s office, and they were checking the sonogram,” Perez recalls. “Right before our eyes, within a matter of minutes, the (baby’s) heartbeat went from 170 to flatline.

“You can imagine the devastation. My wife was four months pregnant and the baby seemed healthy at first.”

That was on the Wednesday.

“We went back the next day, Thursday, just to verify (there was) no blood flow and the baby’s death,” Perez says.

The following day, on Good Friday, Wendy underwent surgery.

“She came out of the surgery and they released her about 1 o’clock in the afternoon,” Perez says. “I’m driving home and get her home, and she collapses in my garage, her eyes rolled back.”

Paramedics were called and Wendy was rushed to the hospital where, Perez says, “by the grace of God there were the right persons to save her life.”

That weekend, Perez was scheduled to preach 10 Easter services. He wondered whether he even could, until, he says, Wendy told him to “go preach the hell out of people.”

So, he did.

“I was preaching through my pain,” Perez says. “But at that moment, it was like, “Wow, God gave up his son voluntarily. I lost a child involuntarily. I felt the loss and the pain. Man, I couldn’t imagine what God went through as he sacrificed his one and only son.”

“I’ve been preaching for over 20 years,” Perez says “and, emotionally, I connected more to the story than I ever have before.”

Perez admits that the obvious question — why did it have to happen? — crossed his mind over subsequent weeks. It was that very natural human response that prompted him to write the book.

However, the premise of the book isn’t to ask why, because “God didn’t give us an answer as to why,” Perez says. Instead, God “points us to ‘who,’ who is Jesus.

“We’re going to go through storms, and anyone who tells you anything but that is a liar” Perez says. “But you will have someone who will go with you, and that is Jesus. So we kind of take that through the book and talk about some great stories.”

Perez says it’s a particularly timely topic, given the financial and personal problems so many Southern Nevadans have faced during the past few years.

“Through the recession, people were losing homes and jobs, and (there were) home equity losses and bankruptcies,” Perez says. “I mean, it was basically storm after storm. It didn’t let go. It didn’t let up.”

Besides the miscarriage, the storms faced by Perez and his wife included the deaths shortly afterward of Perez’s father-in-law and financial troubles (now resolved, Perez says) at his own church.

“What my wife and I had gone through personally, and even our church, I think just kind of linked up with what’s happening in the Las Vegas Valley with the recession and people not knowing what to do,” he says.

Another point Perez makes in his book: “It’s OK to ask the ‘why’ question.”

“Even though I knew I wasn’t going to throw away my faith, certainly those thoughts come: If God is so good why is this happening? Why this? Why that?” Perez says. “I want people to know that it’s OK. God is not going to get upset because we ask the ‘why’ question. It’s his prerogative. He’s God, and he may never answer the ‘why’ question.

“But, again, he gives you something better. That’s the ‘who,’ and that is Jesus. So the whole point is trust.”

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The Rev. Randall Cunningham calls his book, “Lay it Down: How Letting Go Brings Out Your Best,” a “life application book.”

In it, Cunningham uses experiences from his own life and career as an aid toward teaching about Christian principles.

However, the experiences he uses aren’t all upbeat stories about his stellar football career at UNLV and in the National Football League. Cunningham’s retelling of the day that his 2-year-old son Christian drowned in the family’s hot tub is emotionally wrenching.

In the book, Cunningham describes the experience — which took place after he had left football and become a pastor — as “the biggest hit I ever took” and “the day that forever changed me.”

Although the book is written with a Christian focus, it’s “going to help everybody,” Cunningham says.

“This is a book of sharing experiences, about being mentored, about suffering through tragedy and finding strength. It’s about finding out where joy comes from in life.”

Before each chapter, Cunningham offers relevant quotations from notable people and Scripture passages. Afterward, he offers questions for reflection.

‘“It really deals with deep things in daily life,” he says. “I really open myself up.”

Yet, he continues, “there’s also some funny stuff in there, stuff that I went through when I was younger and how certain people would come into my life.”

The title, “Lay it Down,” comes from Cunningham’s belief that, when experiences of the past or hurdles in the present are hindering spiritual growth, it’s best to lay them down so that one can be open to something even better.

“There are people who are going through things in life and they just really don’t know what to do, so they throw their hands in the air and question God,” he says, but “there comes a time to lay down what has happened to you.”

“You can’t allow that to continue to feed into your anger,” Cunningham says. Rather, “you have to lay it down and let God deal with it and move on.”

Although the book doesn’t hit bookstores until March 26, Cunningham is pleased with the response he has received from readers of advance copies.

People, he says, “say they start reading and they start crying.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at
jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.