My confidence level in people really hearing and taking to heart the idea of “more hands” in balance, or incorrespondence with “head stuff” approaches zero. They will hear “more hands” as “less head, thank God!” almost no matter what McNeal or you or I shout to the contrary. I have long experience with this. Thinking hard is hard work and our culture seems to actively discourage it, indeed most have an allergic reaction to it and this has been allowed to pervade the church.

What happens to people when they have a mish-mash “Christian” life modeled for them, but without a deliberate theological and philosophical warrant underpinning it, is what we see in the broad evangelical Americana… a sort of Jesus’n'me-doing-stuff-that-makes-me-feel-good stew.

McNeal I’m sure doesn’t intend this, but if more than half his book is not about the necessity for intellectual warrant for actions and attitudes of faith, then it stands the strong risk of being utterly lost.

“Sunday schools” and other small groups need to move beyond head learning and into the proverbial streets, to meet community needs in the name of Christ and thus practice what we’re learning.

I very much agree. I’ve been in both types of churches. A few years ago we moved from a small church to a mega-church primarily because the small church didn’t do enough in the community. I actually got tired of all the head learning and started asking myself, when are we going to put this into action? It was real exciting to get involved as a church and actually do something for the community. Seems backwards that a mega-church would be better at this but that was the case. Ironically, we recently moved back to the same small church because (in part) the head learning was too shallow at the mega-church. There’s got to be a balance and you can’t just do one or the other.