The Titus Ten: Foundations for Godly Manhood by J. Josh Smith takes ten qualities out of Paul’s letter to Titus and builds a book for men around them. It runs 240 pages in softcover. Smith is the senior pastor of Prince Avenue Baptist Church in Georgia.
One thing to sort out before you buy
There are two products with this name and they are not the same.
This one is the book. There is also The Titus Ten Bible Study Book with Video Access, a separate Lifeway study resource with the session material and video.
An earlier version of this review credited the book with study questions and group discussion guides. Those belong to the study edition. If you are buying for a group, you want that one. If you are reading on your own, this one is right.
What the book is doing
Titus is a short letter written to a young pastor about appointing leaders and teaching sound doctrine on Crete. Smith pulls his ten qualities from it and works through them one at a time: gospel clarity, identity, character, doctrine, self control, and the rest.
The strength is that he is anchored to an actual text rather than to a list of manly virtues someone assembled. Books in this genre tend to start with a picture of the ideal man and go looking for verses. Smith starts with the letter and stays in it. That discipline shows.
He is also direct about passivity without being contemptuous of the men he is writing to, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds. A lot of Christian men’s books either flatter the reader or hector him.
Worth knowing about the source text
Several of the qualities in Titus 1 are written specifically as qualifications for elders and overseers. Smith applies them more broadly, to any man wanting to grow up in the faith. That is a defensible move and a common one, since the character traits Paul lists are not exotic, they are ordinary Christian maturity. But it is an application, not the plain sense of the passage, and it is worth reading with that in mind.
The book stays away from the contested questions about authority in the home and church, which is a point in its favor for anyone tired of that argument.
Worth your time?
Yes, if you want a men’s book with real biblical spine rather than motivational filler. It is one of the better recent entries in a crowded and mostly weak category.
Get the study edition instead if a group is going through it.
An earlier version of this review reported feedback and moments of conviction from a review team. That did not happen and has been removed.