Book Review - First Hired, Last Fired by Anita Agers-Brooks

On First Hired, Last Fired by Anita Agers-Books, my thoughts are a bit mixed.

THE CORE CONTENT

The actual career advice is invaluable. A successful businesswoman tells us what she and other employers are looking for, giving all sorts of examples of what they want and what they abhor. There’s a lot of legitimately good advice in this book, advice that I have largely followed that has served me very well. They want people with integrity, who work hard and have a positive attitude and take responsibility for themselves. In the majority of cases, her advice should serve everyone quite well.

PRESENTATION/USE OF SCRIPTURE
The core content, however, gets a bit lost sometimes.
 

To keep some semblance of brevity, I will focus on the most prominent (and least subjective) issue I had. Overall, my biggest issues were with how the Bible was used. 

In each chapter, we are told about a biblical character, and how they exhibited traits that would have helped a hypothetical worker in a bad situation.

The thing is, the Bible does have a bit to say about work, but not so much the parts that she uses. She uses Bible characters as examples, and the biggest problem I had was that none of these characters were trying to be successful employees in 2013! That may sound pedantic, but it’s hard to say someone is a good example for how to act when they aren’t in an analogous situation. What we end up with is something like this: “these are good character attributes/good tips for the work place. They are also among the things that Bible characters did in their better moments in totally different situations. Therefore, they will work for you at your job.” There’s a missing link, as it were.
  

A number of the examples have specific problems as well. For example, if someone steals, how much does the Bible say to repay? The full amount, plus one fifth (i.e. 120%, 1.2 times, etc) (Numbers 5:5-7). But because Zaccheaus the tax collector, when he repented, chose to give back four times the amount stolen, she tells us, through her example characters, that that is what we should repay employers for wasted time. But Zaccheaus also gave half his possessions to the poor; are we to do that every time we spend 15 minutes telling jokes at the water cooler? No, because description (what the Bible says happened) is not the same as prescription (what the Bible says we are to do). She confuses the two, a sadly all-too-common hermeneutical error.
 

At one point, she muses “Moses must have wondered why, when he and the Israelites wandered a barren, dry, hot desert forty years rather than the few weeks it could have taken [sic].” No, Moses knew exactly why...The whole story is in Numbers 14, and God explicitly tells Moses that it will happen and why in Numbers 14:32-34. It doesn’t really affect the chapter as a whole, but I would have expected a chapter on Moses to not be ignorant of such a key part of the story.

I may sound like I’m nitpicking, as this isn’t a Bible commentary and Anita Agers-Brooks is not a professional theologian. However, we are dealing with the very word of God, so if you are going to use it, you become a theologian, whether you mean to or not. It matters how the Bible is handled.

Furthermore, somewhat disconcerting for me is the fact that, in several of the examples (e.g. Paul seeing Jesus in Heaven, the words of God through Nathan cutting King David to the heart), the intervention of the Holy Spirit is ignored, and instead it's about the person’s own wise action or self-discipline. My guess is this was done because this is aimed at a broad audience (including some who don’t believe in the Holy Spirit). But whatever the case, the intervention of God is kind of an important part of the stories in the Bible... 

And lastly, especially in the conclusion, it seemed that even when God was central to the discussion, everything was discussed except the gospel! The end is a call to find meaning in your work and have God bless it, but there is no call to find meaning in God Himself, or to find salvation in Jesus Christ. I'm not saying that every book by a Christian needs to have a gospel presentation, but there are numerous mentions of Jesus and God in the context of work, and there isn't even a sentence at the end saying "and there is so much more to following the Lord than is in this book, so ask a Christian friend about him/visit this website/etc." If I were one of the unbelievers she appeals to, I would probably leave thinking that the Bible is about living a good life so that God rewards you here and now, and not much more than that. I really don't like being that guy who says these things, but what else can I do?

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As far as the career advice goes, it’s really good, but it gets a bit lost. I feel like maybe she had something good but then tried to add in some Bible to make it more of a Christian book. Or maybe not. Who knows?

Do I recommend the book? I would recommend it to someone who knows what to focus on and what not to. This is because, despite all my problems with the book, I do think that if you follow her advice, it will help make you first hired and last fired.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from ACU Press/Leafwood Publishers as part of their ACU Press Bookclub Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.