Nice: Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More

God never called us to be nice.

What happens when we replace courage with compromise?
What happens when we replace honesty with likability?
What happens when we replace conviction with clichés?
What happens when we replace discipleship to Christ with a devotion to nice?

We live in a culture that prizes niceness as one of its highest virtues. Niceness keeps the peace, wins friends, gains influence, and serves our reputations well, but it also takes the teeth out of our witness and the power out of our faith. When we choose to be nice instead of faithful, we bear fruits that are bland, bitter, empty, and rotten to the core.

In this life-changing book, Sharon Hodde Miller explores the seemingly innocent idol that has crept into our faith and quietly corrupted it, producing the bad fruits of cowardice, inauthenticity, shallowness, and more. Then she challenges readers to cultivate a better tree, providing practical steps to reclaim our credibility as followers of Christ, and bear better, richer, more life-giving fruits.

Sharon Hodde Miller, PhD, leads Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina, which she cofounded with her husband, Ike. She is a bestselling author of several books, including Nice, The Cost of Control, and Gazing at God. She has also been a regular contributor to Propel, Her.meneutics, and She Reads Truth and has written for Relevant, Christianity Today, (in)courage, and many other publications and blogs. She lives with Ike and their three children in Durham, North Carolina.