Bold Love by Dan Allendar - Book Review

Bold Love: When Love Refuses to Be “Nice” and Chooses to Be True

Dan Allender and Tremper Longman’s Bold Love is not a book for people who want love to feel comfortable. It is a book for people who want love to be real.

From the opening pages, the authors dismantle one of the most damaging assumptions in modern relationships: that love is synonymous with being nice. In their telling, niceness is often the enemy of love. Niceness is what embodies many Christians live by when it comes to loving others. Love, by contrast, tells the truth. Love risks rupture in pursuit of redemption. Love is willing to be misunderstood if it means being faithful. The truth about love is that Jesus gave his two most important commands as loving- Loving God and loving others as yourself.

This is a deeply biblical vision of love. Jesus was rarely “nice” in the way we use the word today. He was kind, compassionate, and endlessly merciful—but He also confronted, disrupted, named sin, and refused to collude with false peace. Bold Love invites us into that same posture: love that is anchored in truth and willing to bear the cost of honesty.

Be a Peacemaker not a Peacefaker!

One of the central contributions of Bold Love is its insistence that love is not primarily about maintaining relational equilibrium. Love is about pursuing the good of the other, even when that good requires discomfort.

The book describes love as an act of intentional engagement with another person’s story—especially the broken, disordered, or defended parts. This kind of love does not enable sin, excuse cruelty, or normalize emotional distance. It confronts patterns that destroy intimacy. It names the truth without cruelty and offers grace without denial.

This reframing is especially important in marriages, families, and Christian communities where “being loving” often becomes code for avoiding hard conversations. Bold Love exposes how quickly passivity masquerades as virtue. Silence can feel spiritual. Endurance can feel holy. But love that never speaks eventually becomes resentment—or despair.

Bold Love calls for effort—the effort to stay present, to speak honestly, to refuse easy exits or false harmony. We want to be peace makers not peace fakers!

Love and Power: Why Truth Matters

A recurring theme throughout the book is the relationship between love and power. Love that refuses to speak truth subtly gives power to sin, fear, or dysfunction. In that sense, avoiding conflict is not neutral—it is a choice that shapes the moral landscape of a relationship.

Bold love reclaims power not through control, but through clarity. It says, “This is who I am. This is what is happening between us. This is what I will and will not participate in.” There is a Jungian honesty here: a recognition that what we do not confront in ourselves or others will inevitably rule us from the shadows.

True love invites people into responsibility. It does not rescue them from consequences, nor does it abandon them to shame. It walks the narrow road between collusion and cruelty.

The Final Chapter: Loving—or Not Loving—a Narcissist

The last chapter of Bold Love is among its most bracing and pastorally important. Here, the book addresses narcissism—not casually or diagnostically, but relationally and spiritually.

They are clear: narcissism is not simply self-centeredness. It is a profound incapacity for repentance, empathy, and mutuality. Narcissistic individuals do not truly engage others as separate souls; they relate to people as extensions of their own needs, image, or control.

This has enormous implications for how we think about love.

The authors argue that bold love does not mean endless exposure to abuse, manipulation, or soul-eroding dynamics. Loving a narcissist does not mean staying emotionally available to someone who cannot receive love or give it in return. In fact, attempting to “love harder” often strengthens the narcissist’s sense of entitlement and erodes the other person’s soul.

Here, love looks less like intimacy and more like boundaries. Distance can be an act of love. Withdrawal can be faithfulness. Naming reality—“This person is unsafe for my heart”—is not bitterness; it is wisdom.

This chapter is particularly freeing for those who have been spiritually gaslit into believing that endurance equals holiness. Bold Love affirms that God does not ask His children to offer their souls as fuel for another person’s unrepentant sin.

As Charles Spurgeon once implied, discernment is not a lack of love—it is love guided by truth.

Why Bold Love Still Matters

Bold Love endures because it speaks to a tension every serious Christian eventually faces: the tension between peace and truth, between kindness and courage, between endurance and wisdom.

The book does not offer formulas. It offers a posture—a way of standing in love that is honest, grounded, and brave. It invites readers to love as God loves: with mercy that confronts, grace that does not enable, and truth that seeks redemption without guaranteeing reconciliation.

In a culture addicted to comfort and a church often afraid of conflict, Bold Love is a needed disruption. It reminds us that love is not about being liked. It is about being faithful.

And faithfulness, as Scripture and experience both teach us, is rarely nice—but it is always good.

Discussion Questions

1. Where in my relationships have I confused being “nice” with being loving, and what truth have I been avoiding because of that confusion?

2. How do I discern when love is calling me to move toward someone in truth—and when love is calling me to create distance or boundaries?

   
   

3. What would it look like for me to practice bold love this week in a way that reflects both Christ’s compassion and His refusal to collude with false peace?