Jim and Casper Go To Church
Jim Henderson & Matt Casper

Religion | Evangelism | Church Life
169 pages

I read this book fairly quickly as the chapters and stories were short and yet fairly engaging. The premise of this book is Jim Henderson takes his newfound friend Matt Casper, an atheist, on a tour of churches over the course of 4 months. Jim and Casper visited churches from Willow Creek to Mosaic, Imago Dei to Mars Hill, Potters House to Lakewood (think Joel Osteen), and various ones in-between. During the course of their trip they maintained their objectivity, pulled out laptops during services and took notes describing the details of their trips and documentation of their conversations.

I was intrigued by this book from the get-go, wondering exactly how this would turn out, expecting a negative response all throughout, yet what I read was rather objective and insightful. I enjoyed reading their comments and conversations, and found a great deal of value in many of their conversations. There were only a couple of times that I cringed at their comments, not because it hurt to hear, but because it took a fairly negative and nasty tone…however, for the most part I took it very well.

My biggest beef with the book was that it wasn’t enough. They spent two months traveling to over 10 different churches, taking notes, and conversing over the issues at hand, yet they only gave about 10 pages of the book (give or take) to each church intermixed with their own conversations about their personal relationship with each other. Although I appreciated their personal dialogue, I would have rather had learned more about their observations. I feel that this book fell terribly short in that department (the main thrust of the book). The book didn’t seem to be well organized in though content, never really hearing exactly what their criteria for observations really were, and exactly what it was that they were attempting to measure. Instead, it was formatted as a narrative—not necessarily a good approach for a study intending to be somewhat “scientific” and objective.

I appreciated the book and what they did… I just feel they didn’t communicate enough of their observations throughout. If they happen to do a sequel and visit other churches (it was suggested a time or two that this may be possible) I would have to seriously examine the book to see if it’s more in-depth than this one before making the purchase.

It’s a good quick read, and for many churches might prove to be earth-shattering… but for many, it’ll just fall short of expectations.

Paul
N.T. Wright

Religion | New Testament
174 pages

This is not for the faint of heart, nor is it an introductory, lay-man approach to the debate concerning the “New Perspective” on Paul as I was anticipating. It was, however, very fruitful once I gathered my thoughts, got my bearings straight and realized what I was reading. I very much appreciated Wright’s “introduction” and addition to the “New Perspective” and gleaned a great deal of insight from this endeavor.

Wright takes you through the major lenses of understanding the Apostle Paul, his relationship with Jesus and his Jewish perspective and approach to the gospel he suffered and died for. This was, perhaps, my greatest insight/reminder into the life of Paul—he was Jewish through and through. No matter how often we (Western, Gentile Christians) attempt to divorce Paul from his cultural understanding and re-introduce him as a Post-Enlightenment guru of Jesus, this is simply an un-faithful approach to understanding and interpreting Paul.

I did find one of my own hypothesis very blatantly displayed in various sections of Wright’s understanding of Paul and the gospel—everything revolves around not only the resurrection, but around your understanding of eschatology. I found this a refreshing elevation of eschatology to the realm of importance in the denunciation of eschatological understandings that neither compliment nor coincide with the gospel as presented by Jesus and proclaimed by Paul. In this Wright exposes the “rapture” myth of 1 Thessalonians 4 from a historical perspective and ties it into a beautiful understanding of the Lordship of Jesus that would have been more than understood by the church and people that inhabited Thessolonica as written by Paul. (Side note: This also gave me pause while reading this book to realize that Rob Bell isn’t necessarily a scholarly mind as he is very well read—he purported this idea as well as several others from this book in sermons and conferences I have listened to and attended. I am in no way attempting to discredit Rob Bell, rather I am extremely appreciative of how he contemporizes and communicates scholarly work!)

While reading this book it was easy to see why so many in the Reformed movement are so quick to cast Wright aside, label him a heretic (Presbyterian Church of America), and excommunicate those who would agree with his understanding of Paul for in this work he certainly takes Reformed Theology and Calvinism to task, albeit in very subtle, nuanced and profound ways.

I wish that before reading this I would have read New Testament and the People of God, which I believe is Wright’s foundational work for all the rest of his theological arguments. It is my goal to tackle this by the end of the year and in doing so, hopefully better shed light on the argumentation here within this work on Paul.

The Art of the Start
Guy Kawasaki

Portfolio—New Business Enterprise | Entrepreneurship
215 pages

My church-planting coach, Phil Claycomb, assigned me to read this book and at first I was not only skeptical but wasn’t really looking forward to reading a business book as preparation for planting a church. I put it off until the last possible minute, fully expecting it to take me a good couple of weeks to trudge through the material, however I finished it in a grand total of 3 days. It was absolutely fantastic and it gave me a great deal of confidence and information to proceed through the incomprehensible black cloud of confusion that was enveloping my psyche. (Easily put: The fog began to lift.)

Granted, this is a business book so as you read it you have to skip over certain parts that don’t pertain to church work but the rest of it aligns rather beautifully. If you read it from a church-planting perspective, you begin to see that this book is more than a business book but a book that gives a practical and insightful look into what it takes to start something from nothing.

Perhaps the most intriguing, helpful and inspiring chapters for myself were:

• The Art of Pitching, a chapter that helps you create a “sales pitch” for potential donors and partners. This gave a real simple outline on how to create a short and powerful presentation that clearly communicates your vision and your plan. This helped me by helping to clarify my communication strategies.
• The Art of Writing a Business Plan, a chapter that helps you create an in-depth approach and 5-year strategy for getting up off the ground—and in the realm of church-planting, making it to self-sufficiency. This also helped create a sense of confidence for where this thing is heading and even just a sense of how this thing is truly possible!
• The Art of Recruiting, gave a sense for how to go about finding and wooing a potential team that will be on this Jesus Mission with us. This was extremely valuable not only for helping to go about finding a paid staff, but a volunteer staff that is truly sold out to the vision and mission—especially when you combine this chapter with the The Art of Partnering.

This was a fantastic book that has truly helped to give some concrete thoughts where before there was mush. I would highly recommend this book for anyone getting ready to embark on a new journey, a new venture, and a new church-plant. It’s been invaluable to our journey.

Church Planting from the Ground Up
Ed. Tom Jones

College Press—Church Planting | Christianity | Evangelism
337 pages

This book was a labor of love… not because it was a horrible book, but because it was so meaty! This was a great step-by-step, yet broad overview of what it looks like and should look like to plant a healthy, successful and vibrant church in almost any community.

This is a practitioners book, written by church planters for church planters with a vast amount of information and tools that will take me a lot more time to filter through and process… therefore, this review is rather slim. However, I would recommend taking a look through it if you’re interested in or planning on planting a church… this is a great resource for that. And if you’re not, there might still be some useful information in there for going multi-site as well as principles that can be used in the traditional church.

They Like Jesus But Not The Church
Dan Kimball

Zondervan—Religion | Christianity | Evangelism
260 pages

“Ask someone today if he or she likes Jesus, and the answer is usually yes. But ask if that person likes the church, and chances are you will get a far less favorable response.”

I jumped into this book on the heels of reading Pagan Christianity? and experienced some striking overlap between the two in thought and in practice, however there were two striking differences… Kimball was gracious in his observations, and never tried to coerce people to leave the church. In fact, he brilliantly quotes one of my favorite “fathers of the faith” Henri Nouwen: “When we say, ‘I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,’ we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the Church seldom asks us for forgiveness.”

I found Kimball’s observations about the way in which we “do church” to be very insightful and relevant to the church today. There were 6 common perceptions of the church that he laid out in detail backed by the stories of people in his community that have virtually nothing to do with the church. The 6 common perceptions were:

1. The church is an organized religion with a political agenda
2. The church is judgmental and negative
3. The church is dominated by males and oppresses females
4. The church is homophobic
5. The church arrogantly claims all other religions are wrong
6. The church is full of fundamentalists who take the whole Bible literally

I found this list is a fairly comprehensive assessment of church today based on the conversations I have had with people in my own community in the coffee shops I frequent. It’s amazing how quickly a conversation ends when someone finds out you’re a “pastor”.

I appreciated very much Kimball’s attitude towards the subject, not as a “know-it-all” bringer of the perfect solution, but rather as a humble practitioner who is trying different modes and means to reach out in real, authentic and tangible ways to the people in his community. Perhaps the most valuable section of this book was “Part 3: How the Church Can Respond”. The first two parts were important at making the point, but they seemed to drag on for me… almost a little too much information, and overstating the point—although this could be extremely important for other people to hear. I would recommend this book for a scan-through, paying particular attention to the second chapter: “Why I escaped the Church Office” and a few chapters throughout that may strike your fancy. But the meat of the book, the suggestions that get your creative mojo flowing are mainly found at the end. So, give it a whirl and see how it might affect your church, and ultimately the Kingdom.

Pagan Christianity?
Frank Viola & George Barna

Religion | Christian Church | History269 pages

You know you’re about to read a controversial book when the publishers (Tyndale) decide to put a disclaimer—”Publisher’s Preface”—about the content of the book at the very beginning (even before the table of contents)… and this book certainly didn’t disappoint in the realm of “controversial” (or in the realm of the ridiculous). Before reading this book I isolated myself from all of the reviews out there wanting to approach it from an unbiased position and evaluate it completely for myself… although I knew it was taking some heat, I didn’t realize the wide spectrum from which the heat was coming.

The very first thing that I did was look through the table of contents to get a feel for where this book was heading, and immediately I gathered exactly where the authors (Frank Viola—a heavy proponent of the house church—& George Barna—a highly regarded church statistician) where coming from. The 3 largest chapters (by far) dealt with the church building, the order of worship and the pastor (a ratio of 2 pages to 1 in regards to every other chapter). I then read their introduction and braced myself for an exercise of silly logic and ridiculous research—and that’s exactly what I found.

If you want to know the crux of this book (the thesis if you will) here it is: Everything that we do in the church today is directly linked to paganism. Meaning, that there is nothing we do that is truly sacred—unless of course your church meets in a house… then you’re exempt from this. Viola and Barna do nothing in this book but propagate a horrible history of the church that is founded upon poor research and terrible logic. If you have read this book, I would love to hear your perspective on their research and logic.

I can’t even count how many times I rolled my eyes at their nonsense, or grunted in disgust.

This was a horrible book, not because of their conclusions, but because of the cavalier arrogance and insinuation that anything outside of the realm of the house church is unbiblical and pagan in nature because it all evolved after the 3rd century. Viola and Barna give no regard to cultural sensitivity, cultural awareness, or cultural influence into the promotion of the gospel and by doing so expect that each and every church be a “New Testament Church” functioning the exact same way as a first century Jewish Christian would… sorry, but I don’t think that translates very well to our culture.

Another interesting note is in their analysis and conclusion, everything that came alive in the church after the first century is regarded as having a pagan influence and therefore unbiblical—buildings, pastors (whom they say have no scriptural support), sermons, order of worship, etc, etc, etc. However, in a strange twist of logic, they base all of these conclusions on the New Testament (NT) which wasn’t canonized until 393 at the Synod of Hippo. So, does this mean that the NT is also of pagan influence? According to their logic it would seem this is the proper conclusion. These are the blanket statements that Viola and Barna make in their book—yet when fleshed out they fall short.

This book was nothing more than Viola’s poor attempt to promote house churches as the only biblical form of church and used by Barna to offer a solution to the problems raised in his book Revolution. It was a very poor attempt and a shameful ploy on both of their parts. I was very disappointed.

If you want more commentary on this book check out Bob Hyatt’s conclusions (there are several links in this one post to a few of his reflections) or Christianity Today’s review at Out of Ur and the discussion there within.

Everything Must Change
Brian D. McLaren

Religion | Spirituality | General
301 pages

I spent a lot of time reading through this book for two reasons: one there were parts that were extremely interesting that I wanted to spend a great deal of time thinking through; and two there were parts of the book that were extremely slow to read, hard to read, and boring. The latter sections took a great deal of time to trudge through.

McLaren’s basic thesis simply put is that Everything Must Change. The system by which the world works is horribly broken which results in a system that not only dehumanizes people (specifically the poor), but renders them nothing more than cogs in the wheel that work to support and increase the wealth of the richest 1%. I don’t think this is really all that surprising. We’ve been hearing this for years. In fact, one of the more interesting sections of the book sparked this blog entry last month in which McLaren offered a solution to breaking this system.

McLaren calls for us to disbelieve in the system of the world and instead believe in the framing story of the gospel turing our sights to the hope that the gospel brings. Of course he doesn’t leave us hanging, he offers several insights and thoughts into how this could be accomplished. This of course is where the book becomes “controversial.”

Many of the insights McLaren gives are good ideas with thoughts that could truly revolutionize the world if embraced by the masses. However, my biggest beef with his solutions is that they are all financial driven. It seems that McLaren is promoting the idea that money can solve all of the worlds problems if only it were equally distributed among the people, almost in a Marxian utopia. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the complete solution. Although I’m sure that there does need to be more equal distribution of resources throughout the world, I don’t think we can rely on this to be the total solution. I don’t think we can fix all the worlds problems through economics.

I wish that I were able to give a different path to walk down other than a completely economic package, but I cannot. I think the world is much more complex than economies… and I don’t believe everything hinges upon the equity system of the world.

McLaren offers some great insight and this book is decent, but be prepared from time to time to be bored in the minutia of economic theory. It’s certainly worth a read, but I’d suggest skimming it first for the actual nuggets of wisdom that are there within.

Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale
Frederick Buechner

Preaching | Communication Theology
98 pages

Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale, by Frederick Buechner was an interesting foray into the different worlds and categories that the gospel inhabits. From my perspective there was a great deal of metaphoric overload that often times left me feeling confused and wondering what story we were working with ranging from King Lear to The Wizard of Oz to The Tempest to The Seventh Seal with references to Charlie Chaplin and Donald Duck falling into the mix. It was a lot to digest and keep track of!

I found the most helpful part of the book to be the title. The categorization and the flow of thought in thinking of the gospel as a tragedy, a comedy and a fairy tale certainly brought about a deeper and richer sense of meaning… one that will certainly propel me to think in broader terms in my preaching. However, my biggest beef with Buechner is that he starts with the thought that the gospel is a tragedy. I wish that he would’ve started the gospel with the notion that everything started out in perfect harmony in the garden before the fall. To miss this point misses the full scope of the tragedy of the gospel… as well as the comedy and fairy tale of it all. We certainly cannot feel the tragedy without knowing why it is a tragedy—that at one point everything was in perfect harmony (Genesis 1 & 2). We certainly cannot feel the comedy (or shear senselessness) of it all without knowing that at one point God walked among us and wants to do that again! We certainly cannot feel the fairy tale aspect, the shear dream of it, without knowing that God plans to bring it all back together through the gospel.

I appreciated the passion of Buechner’s writing and this book has certainly given me a deeper sense of calling as it relates to preaching. I truly wish this was something that I would’ve read in Bible college, although at the same time I’m not sure I would’ve truly appreciated it.

Choke
Chuck Palahniuk

Anchor Books—Fiction
293 pages

Dark and twisted… what a book to read during your Christmas vacation! I really enjoyed the twists and turns that Palahniuk took you through in this book of fiction detailing the chronicles of a man who eventually believed himself to be the second coming of Christ. I would love to spoil the twist for you all, but I won’t… let’s just say it’s a good one!I think this book is somewhat of a modern-day parable about the church and one of the more interesting statements by the character i believe portrays the church is: “I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything…” This is a very good critique of the church and I think that Palahniuk gives us a very good assessment from an outside perspective.This is,however, a rather “dirty” book; very dark, very twisted and I wouldn’t recommend it for very many people. However, if you can handle sexual humor, sexual innuendo and crass writing, then this would probably be a fairly interesting book for you to plot your way through.

Static: Tune out the Christian Noise and experience the real message of Jesus
Ron Martoia

Tyndale—Religion, Social Issues
249 pages

I just finished reading through Ron Martoia’s cultural contextualization and interpretation of the gospel and I found it to be rather interesting. Martoia intermingles propositional teaching and narrative throughout the scope of this book as you mainly follow along with his conversation with Phil and Jess as they discuss how best to talk about Jesus with their non-Christian co-worker Marty. Martoia weaves you through the history of salvation and gives you pause for considering the way in which we have always (always as in the past century) presented the gospel. Martoia says:

I don’t think there are any easy answers, pat formulas, or quick cliches. That’s the ‘Christian noise’ we have to work so hard to cut through. What we have, though, is the wild and woolly complete story of God, as recorded in the Bible. The story tells us about who God is and how he relates to real, often complex, people in a variety of different circumstances. It’s a complex story because it’s a real story about a real God. It can’t be stripped down, reprocessed, repackaged and served to us with fries on the side. It’s a multicourse dinner at Outback that we spend time to enjoy—not a McDonald’s Value Meal we gulp down in minutes… It takes time to tell a really good story about characters we care about. Think about it. We allow George Lucas to spend over twelve hours of our time telling the visual story of Star Wars. But we want to stuff the story of God into a five-minute conversation. There’s intriguing variety within God’s story that can’t be summarized in five minutes.

If anything it seems that Martoia is attempting to get us to slow down in our evangelistic approach, toss aside the slasher mentality of “witnessing” and re-think our linguistic approach in order to better connect with people first and foremost.

If you can get past all of his suggested “new terminology” which most of the time seems pretty lame, there are some really good morsels of thought that should give us pause for re-thinking how we “do” evangelism. In fact, this could be an important work for the emerging church as we continue to think through what evangelism means, is, looks like, in a postmodern context.

The Great Omission
Dallas Willard

HarperOne—Discipleship/Christian Living/Spiritual Formation/
256 pages

The Great Omission is a challenge to the church to set aside the flash and excitement of the moment in order to return to the call of Jesus of “Follow me.”  It’s a great reminder of how we often forget just how much we wrap ourselves up in programs and the next greatest adventure while leaving Jesus in the dust—exchanging Him for the later.  This is a really thought provoking and a good book of “re-centering” and re-orienting yourself around the story of Jesus and I would highly recommend it.

There are times in the book that Willard uses a great amount of hyperbole to communicate his point and at times I think he takes it a bit too far, but overall it’s a very powerful call.  Something to note: this book is a collection of articles and sermons that he has preached over the years and as a result some of it feels as if you may have read it somewhere else—especially if you have read a lot of Willard’s writing over the years—and at times it there is some rehashing of the same concepts and ideas throughout the book.  You could say that this is a good thing for reinforcement, or completely unnecessary, but whatever the case it is certainly a good call and challenge for the church today to return to Jesus’ call of followership.

Holy Discontent
Bill Hybels

Zondervan—Religion, Christian Life, General
149 pages

There are times when you come to a book that you expect an awful lot from the author, not just because of who the author is but because of the subject matter he/she is trying to tackle. This was one of those books for me and unfortunately didn’t deliver. This is a great subject and an enormous one to attempt to tackle in light of our current cultural situations, the upheaval in the church and the strong feelings of discontent within the church among our emerging brothers and sisters but Hybels barely touches the surface. I’m pretty sure I came to this book with a different set of expectations than Hybes and maybe that’s partly responsible for my disconnect (this might be one of those subjects where an introduction explaining your expectations for the book would have been extremely helpful and clarifying.)

For me, this book seemed rather passionless (until the postscript) and full of disconnected words and associations—maybe it was my state of mind while reading this book (I’ve heard from a lot of other people that absolutely love this book). Unfortunately this book was nothing more than a 149 page definition of what a “holy discontent” is and an attempt to get you to locate your and do something about it… but it fell more on the definition side than the attempt to locate it and motivate. (This book was full of interesting stories of other people’s Holy Discontent.) So, if you know what a Holy Discontent is, don’t bother with this book… if you have no clue, then this could be just what you’re looking for and it could quite possibly give rise to the voice within and help you move on that discontent that is within.

One question that I did have coming out of this book, which is totally unrelated to the subject matter: “Where is the bridge between bragging/boasting and telling a story?” There were times as I read the different stories that I felt like I was reading a propoganda piece for Willow Creek and at other times I felt like I was reading about all the cool and important people Hybels knows (and maybe that’s just me reading into the intent of the stories). I guess my question would be, is there a way to tell stories like this without coming across as a braggard or by telling stories like this will you always come across that way to someone?