Dallas had a remarkable mind…

But his life and his heart were better than his mind.

Wow.

I pray that I will live in such a way that one day the same might be said about me: that my life and heart were better than my mind.

Photo credit

In doing any ministry that is geared toward serving and giving away resources, some people get concerned that they might get ripped off.  Many times I’ve been asked, “Don’t you worry that some people will take advantage of what you are doing?”  I respond, “No, I’m not worried.  I know they will!”  I think the stats are pretty good that we’ll get ripped off.  As a matter of fact, I think that’s a scriptural idea.

Dave Workman in The Outward Focused Life.

What do you think?

Photo credit

Photo credits: first and second pictures

Here beginneth a LONG quotation from John 11.  Bear with me!

¹⁷ Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. ¹⁸ Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, ¹⁹ and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. ²⁰ So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. ²¹ Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. ²² But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” ²³ Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” ²⁴ Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” ²⁵ Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, ²⁶ and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” ²⁷ She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

²⁸ When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” ²⁹ And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. ³⁰ Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. ³¹ When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. ³² Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” ³³ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. ³⁴ And he said, “Where have you laid him?”They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” ³⁵ Jesus wept. ³⁶ So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”³⁷ But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

³⁸ Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it.³⁹ Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” ⁴⁰ Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” ⁴¹ So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. ⁴² I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” ⁴³ When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” ⁴⁴ The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Mary and Martha each make the same statement to Jesus.  Exactly the same, as our preacher last week pointed out.  Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

Yet he responds differently to each.  To the practical one, the one who is on her feet as soon as she hears him coming, running headlong perhaps to ask him why, to her he responds with words.  Words of truth, a reason – even if she cannot fully understand it.  He honours her faith in believing that he is favoured by God, that whatever he asks will be given him, and he pushes that faith one step further: towards an understanding that he is not just the one whom the LORD answers but also the very resurrection and life itself.  Where I am resurrection is, he seems to say.

And his words are precious to the one who has run all the way up the road despite the grief.  His words are a gift of grace to the one who may perhaps have gone ready to accuse, certainly to question Jesus’ choice not to come before.  They are words which do truth, words which create a response in her, the only response appropriate to the Christ, the Son of God.  And so she is blessed beyond measure, for in the same way as Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, flesh and blood did not reveal this to her but rather the Father in heaven.

Martha is blessed, for his words are truth and have done truth in her life.

But I cannot help it.  I am drawn to Mary.  Always.

She captivates me, weaving through my own life as call to another way.  She turns up almost without fail in the occasional personal prophecies that I receive; always it comes back to her.  Mary, the one who was content to sit at Jesus’ feet.  Mary, the one who had chosen the better portion which would not be taken from her.  Mary, it is always Mary.

Because when Mary speaks to Jesus, the very same words that her sister had uttered before her, she falls at his feet.  Martha, we must assume, had stood.  She’d waited for the response to her question, operating in the realm of the cognitive, a realm which our Lord knows well and in which he delights.  Martha had been honoured by him, an answer for a question yet also so much more: a word which was not only truth but which also did truth in her.  Martha had been touched by her encounter with Jesus.

But Mary…  Mary, she entered the realm of the heart, as perhaps she always had.  She fell at his feet, the same feet where she had spent hours listening and loving.  Though her words were the same as her sister’s, the response from her Lord was different.  Whereas before it was Martha who was touched, this time it is Jesus who is touched.  It is he who is deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled, he who now weeps the tears of a real flesh-and-blood Saviour.

What was it about Mary, a heart that could move his?  What was it about her that she touched something deep within him?  It wasn’t her words, that’s for sure: they were the same as her sister’s, a question implied, an answer longed for.  To her also, it would seem, he could have offered those words which are truth and which do truth, words which would have touched her and brought her to her sister’s confession of faith.

But he did not.

And we don’t know why.  I suspect she had already made this kind of affirmation of faith; there’s something about the way that she falls at his feet and weeps which hints at this for me.  But we don’t know it for sure.  Yet what we do know is that Mary’s tears move the Saviour and also, perhaps that her trust in him is implicit, for it is not she who worries that there will be a smell when the tomb is opened – he, after all, is Lord of all the earth, the resurrection and the life.

As I reflect upon these things, it all comes back to Mary for me.  Once again.  I want to be Mary more than Martha in this story.  I want to talk with him, to ask the questions I hardly dare broach; I want to be heard by him and I want to hear his reply.  I want the words that are truth and that do truth in me – I absolutely do.  If it were not so, I would not be fighting so hard to listen to him – to his Word and to those through whom his Spirit has spoken and is speaking still.  I would not be struggling to say truth about Jesus and the church and leadership and disciple-making and holiness.  I would not wrestling to say truth about these things in a way which also does truth in my life and the lives of those around me.  There is no question for me that I want the words that are truth and that do truth in me and those I serve.

But I want more than this.

I want to be one who moves his heart.  I want to be the Mary who throws herself down before him.  The Mary who falls at his feet because nothing she can ask or say can express the depth of her passion to be with him even as the world around her seems confusing and dark.  The Mary who is looking perhaps less for answers from him than for intimacy with him.  The Mary, who in her passion for him, can somehow move the very heart of God.

And so it is that I say this again:

Somehow Mary, in my pursuit of Jesus, always it comes back to you.

Last Friday was a good day for my book problem: I finished another!  I’ve blogged a fair bit about Jesus Wept and this is the last post I plan to write on the thoughts in this provocative book.  Listen to this quotation which the authors of Jesus Wept take from Nouwen’s In The Name of Jesus:

Formation in the mind of Christ, who did not cling to power but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, is not what most seminaries are about.

Hold that in your mind and then read this excerpt from the same chapter of Jesus Wept, Herrick and Mann’s own words:

Learning vulnerability is, we would suggest, part of ministerial formation.  In a training environment where the reality (if not the principle) of ministerial formation as integral to preparation for leadership in the Christian community has been or is in danger of being lost, those who are willing to risk walking the way of vulnerability may save the Church from success-bound professionalism, and ensure that the self-emptying, self-giving – sometimes vulnerable – service of others which Christ modelled, is not entirely effaced.

As I read this particular chapter on ministerial formation as prophetic vulnerability, I was thanking God for the place of the London School of Theology in my life.  I don’t normally do this but today feels like a day for blogging my reflective gratitude for that community and for shouting pretty loud about what a special community it is.

And I know LST is not perfect, that for some there has been great pain or disillusionment in this place, a heaviness which perhaps lingers still; indeed, we all have our problems when we gather as Christian community, theological colleges just as much as churches!  But I also believe that, for the saints, there is power in choosing to reject an endless repetition of the negative and instead speaking out what is true and praiseworthy about our communities.  Not only a power but even a responsibility to do the same.

You know, LST is unashamedly an academic institution.  I don’t think I fully realised that before I came.  I was only interested in getting some form of ministry ‘training’ in the best conservative evangelical sense of that word, after all.  But LST is more than that: we’re not only about the transmission of information, doctrine that the majority considers ‘sound’.  Instead, we’re about genuine theological enquiry in submission to the authority of Scripture.  No one in all my time at LST has ever told me that I can’t ask that question, that I can’t hold that theological position; all that has ever been demanded is a rigorously academic and thoughtful grappling with the text and an engagement with the related wisdom of scholars better-equipped than I to reflect upon its mysteries.  I’ve been taught to celebrate the kind of scholarship shot through with godliness, the heart committed both to understanding and to obeying the text.

I am grateful for the place of LST in my life because of all that it has taught me regarding the best of evangelical scholarship and the way that it has trained me to think for myself rather than parroting the doctrinal ‘party line’ of one denomination or another.  Yet I am also deeply thankful for another reason: the commitment to the formation of me as a person and as a minister.  It’s not been so much in those classes entitled ‘formation’ that this has happened.  Instead it has been in the quotidian: the conversations in the corridor, the unexpected coffee breaks, times of prayer and struggles with essays.  It has been the openness of those in this community which has been most used by God in my transformation.  In fact, the two groups to whom I owe the biggest debt here are the other research students and the faculty.  The friendships which have grown with so many in these groups have been truly transformative for me: you’ve taught me theology I didn’t know or, in the way you’ve been living it, reminded me of theology I did know.

Sometimes you won’t even have known just how much your commitment to a theology of vulnerability, of the cross, has affected me.  Sometimes a one-liner, perhaps even one which you thought throwaway, has sat with me for weeks or months and the whole of my ministry has been rocked, even part-destroyed and rebuilt, as I have sought to process what it means to lead and to mentor, to lecture and to preach, to pastor and to write…to do all that I do through that lens which you espouse so completely with your words and your living.

And when I’ve been stuck, lacking in wisdom or experience, so many of you have made time for me.  Invariably so, actually.  You’ve shared with me your ideas…your notes…your books…the opportunities which were in your hand to give even when that meant for you to take a risk on me as I stepped out in something new.  More than anything, so many of you have believed me into becoming the person that I am now, calling out of me things that I never dreamed might be mine.  And, in the manner of your ‘self-emptying, self-giving – sometimes vulnerable – service of others which Christ modelled’, you have kept me from falling into the ‘success-bound professionalism’ against which Herrick and Mann warn.

I’m grateful to be here now, at this time in our history as we enter the new thing that God is doing amongst us and through us.  I’m thankful to have spent these several years past here.  Back then, I thought it would only be one.  One year of  ’being trained’.  One year of getting my head straight after the hopeless servitude of the City lawyer who feared that she was losing her way in the success-bound professionalism of it all.  But one year was not enough.  In a place like this, a community of saints who get so much wrong but also get so much right…an assortment of people who are committed to the discipleship of both head and heart, to a way which is the way of death and of faith and of resurrection all mixed up in one holy mess…

…in a place like this, one year is never enough.

Photo credits

The Singing Grammarian

I am becoming a connoisseur of Macnair’s textbook, having had the recent pleasure of teaching all the chapters I never totally understood first time round.  But this video/audio resource from Zacharias is a completely new concept for me – singing Koine grammar songs!  I wasn’t sure what to make of it from the beginning, perhaps mostly because it put me in mind of learning a foreign language in primary school – whilst it is one thing to sing along at the age of ten, could I imagine getting a class of first year theology students to do the same thing?

In short, the answer had to be no!  I’m sorry because I recognise how much work has gone into the production of this resource and I also know the value of this approach to language learning.  But I couldn’t keep a straight face singing along (sadly, songs such as Frere Jacques will never be the same again for me!) and so I cannot conceive of taking this resource into a classroom.  That said, it’s still not a bad tool for students to use alone should they so choose.  After all, anything which helps to nail the intricacies of grammatical endings has to be worth exploring!  For that reason, I am recommending this resource but with the caveats mentioned.  (And if you hear me singing strange words to Frere Jacques sometime, do just give me the benefit of the doubt and ask me no questions!)

I received a free copy of this resource from Kregel Publications in return for a fair review.

Craig Groeschel, Altar Ego

Though the world tells us to seek fame, accomplishments and success…though those around us label us as father, mother, husband, wife…though we ourselves count our identity as empty, depressed, or angry…these labels are not all there is to say.  You are not, in fact, who you think you are.  So says Groeschel in this, his latest book.  You are not who you think you are; rather you are who God says you are and, until you can lay your own understanding of who you are on the altar, you won’t become that person.

This book was quite well-written and relatively engaging.  For me, the most memorable part of the book was about boldness in prayer: whilst I didn’t find that the book said anything new, I did find that it teaches truth in a simple, clear and arresting way and therefore I would be tempted to recommend it to newer Christians.

I received a free copy of this book from Booksneeze in return for a fair review.

Betty Malz, Angels By My Side

Betty Malz suffered a ruptured appendix and was eventually declared dead.  Yet some minutes later, she came back to life with a whole new interest in angels, having had some kind of angelic encounters in those few minutes.  As the years passed after this time, Malz seemed everywhere to meet others who were keen to talk about their own experiences of angels and this is the record of those stories which she was told.

You may react like me to such books, assuming that they are influenced by the New Age and divorced from the gospel of Jesus.  But Malz’s book is refreshing in that she is clear that Jesus was at the centre of her death experience and that angels are sent to do his work. The stories she tells are captivating and reminded me of the word in Hebrews which encourages believers to offer hospitality knowing that they may thereby entertain angels unawares – this was a book which reminded me that, according to Scripture, angels are real and active today.  In such a rationalistic age, such a reminder can only be a good thing.

I received a galley copy of this e-book from NetGalley in return for a fair review.

I know the value of things, how to use time and money wisely, and I have no problem paying now and playing later.  Except that I do usually then forget to play!  So, given this self-discipline and related OCD tendencies, my book problem is a little unexpected.  You’d think I’d be disciplined at finishing one before I move on to the next.  But I’m not.  I’m terrible.  And the book problem has progressed to the extent that I don’t even know how many half-read books I have.  Nor do I even know where they all are.  But, even largely out of sight, their unreadness is pressing on my mind, a waft of guilt every so often followed by panic as to the impossibility of getting my head the other side of ALL of them.  As for the unread articles that are scanned and sitting accusingly in my dropbox, let’s not even go there!  The extent of my academic and practitioner interests makes it worse: the books range from trinitarian theology to commentaries on Isaiah, from discipleship to books on John, from Celtic Christianity to ecclesiology of the emerging church, feminist hermeneutics to sociology, and leadership in both Christian and secular contexts.

And the latest book?  Well, that dips into quantum physics and the theory of living systems.  I shouldn’t have started it.  I know that now.  But it looked so interesting in the connections that the author was promising to make with leadership and…all discipline failed me! Still this one is good: double science at GCSE doesn’t quite equip me to read it well but some of it is fascinating.  It’s called Leadership and the New Science and is by the well-known Margaret Wheatley.  Listen to this:

New understandings of change and disorder have also emerged from chaos theory…order and chaos…are now understood as mirror images, two states that contain the other.  A system can descend into chaos and unpredictability, yet within that state of chaos the system is held within boundaries that are well-ordered and predictable.  Without the partnering of these two great forces, no change or progress is possible.  Chaos is necessary to new creative ordering.

Here’s a bit more:

There is another important paradox in living systems: Each organism maintains a clear sense of its individual identity within a larger network of relationships that helps to shape its identity.

And again:

If people are machines, seeking to control us makes sense.  But if we live with the same forces intrinsic to all other life, then seeking to impose control through rigid structures is suicide.  If we believe that there is no order to human activity except that imposed by the leader…then we cannot hope for anything except what we already have – a treadmill of frantic efforts that end up destroying our individual and collective vitality.

With almost every page, I am seeing connections.  Connections with leadership and things I’d like to say theologically.  I’m nowhere near ready to say them (so if you read this far and now feel shortchanged, sorry!) but I am so excited about the opportunities that the ‘new science’ offers for creative engagement in my thinking about leadership.  I could do with a crash course in quantum physics and living systems as well as the mathematics of fractals to understand the book a bit better than I do; a bit more education in theology would help me too, though I am at least working on that!  Still, suffice to say, that this is one book I shall finish sooner rather than later: the indiscipline in starting it this week will have no net effect on the book problem in the end.

*  By the way, in case you were wondering, my friends are wrong – but only because six-minute slots don’t show up so well as half hour blocks on an Outlook calendar.

Photo credit

We all know people who spend a lifetime at the same job, or the same marriage, or the same profession, who are slowly, inexorably diminished in the process.  They are persistent in the sense that they keep doing the same thing for many years, but we don’t particularly admire them for it.  If anything we feel sorry for them…

But we don’t feel sorry for Jeremiah.  He was not stuck in a rut; he was committed to a purpose…  Everything we know of him shows that after the twenty-three years his imagination is even more alive and his spirit even more resilient than it was in his youth.  He wasn’t putting in his time.  Every day was a new episode in the adventure of living the prophetic life.  The days added up to a life of incredible tenacity, of amazing stamina.

Eugene Peterson in Run With The Horses.

Friends, is this true of your life?  Is your imagination even more alive, your spirit more resilient than ever it was?  Are we coming alive, more every day, as we encounter our life as the unfolding of God’s purposes in and through us?

Jeremiah knew this reality, yet not from the standpoint of a comfortable, easy existence.  So also I believe that – even in the midst of trying circumstances, situations which we did not choose and relationships which are less than we had hoped – we can still experience a walk of faithfulness over a lifetime as inexorable enlargement, not diminution.

And wouldn’t it be precious one day if we were able to look back on a life of faithfulness, even faithfulness through the hard things, a life which had grown into the fulness of holiness and joy?  Wouldn’t it be beautiful to be enlarged in the waiting, to borrow from Peterson’s language in Romans 8, perhaps not seeing what is enlarging us yet waiting with joyful expectancy until we with the whole of creation are released into the glorious times ahead?

Isn’t that worth pursuing?

Photo credit

But the holidays have never felt so long.  Nor so educational!  Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee with trips to Masada, Ein Gedi, Qumran, Dan, Caesarea Philippi, Jericho and even more places that I have temporarily forgotten with an incredibly knowledgeable guide.  His command of the OT kings and obscure place names was second to none.  And the crowning glory (sort of!) the evening meetings which put us somewhat in mind of our CICCU days.  (Yes, there is a sub-text for the initiated in this final comment!)

There were so many good parts – sunshine, being away from all the responsibilities, seeing places I’d only read about and lots of time just being with Peter.  People ask me for my highlights and I struggle to tell them because what comes to mind is those occasional moments of repose under a blue sky, the sun warm and a decent coffee in hand, chatting with Peter as we skived walking through Hezekiah’s Tunnel or decided not to bother with the Israel Museum after seeing the Shrine of the Book!  It’s not that the main sights weren’t amazing: they were but none stands out as more special than the rest because they were all so ‘other’.

But if I had to pick a highlight (other than the moments of just ‘being’ which are so foreign to me most of the time), I would say Bethlehem.  Not the church.  I mean, seriously, how many incense holders and general other ‘church bling’ can you fit in any one square metre anyway?  (More than you think, by the way.)  So, not the Church of the Nativity.  But Bethlehem Bible College.

I loved being there because one of my friends from college now teaches there.  It was precious to see her context, to understand the fragility of this ministry, how its continued freedom depends on the non-intervention of the two majority groups, Israelis and Muslims, a non-intervention which the Christians there don’t expect to last forever.  It was incredible to spend a couple of hours with her, in a brief respite from the evening meetings(!), asking all the questions I had never known to ask her when she was in the UK and hearing what life is like behind the wall.

But so soon we are home, back to the routine of crazy busy and longing for the English spring to arrive.  Still, at least we missed the snow, I gather?

If the ministry is reduced to being primarily a helping profession then those who take up that office cannot help being destroyed if they have any integrity.  For they will find themselves frustrated by a people not trained on the narrative of God’s salvation, not trained to want the right things rightly, but rather a people who share the liberal presumption that all needs which are sincerely felt are legitimate.  Those in the ministry will then find they are expected to try to meet those needs since, “Isn’t that what the ministry is supposed to do since they have been freed from having to earn a living?”…  the pastor feels like a cult prostitute, selling his or her love for the approval of an upwardly-mobile, bored middle-class, who, more than anything else, want some relief from the anxiety brought on by their materialism.

Because we do not know enough about where we ought to be going in our ministry, we are powerless to lay hold of ourselves.

Hauerwas and Willimon in Resident Aliens.

This is increasingly my concern: that ministry has become all about holding people’s hands and meeting their needs.

You see, I hear older and wiser pastors telling us that we need to keep people happy.  We mustn’t change things too fast nor push the people to conceive of church which is radically different from our present chairs-in-rows, five-song-singing and clap-the-preacher efforts.

I hear them and I know where they’re coming from but it still feels like something inside dies when they say it.  I hear them and I get it, I really do, but it only serves to make me feel more trapped, this bowing to the insatiability of these felt needs, disparate desires of not just one but multiple individuals.

I hear them and I cannot live this for a lifetime of ministry.  It’s become that clear a choice in the end.

Either my understanding of ministry changes or I quit.

Either I get to explore all that it means to be the church, a community of Jesus-disciples in 21st century Britain, instead of pleasing the people or I walk away from it all.

 Photo credit

And it sounds bald and final and dramatic.  Hopeless even, that I would continue long as a church leader.  I know it does.  I’ve faced this choice much more honestly in recent months than perhaps ever before.  I’ve seriously contemplated what a life outside of doing church could look like.  Not outside of loving Jesus and his people, you understand; just outside of the golden cage which ministry in an institution can become.

Yet somehow – something to do with this God of resurrection, maybe?! – I don’t think all that I say about the place of ministry in my life is as final as it sounds.  I wouldn’t be doing this research if I thought that were so.  I am reading and writing, thinking and rethinking because I believe there is something to say about what it means to be a church leader.  And the finality of my conclusions on ministry at this time drive me forward.  They spur me on because I know that unless I can find a better way for ecclesial leadership I shall have to admit defeat, unable to keep making my offerings at the shrine of the ‘felt need’, the individual’s desire for self-fulfilment.

I know that until I can articulate where I ought to be going, what it is in biblical and theological terms to be an ecclesial leader, I must – with Hauerwas and Willimon – admit my powerlessness ‘to lay hold of’ myself.  I must, as they note a few pages later, admit that any church which needs me to keep the people happy, any church which allows my vain attempt to be everything to everyone, such a church will destroy me.

Unless I am clear on the call and task of ecclesial leadership.

In short, it is time to redefine success.  It is not about numbers.  I know I always say that but the problem is that the megalith that is UK and US evangelicalism doesn’t tend to bear this out.  Whether or not we trumpet that numbers are irrelevant, you can’t get away from the fact that those church leaders being published these days tend to have large churches and plenty of groupies.  It’s all about platform, after all, right?  Platform of a megachurch, platform of one of those trendy top-ten Christian blogs, perhaps even the platform which comes with denominational seniority.  (And let’s be honest – you can’t blame the publishers really: in this market, they’re looking for sure sales and we’re the ones who buy those books!)  All of this tends to have the slow-drip effect into our brains that ministry success always means numerical growth.  And whilst I know that this is not always true, I hear it implied so often that I start to believe it.  Then I begin to get back on the bandwagon of meeting felt needs because that surely is how to grow the church…isn’t it?

It’s time for me to stop this.  For the sake of my survival in ministry, it’s time for me to get clear about the call and task of ecclesial leadership, to become serious about redefining success and to counter the advice of those older pastors (however much older they may be) and those popular writers (however many more followers they have than I)!

And I don’t suppose I’m going to like the answers I’ll come to.  I don’t suppose other leaders will like them either.  The way of the cross, the kingdom where death is the necessary precursor to success, perhaps even the death of a form of church as we know it and the related hemorrhage of people, perhaps even the people upon whom our identity as ecclesial leader might seem to have rested?! – such death is not exactly a selling point, eh?  I still quail internally at quite how I’m going to get some key people on board with me here; I can’t find a way to make this sound like fun!  But it’s time, friends; it’s time and this is burning within me, a call I cannot ignore.  If we want to survive, then it’s time to articulate the new way – or rather the old, old way in new language and thought forms – so that we do not resign ourselves, in the language of Hauerwas and Willimon, to being cult prostitutes selling our love for approval in a temple packed with individual consumers.

Steve Sjogren died on the operating table when supposedly simple surgery went massively wrong.  He had a near-death experience but then came back, to a world of pain and disability.  His old ways of understanding God were no longer enough and so he embarked on a long process of trying to make sense of his theology.

This book is the account of that: it details not so much about what Sjogren saw during his NDE but rather what he has learned through reflection upon that experience.  Parts of it are captivating; other parts held me less powerfully.  In all honesty, I would not buy it but read it happily enough not having paid for it!

I received a free copy of this e-book through the BookSneeze programme in return for a fair review.

Hilary Alan, Sent

This is the account of a very normal family who are living the American dream and who consider themselves to be committed Christians – until things begin to change as they start to hear God’s whisper of a different way.  In their 40s, Hilary and her husband consider a call to mission in an island in South-East Asia which was devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami.  Yet it is not just their lives which they are about to uproot.  It is also the lives of their children, aged 10 and 14, which will change forever.  Friends don’t understand what motivates them as they sell off all their possessions and prepare for a total change of cultures but this family decides to go anyway!  Told from Hilary’s perspective, this book recounts the story as it affects each family member, the spiritual opposition which they encountered along the way and the joys they experience as they follow God’s call.

I enjoyed this book very much.  It was an easy and engrossing read, which held my attention for the couple of hours which it took to read it.  If you like the stories of real people following their God, you will enjoy this one.

I received a free copy of this e-book from Waterbrook Multnomah in return for a fair review.