Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you had a great time celebrating what God has done and looking forward to what God is going to do.
Last Sunday I had the privilege of speaking to our church. The Sermon was called, “Called to Exile”. You can listen to it here.
Over the break I finished up two books that were kind of related to each other. First I finished up unChristian, by Dave Kinnamon and Gabe Lyons. This is a very interesting and insightful look at the way 16-29 year-old outsiders view the Church. This book is really quite eye-opening. But I wouldn’t say that I found it surprising. I found myself agreeing with outsiders on a lot of the issues that were addressed.
The second book that I finished was Everything Must Change, by Brian McLaren. McLaren is the Emergent Church leader de facto. He has an ever evolving liberal view of faith, Jesus, the Church, so he is a little troubling to read. He makes me angry on a lot of issues, but at the same time he brings issues to light that really should be addressed. Everything Must Change intends to show that the Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t just about salvation from sin, but it’s really a salvation that should effect and transform every aspect of human life. He is very much an idealist, but he writes with great hope that Christians would not wait for heaven to come to try to make this world a better place.
I found myself agreeing with a lot of what McLaren was saying, he does a good job of showing how revolutionary Jesus really was, and the fact that Jesus didn’t play the same game with the same rules as his counterparts. Jesus was introducing a new set of rules that went counter to the system (or as McLaren calls it story). Very intersting stuff.
If you want to wrestle this is a good book to get you thinking and wrestling. You don’t have to agree with everything McLaren says to take some good nuggets of wisdom away from it.
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