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Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk by Dale & Jonalyn Fincher

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Coffee Shop ConversationsCoffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk
By Dale & Jonalyn Fincher
Audio Book
Rating: 7 of 10

The book I was really wanting to read was God Space: Naturally Creating Room for Spiritual Conversations by Doug Pollock.  I had gone to a workshop by him—the best evangelistic workshop I have ever attended—and wanted to review the material by listening to his book.  The only problem was that his book wasn’t in an audio format. What I found instead was the Fincher’s Coffee Shop Conversations.

The most helpful section of the Fincher’s book for me was “Part I: Making Spiritual Small Talk.”  They describe a method for getting into spiritual conversations.  Their method is very similar to Pollock’s: ask a lot of questions and be sincerely interested in the person and their answers.  There are no gimmicks here, just simple and plain care and compassion.  I’ve been attempting to do this more and more myself.  I have a tendency to ignore the people who serve me, like waitresses, baristas, cashiers, etc.  I also tend to ignore the people who are just milling around me, like the people standing in line next to me.  I can sit on a five-hour plane ride and not talk to the person next to me.  Lately, I’m attempting to break these bad habits, not so much for evangelistic reasons, but just to be a more friendly and caring person.  Coffee Shop Conversations helped give me some new direction on how to do so more effectively.

Finchers

Dale & Jonalyn Fincher

The rest of the book is more of an apologetic book.  “Apologetics” is not an apology, but a defense of a particular idea.  The word is not specifically Christian.  You could have a Republican apologist or a Democratic apologist or a Starbucks apologist or a Biggby apologist.  The Finchers do a good job covering the current landscape of our culture and the issues it has with Christianity.  I tend not to have as much of a problem with this aspect of spiritual conversations, but others who stay out of spiritual conversations because they fear getting asked questions that they can’t answer will find the Finchers provide considerable help in navigating the ups and downs of our culture’s biases for and against Christianity.  I found two or three chapters particularly helpful in this regard.  They encourage not judging something by its abuses (this is not particular to Christianity and could be said about other religions, politics, careers, etc.), watching out for red herrings (i.e. distractions in conversations that tend to derail the conversation from the main topic: Jesus), and not making mountains out of molehills (i.e. allowing for faithful Christians to disagree on some topics like evolution, drinking, homosexuality, etc.).  I also found their discussion of genre (the style or category of something) in the Bible particularly intriguing.  Sometimes both Christians and non-Christians quote the Bible out of context and create obstacles to following Jesus that need not be there.  After listening to some of their interpretations of particular Bible passages, I realized I too was guilty of this at times!

The average person will find this book helpful and stretching.  The Finchers have written a book that is intellectually sound but also engaging to the common Joe.  Having these kinds of coffee shop conversations—whether in the coffee shop, on campus, in the pub, at work, or elsewhere—is something that our own church needs to get better at cultivating.  The Finchers help us to that end.

Current Reading
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
All My Holy Mountain (Book 5 in The Binding of the Blade Series) by L.B. Graham
Shaped by God’s Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches by Milfred Minatrea

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Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performance from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin

November 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Talent Is OverratedTalent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performance from Everybody Else
By Geoff Colvin
Rating: 8 of 10

Colvin, Fortune Magazine’s Senior Editor-at-Large, argues in Talent is Overrated that if there is an in-born talent in geniuses and high-performers, it has not yet been found, and an easier explanation for world-class performance is a very long process of deliberate practice.

Colvin explores several different case studies, but let’s review just one: Mozart, an assumed musical genius.  Mozart was born to a father who was a famous composer and performer, but even more important his father was an expert in musical pedagogy (the art of teaching a subject or discipline).  Mozart’s early compositions are not in his own hand.  His father exercised editorial control over his son’s work and had a keen sense for marketing Mozart.  His compositions during his teenage years are mostly adaptations of other works, a common strategy for teaching composition.  Colvin notes that none of these early works are today considered masterpieces, and Mozart’s first masterpiece didn’t come until the age of twenty-one, after eighteen years of “extremely hard, expert training.”  Colvin adds that Mozart’s supposed claim to see or hear an “almost finished and complete” work in his mind comes from a letter that scholars now consider a forgery.  Based on today’s “precocity index,” a score that describes how fast a “child-prodigy” progresses, Mozart was at a mere 130%, 30% faster than the average student; whereas with the help of today’s training methods, children reach 300-500%.   According to Colvin, Mozart was good, but not as good as we might imagine.  He goes on to explore in similar ways Tiger Woods, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett among others.

In two key chapters titled “What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t” and “How Deliberate Practice Works,” Colvin outlines the path to exceptional performance through deliberate practice.  Here are the key points:

  1. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance.  It is designed not by the individual doing the practice (unless they have reached the highest levels of performance and are themselves an expert) but by someone who is an expert on the huge field of knowledge that surrounds any given discipline and can pinpoint specific activities of practice in the “learning zone.”  Mozart’s father’s expertise in musical pedagogy is an example.  Or to put it more simply, who is your expert coach?
  2. Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot.  This repetition isn’t just doing the same thing over and over.  It’s doing a particularly hard specific activity pinpointed by a coach in the “learning zone” over and over.
  3. Feedback on results is continuously available.  Measurement is key.  Seeing whether you are accomplishing what you are aiming to accomplish is essential.
  4. Deliberate practice is highly demanding mentally.  This is the difference between mindless practice of easy things and deliberate focus on the tasks that are difficult and mentally challenging.
  5. Deliberate practice isn’t much fun.  Practice, get feedback, and look at what isn’t going well.  Then repeat the aspect that isn’t going well again and again until it is done right.  This kind of practice is focused on what you probably don’t like doing.

Those who engage in deliberate practice end up with several new skills:

  1. They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don’t even notice.
  2. They look further ahead.
  3. They know more from seeing less.
  4. They make finer discriminations than average performers.

Throughout the whole book Colvin points out just how much time deliberate practice takes.  Therefore, if someone wants to be a top-level performer, but only makes that decision later in life, the obstacles are almost insurmountable to have the time to achieve top-level performance.  Their peers who began as children are already thousands of hours ahead of them.  Perhaps this fits well with an idea that Marcus Buckingham, another well-known business consultant, often makes: it is unlikely that we will improve our weakness so we ought to focus instead on our strengths (See The One Thing You Need to Know which makes the argument that they key to sustained success is to find out what you don’t like doing and stop doing it!).

The most obvious application for pastors is in the weekly sermon.  Having an expert communication coach would improve a pastor’s communication skills significantly.  Another idea might be repeating over and over (until “mental exhaustion” as Colvin suggests) one or two parts of the sermon that you really wanted to communicate well instead of the sermon as a whole.  Some less obvious applications would be having an overall leadership coach (Path1 provides just such coaches).  Running through team meeting agendas ahead of time with a coach could be a way of practicing deliberately.

Because I am reviewing this book for our New Church Committee I’d also like to make some observations about how Colvin’s ideas might help us in our big-picture strategy to plant churches and in a new church pastor’s individual strategy to plant a specific church.

New Church Committee

  1. Who is our expert coach giving us continual feedback on our church-planting process?  Our committee has attended the School for Congregational Development, but maybe it would be worth investing in a coach for the committee or the committee chair.
  2. Our own process of planting a church is much slower so how can we take a particular part of the process and repeat it a lot?  We could do that by choosing a particular part of the process and then sitting in on several other conferences’ moments of performing that part of the process (i.e. watch other conferences evaluate prospective candidates).
  3. Benchmarks will be key to continual feedback on results.
  4. For us to do this well, it will be mentally challenging.  Our commitment to planting churches can’t be a side commitment.  It will have to be a full commitment of body, mind, and spirit.  Perhaps members of the committee need to make sure they protect their time commitments so that they have plenty of energy to devote to this mentally challenging task (i.e. being available to attend things like SCD, Church Planting 101, etc.).
  5. We’ve just gone through a couple of processes that weren’t very much fun.  Colvin’s admonition that deliberate practice isn’t much fun should encourage us.  We worked on some areas that we were failing.  That’s part of learning how to do church planting well.

New Church Pastor

  1. An effective new church pastor is probably going to be one that has grown up practicing specific skills that are required to plant a new church.  It is unlikely, according to Colvin, that you can start late in life at acquiring the necessary skills and be very successful at what you are attempting.  This might mean that they grew up or have spent significant time in the culture of a new church.  It also might mean that they have a record of growing or planting churches in the past (or as we have heard over and over again in various settings – a record of having the creativity to start all kinds of new things).
  2. For those who began early, having an expert coach who directs them in specific practices will be key to the success of their church plant.  This coach must be an expert in the field and perhaps even more so, an expert in the pedagogy of coaching and training new church pastors.
  3. Introducing future potential pastors (middle and high school students) and young new pastors early on in their calling to new church ideas and skills will yield more “high-performers” later in life.  Could we create a new church academy specifically for this population or invite middle and high school students to attend a new church academy?

Questions and Conclusion

I have several questions that I must ask about how to integrate Colvin’s ideas with various Christian beliefs.  Over and over again he takes shots at the “divine gift” idea of talent.  Colvin’s ideas are based in research and science.  If excellent performance is mostly the result of a natural training process, then how are we to understand spiritual gifts?  Are spiritual gifts divine aptitudes given by God or are they “divine” results of a lifetime of training?  Our Wesleyan theology of sanctification suggests that we grow both naturally and supernaturally through a process of training the mind and body in certain habits and practices that are means of God’s grace working in our lives.  Are Colvin’s ideas simply an extension of the “natural” side of our theology of sanctification, or do they lack something vital because they discount the idea that God can supernaturally give gifts to specific people whether they have had the right amount of practice or not?  I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I think they are questions we must wrestle with if we are to fully embrace Colvin’s ideas and methodology.

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Ignite: How to Spark Immediate Growth in your Church by Nelson Searcy

November 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

IgniteIgnite: How to Spark Immediate Growth in your Church
By Nelson Searcy
Rating: 7 of 10

Searcy is easy to hate.  Three emails a day selling you all kinds of things that will immediately make your church huge and successful tends toward the spam side of things.  One fellow pastor said he fears that Searcy “prostitutes himself for Jesus”!  The only problem with ignoring Searcy (he makes it pretty hard that you can’t) is that he’s got some really good ideas.  One of them is the basic system described in Ignite.

Searcy is a pastor out of Saddleback who moved to New York to plant a church.  He was originally a computer programmer.  This training causes him to think like a programmer when it comes to church leadership.  He writes a program (he calls them “systems”), runs the program, and then checks for bugs.  If the program isn’t as successful as he would like, then he writes another one.  He has developed around seven key systems that he thinks every church needs.  One of those systems is the evangelism or marketing system.  That’s what this book describes.

The basic framework of the Ignite system is a series of four big Sundays every year.  Searcy says that they should be in October (September is still too early), February (January is too close to the holidays), Easter (obvious), and then one in the summer.  Interestingly he jumps over Christmas.  Maybe Christmas needs no help to be big.  The idea is to try to put such an emphasis on these four Sundays/series that each big Sunday is bigger than all the rest before it.  There will then be a natural attrition until the next big Sunday, but hopefully it won’t drop below where it was before the past big Sunday.

There are several things about this basic system that I find helpful.  First, I appreciate the tweak of moving a big Sunday away from the day after Labor Day in September and using September to build for October.  It is almost impossible to build momentum in August for anything in September.  It is easier to build momentum in September for something big in October.  The same is true of January and February.

Second, I appreciate the ability to push hard, then rest and breath.  It’s not that you ignore invitation during the other Sundays, you just don’t push it as hard.  I found this helpful in terms of pacing.  You can’t always sprint as a community.  This is an interval training method.

My critique of Searcy is that he promises too much.  His propensity for marketing sets you up to think that you can “spark immediate growth in your church.”  Well, yes, you can.  But no you can’t.  We did almost everything he said in his book (except that we already had our big Sunday planned in September), and we didn’t have one guest on that Sunday.  But Searcy is teaching me how to think like a programmer.  We’ll tweak the system and run it again next fall in October rather than September hopefully with better results.  In the mean time, we’re gearing up for Christmas and a big Sunday in February.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris
Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk by Dale and Jonalyn Fincher

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Three Novels

November 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Original Sin: A Sally Sin Adventure
By Beth McMullen
5 of 10

I picked this book up off the new bookshelf in the library entirely because of the title.  I am heading into a sermon series on sin, and thought this might be a fun way to engage the topic.  The fun was there sometimes, but the topic was almost entirely missing.

McMullen tells the story of a mom who used to be a spy, code-named Sally Sin, and who finds her previous espionage adventures intruding on her new life with a husband and three-year-old.  This is really a chick-lit novel, and a mom with a toddler would probably find it funnier than I did.  Although I did find it humorous when the villain regularly shows up and is unable to follow the old scripts because a three-year-old is in the room.

My one big complaint about this book is that if you’re going to give a book a theological title, it seems to me that you should at least do a cursory study of what the phrase means and somehow include that in the plot.  Original sin is the theological idea that we all are unable not to sin.  Our will is bent in on itself.  I would imagine that the hero or the villain of a novel titled Original Sin would either win or lose based on someone’s inability to not mess up.  But what seems to happen is that Sally Sin always wins in spite of herself (perhaps a subtle nod to grace).  She’s not incompetent.  She’s actually very competent.  But her villain is always one step ahead of her, and she often finds herself kidnapped by him and then released by him.

I’m probably expecting too much from this book.  Or maybe I’m missing the something subtle that McMullen is doing.  The average person most likely won’t have the same motivation for reading this book as I did and will probably enjoy it much more than I did.

Pompeii
By Robert Harris
6 of 10

I was so enthralled with the first novel, Imperium, I read by Robert Harris that I had to read more, especially more of his ancient Rome historical fiction.  Imperium was so good that it was inevitable that whatever I read next wouldn’t live up to it.

The plot of Pompeii is fairly obvious: a city is buried by a volcanic eruption.  Harris manages to tell a tale of intrigue, corruption, and romance in the couple of days leading up the catastrophic event.  There were a couple of good twists and turns, but nothing like Cicero’s ability to use rhetoric, or the art of speech, to outmaneuver disaster.  Of course, I am someone who must use his voice and language skills every week to preach!

Caleb’s Crossing
By Geraldine Brooks
6 of 10

Geraldine Brooks supposedly wrote a historical novel about the first Native Americans to attend Harvard, but I think this was really a novel about a young woman, Bethia, who grew up alongside those natives.  Brooks does an excellent job describing the culture of the early settlements and how it was stacked against certain groups like women and natives.  Bethia shows more academic progress than her older brother simply by overhearing their father teach him lessons, but because she is a woman, she is not given the same opportunities to learn.  She becomes a pawn moved around for the benefit of the men in her life.  There is a particularly difficult moment when she is required to publically confess to the church the disrespect she showed her brother, which was mostly just telling the truth about him.  It makes me glad to be living in a more merciful and graceful church.

If I have one quibble it is this.  The tricky part in writing historical fiction is not allowing modern sensibilities to enter into the characters.  Overall Brooks has done a good job at keeping the characters in the 1600s, but at times Bethia sounds more like a modern woman than a woman from the seventeenth century.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris

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Recreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age By Richard L. Hamm

November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Recreating the ChurchRecreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age
By Richard L. Hamm
Library
Rating: 8 of 10

Recreating the Church is the first book assigned for the West Michigan Conference’s Vital Church Initiative (VCI) pilot project.  VCI is an attempt to adapt what has been successful in the Missouri conference at stopping decline in church attendance.  The basic structure of VCI includes two phases each lasting about one year.  Phase one includes a group of pastors and another group of laity (non-pastors) from the same church reading a series of books and meeting for training and mutual accountability.  Phase two begins with a church-wide consultation resulting in a prescription for change and vitality.  The prescription is either adopted or rejected by the church.  If it is adopted the church is assigned a coach to help implement the changes.  It’s a pretty simple design, and I am excited at the potential for it in our conference and also in our church.  Hamm provides the pastors and laity involved in VCI a very helpful and broad overview of why and how things must change in this postmodern age.

Hamm offers 1968 as the pivotal year where things start going downhill for most mainline denominations.  Hamm is not a United Methodist, but it is worth noting that 1968 was the year that the United Methodist Church was born in the merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren.  Perhaps that year we were busy rearranging chairs on the sinking titanic.  Hamm points out that today mainline denominations have “lost even the appearance of success.”  We are too busy trying to survive by maintaining a dying system.  We must seek not just technical change to the system (replacing one leader or structure with another), but adaptive change of the entire system itself (rethinking our method completely).

There is too much in the book to summarize it all, so I will focus on one point that Hamm makes that I found particularly helpful.  I often hear an argument that goes something like this: our call in life is to be faithful and let God deal with the growth or decline.  This argument is persuasive because it has a kernel of truth in it.  But Hamm points out the problem in this argument over the past fifty years.  The entire paragraph is worth quoting:

A fourth reason [that mainline leaders did not notice the shift from modern leadership to postmodern leadership], found among some mainline church leaders, was an attitude that viewed the decreases as a sign that the denominations were paying the “price of faithfulness.”  That is, some mainline church leaders and governing bodies (especially in national settings) had taken unpopular stands in regard to such issues as racism and the Vietnam War, and so some concluded that a lot of contributing members just couldn’t take the “heat” of the “truth.”  This was a self-serving, but understandable interpretation.  If we had done statistical analyses of who was still attending, however, we would have found that the losses were primarily among the young, not the old (who were the primary contributors and would have been more likely to leave than would the young when traditional values were challenged).

Ouch!  I hear the same argument today around issues like homosexuality and politics and religion.  Hamm’s insightful analysis of what has taken place in the past fifty years suggests that today something bigger is going on with the continued decline of mainline denominations than just “taking the heat” for progressive stances on divisive issues.  (This is not to suggest that mainline denominations ought not to take “progressive” stances on these issues, but that we ought not to use those stances as an excuse or justification for decline.)

One solution Hamm suggests is that leadership teams must become smaller and less “representative.”  He doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be diverse, but that they shouldn’t necessarily be made up of a representative from every ministry in the denomination or church.  That approach tends to lead to territorialism rather than broad dynamic leadership of the church as a whole.  I’m glad to say that our Annual Conference passed legislation last year that accomplished just that.  We are beginning to see the fruit of that smaller leadership team as our Annual Conference begins to focus its strategy around ministries like the Vital Church Initiative.  Hamm helps us to continue to see the way forward.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Original Sin:  A Sally Sin Adventure by Beth McMullen
Pompeii (A Novel) by Robert Harris
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris

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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman

October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Good Man JesusThe Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
By Phillip Pullman
Library
Rating: 5 of 10

This book was picked for our Agnostic Pub Group as a change of pace from C.S. Lewis.  Pullman is at least an agnostic and at most an atheist.  Pullman’s book is an interesting attempt to explore “how stories become stories.”  The basic plot line is that Jesus has a twin brother named Christ.  The two grow up alongside one another, and as adults, Jesus becomes prominent in the public eye and Christ recedes into the background.  Christ begins to follow Jesus around and record what Jesus does.  Along the way Christ meets a “stranger” who encourages him “to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor.  What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was” (emphasis is Pullman’s).  So Christ embellishes the story because “without miracles, without a church, without a scripture, the power of [Jesus’] words and his deeds will be like water poured into the sand.”  In the end, Jesus is crucified, and Christ steps in to provide the resurrection.

Throughout this book I was reminded of two historical/theological debates.  The first is an attempt to make a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  This position tends to hold that Jesus did not claim much about himself and was a wandering prophet or social critic.  Thus, claims about Jesus’ divinity were developed in the early history of the church.  This fundamental assertion lies at the base of Pullman’s story.

The second debate that comes to mind is Albert Schwitzer’s critique of the search for the historical Jesus.  Schwitzer claimed that portraits of a historical Jesus always end up looking like the individuals writing them.  Ironically, Schwitzer went on to write a “historical” portrait of Jesus that scholars now think looks a lot like Schwitzer himself!  Thus, the distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” tends to break down as one attempts to tease the two apart.

Pullman attempts to separate the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith by introducing a very fanciful plot device: the two were really twins.  Pullman is not attempting to say that there really were twins named Jesus and Christ.  The plot device is simply an experiment in exploring how a religion might move from history to faith.  The problem with this exploration is that it requires such a fantastically non-historical plot device to accomplish it that one is left wondering how the “story became a story” without the plot device: twins.  If Jesus didn’t have a twin named Christ, then how did Jesus really end up being claimed to have been God’s son?  Pullman really hasn’t helped the agnostic/atheist imagination see how the “historical Jesus” ended up becoming the “Christ of faith.”

While I didn’t find Pullman’s plot device particularly compelling, I did find his critique of the church compelling.  Pullman rewrites Jesus prayer from John 17.  In this prayer, Jesus is full of doubt and barely believes that God exists, or if God does exist, then God probably doesn’t listen.  So Jesus prays, “Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, powerless, and modest.  That it should wield no authority except that of love.  That it should never cast anyone out.  That it should own no property and make no laws.  That it should never condemn, but only forgive.”  The prayer continues in a similar direction.  Pullman really does provide a compelling vision for what a church might or could be.  I don’t agree with everything in this prayer, but the church has unfortunately used its power and authority in abusive and destructive ways.  It is the church’s lack of providing a truly loving community that makes books like The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ possible.  It is important for the church to listen to the prophetic voice of God speaking through those outside the church who critique her.  At times Pullman provides that voice in this book.

Note: Our Agnostic Pub Group is beginning a new book—The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University—on October 20th.  We meet on the 1st and 3rd Thursday at 7PM at Soup Spoon Café (a kind of coffee house/pub).  Join us for great discussion and brew.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Recreating the Church by Richard Hamm
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin

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The Girl Who…by Steig Larsson

September 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Girl Who Played with Fire and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Steig Larsson
Audio Book
Library (Audio/Book)
Rating 7 of 10

 

A review of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, can be found here.

 

Steig Larsson has written an impressive and gripping trilogy about a government conspiracy to cover up a Swedish espionage agency’s abuse of a young girl, Lisbeth Salendar’s, rights.  This story is ultimately about, as Blomkvist, the key journalist who uncovers the story, says “the violence perpetrated against women and the men who do it.”

While the novel is a page turner (or driveway listener as the case may be), I found myself wrestling with parts of what I was listening to throughout books.  The violence perpetrated against women is at times hard to hear described.  I also found that the scenes of consensual sex were a bit overblown at times.  Ironically, while Blomkvist declares that the story is about the violence perpetrated against women and the men who do it” and he spends the entire book trying to uncover that abuse and expose it, he causes a kind of subtle violence against women (and men) by sleeping around with almost every woman in the story and hurting most of them.  Casual and recreational sex without commitment abound.

By the end of the book all the women with whom Blomkvist sleeps seem to end up hurt (or potentially hurt) by his lack of commitment to one of them.  Lisbeth fell in love with him and was hurt by his relationship with Erika Berger.  Erika is the woman with whom Blomkvist’s affair destroyed his marriage and who now openly continues the affair with the consent of her husband.  Erika finds herself feeling empty at the prospect of Blomkvist falling in love with Monica Figuerola, a police officer who comes on the scene at the end of the story and who and falls for Blomkvist and he for her.  Then there’s Harriet Vanger and Cecelia Vanger, both of whom end up in Blomkvist’s bed in the first book.  What’s going on here?!  Blomkvist’s sister, the lawyer who defends Lisbeth, sums up her brother’s sex life when she claims that it is disrespectful of all the women with whom he sleeps.  This kind of promiscuous sex isn’t nearly as violent as rape, but as much as we try to separate sex from commitment, this separation is a kind of subtle violence against the heart of both men and women.

Larson is a master storyteller, and the tale that he spins is amazing.  Because I was listening to it as an audio book, I found myself looking forward to or extending my next car ride.  I did wonder whether Larson ends up doing a disservice to women who experience violence by couching the story within such a fanciful plot.  Because the violence done to Lisbeth is done by a Russian spy defected to Sweden and a super secret section within the Swedish espionage department, it is a little too easy to toss off the implications as far fetched as well.   How many women are haunted by defected Russian spies?  How man women are beaten down by a government conspiracy?  Probably not many.  But many women are beaten by their husbands as they go about their average life.  If Larsson ultimately wanted to help women who are abused, he might have done better to take his amazing story-telling skills and turn them toward the average suburban household.  But that probably wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Recreating the Church by Richard Hamm

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Selling Swimsuits in the Arctic by Adam Hamilton

August 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Selling Swimsuits in the ArticSelling Swimsuits in the Arctic
By Adam Hamilton
Library (Book)
Rating: 7 of 10

This short little book attempts to look at the ministry of the church through the lens of sales.  This is both a helpful and unhelpful exercise.  It is helpful because it provides many practical tips on how to be more effective in “selling” one’s church.  It is unhelpful because the gospel is not something to be bought or sold and using the language of sales can subtly change what we think the gospel is all about and how we live into it.

Hamilton, pastor of Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City region, is pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the United States.  This book describes some of the methods that he and his team have used to build Church of the Resurrection.  The book follows a fictional story of a swimsuit salesman who moves to Alaska and attempts to continue selling swimsuits.  There are a lot of bumps along the way, and in the end, he has to reach deeper into his company’s mission and change the end product of what he sells and how he sells it.  Hamilton compares this change to the change that needs to take place in the church today.  We have been attempting to sell something to people in a package they don’t need, but if we reach deeper into our mission, we will change the package but retain the mission.

One critique I have of this approach is that by borrowing the language of sales, Hamilton introduces unintentional and subtle changes to the mission of the church.  The language of sales brings with it a lot of baggage of consumerism.  A “good” salesperson helps someone find a “need” that they didn’t know they “needed.”  The problem is that it is rarely ever a “need” but rather a “want.”  As I contemplated this problem, I wondered if there wasn’t some other kind of language that accomplished the same thing, but carried with it less baggage.  I wondered if the language of “ambassador” could accomplish the same things.  An ambassador is a salesperson of sorts, but a kind of sales that doesn’t include consumerism.  An ambassador is attempting to “sell” someone on the truth of what the king says.  Ambassadors are relational, very skilled and could teach the church considerably about how to approach the broader community and speak in a language that will be heard and grasped.

Despite my critique of the “sales” approach, I think this little book is a must read for most churches.  God’s work through Hamilton and Church of the Resurrection shouldn’t be ignored.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy

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Recovering the Satellites

August 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Call & Response

Congregationalists are becoming connectionalists.

I’m a little behind in my reading, but supposedly, I’ve just read in Dave and Jon Ferguson’s book, “Exponential,” the story of how their church became one of the first churches in the United States to be “one church in multiple locations.”

Read more…

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Call & Response

Love Wins By Rob Bell

August 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Love Wins

Love Wins
By Rob Bell
Library (Book/Audio)
Rating: 6 of 10

I think I gave this book a rating of 6 of 10 because it’s really only half a book.  There is so much white space on the pages, that I feel like I mostly read a pamphlet and not an actual book.  I find Bell an incredibly gifted and exceedingly compelling communicator and preacher and a not very good writer.  I have wept powerfully and uncontrollably several times listening to Bell preach.  I have never wept while reading his books.  This is not to say that I find nothing helpful in this or other books of his.  Perhaps my expectations are too high, but something is missing, and I can’t put my finger on it.  Enough about style…let’s get to the content.

Bell offers a vision for heaven and hell that doesn’t fit in any box I have been given growing up in Evangelicalism.  He most certainly leans toward a universalism at the most and an inclusivism at the least, but I was taught growing up that these views always ended up with a less than orthodox Christology, or belief in Jesus.  The reading that I did while in college complemented this view.  John Hick, a classic “Protestant liberal” universalist (every way is a different path up the same mountain), has written of The Myth of God Incarnate.  Jesus really wasn’t God. He was just a really great teacher and model who had a uniquely powerful connection to God.  Then there’s the issue of God’s very own self.  Bishop John Shelby Spong, the controversial Episcopalian bishop, declares that we need to give up a theistic view of God as personal in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.  These are the end points, I was taught, for universalism.

But Bell ends somewhere else: an “exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity” (155).  For Bell, Jesus is everything I have been taught about him growing up.  He is as the Nicene Creed states: “The only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”  Bell holds an orthodox view of Jesus while at the same time being very optimistic about the salvation of others.  This is an intriguing theological mix and one that Bell is not the first to hold in Christian history, as he makes sure we know (107).  For Bell, salvation has less to do with entrance and more to do with joyful participation (179).  This sounds very much like Wesley’s view of salvation when he says in his sermon The Scripture Way of Salvation:

First, let us inquire, What is salvation? The salvation which is here spoken of is not what is frequently understood by that word, the going to heaven, eternal happiness…it is a present thing; a blessing which, through the free mercy of God, ye are now in possession of. Nay, the words may be rendered, and that with equal propriety, “Ye have been saved”: so that the salvation which is here spoken of might be extended to the entire work of God, from the first dawning of grace in the soul, till it is consummated in glory.

On this point, Wesley sounds a lot like Bell and Bell sounds a lot like Wesley.

On the flip side of things Bell says that “hell is our refusal to trust God’s retelling of our story” (170), and so we live in agony right now like the older son in the parable of the prodigal son who sees his father as a slave master demanding obedience or the younger son who wanders from his father’s love and must ask himself the question of whether he can again be his father’s son.  This parable (and others) leads Bell to see heaven and hell not as some separate place but more as a state of being which intermingle with one another.  Hell is the older brother being at the party, heaven, but unwilling to participate.

My major critique of Bell is that he has drawn a classic either/or scenario.  It seems that for Bell heaven and hell are either separate places or intermingling places.  I don’t know why they can’t be essentially both things.  I think C.S. Lewis offers a more powerful vision of hell in his book The Great Divorce.  In this classic book we see Lewis describing hell as a place that someone chooses both to become and to dwell.  The more that they choose this place, the further they move from heaven.  There is a kind of gray area in between where shallow hell and shallow heaven are something of a purgatory, and these places touch by way of a daily bus ride between the two.  The further one gets into heaven, the more impossible it becomes for them to enter into hell and vice versa.  In his introduction to The Great Divorce, Lewis rightly points out that this is fiction and ought not be taken as doctrine, but fiction has a way of helping the imagination as it ponders doctrine.  While The Great Divorce has clearly influenced Bell, Lewis does with fiction what Bell is not able to do with nonfiction: hold both a state of being and a place of being in creative tension with one another.  The old adage is true: it’s not either/or but both/and.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Exponential by Dave and Jon Ferguson
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy

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