Category: Books

Stephen Ellis’s book The Mask of Anarchy is a fascinating exploration of the little known history of the Liberian civil war. From 1989 to 1997 war raged across Liberia in West Africa, fuelled by child soldiers wearing women’s clothing and wigs for “spiritual protection”, while high on marijuana and cane juice. The war was characterised by mindless brutality, relentless looting, and constant quests for greater power provided by spiritual forces, such as through tearing out and eating the hearts of conquered warriors.

The book provides important insights into the causes of violence and war, and it provides a well-researched source of information. However, the content is at times repetitive and some of the author’s opinions are puzzling. For example, he seems to consider it politically incorrect to talk about cannibalism, but it is fine to talk about human sacrifice. Both practices have been engaged in extensively by those seeking to obtain power from the spiritual world.

The civil war essentially ended when the most powerful of the warlords, Charles Taylor, defeated the others, thereby obtaining a monopoly on violence and looting. In 1997 he was elected apparently legitimately (the people didn’t want him to keep fighting for power), but the war started up again in 2000. Taylor is now on trial for war crimes, and the country is trying to recover from the devastation of the past 25 years.

Michael Frost’s strength of character and personality shines through each page of his book, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture. Michael isn’t afraid of offending anyone, and he boldly takes on the contemporary church, blog writers, and even some of the finest Christian musicians of our time including Matt Redman and Steve Fee.

Michael is a great story-teller, and the book is full of stories about life on the edge as a beer-drinking crowd-defying follower of Jesus. Most of the stories are effective in calling us back to a truer reflection of the lifestyle of Christ. However, Michael’s story-telling style requires him to display extensive details about his subjects, and his ruminations in the fields of economics and corporations could have benefitted from more detailed research.

What Michael has to say is important and deserves to be heard. Nonetheless, in my view it does not present a complete picture, and the critiques which it presents are for the most part more convincing than the tentative suggestions which it makes. If you want some original insights into what’s wrong with the church, read the book; if you want to know how to fix the problems, look elsewhere.

In the proud tradition of The Prayer of Jabez and other books which make much of obscure Old Testament references, comes In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day, a book by National Community Church leader Mark Batterson. Mark is an extreme blogger, and he leads a remarkable church community meeting in cinemas and running Ebenezer’s Coffee House, the largest cafe on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.

Using the story of Benaiah, one of King David’s mighty men, as a starting point, Mark’s book is an engaging and challenging exhortation for followers of Jesus to seize with great courage the opportunities which life presents. We are called not to run away from obstacles and challenges, but to use them as a source of opportunities, and take risks to reach for God’s best. The more we grow, the bigger God should get, and the smaller life’s problems become.

According to Mark, you have to be willing to look foolish in the world’s eyes. Spiritual maturity is about caring less and less what people think of you and more and more about what God thinks of you. Everybody ends up chasing something in life. Why settle for chasing something less, when God has created you to chase lions?

My new book, The Global Christian Adventure, is back from the printer. It tells some of my story, and it aims to give an overview of some important and often-overlooked aspects of following Jesus in the 21^st Century. There are chapters on different cultures, how the gospel spreads, poverty, Islam, atheism, understanding and influencing our own culture, and the new global rules of engagement.

It seems to me that, in spite of the ready availability of virtually limitless information on the Internet, Christians who live in the West typically fail to understand and appreciate how the rest of the world lives. Ironically, as people become wealthier and more powerful, with more access to information, they tend to become more insular and more ignorant of the realities of the world.

The book is an attempt to address some of these blind spots, and to encourage followers of Jesus to seek radically different goals for their lives. The message of Jesus is hard to discover in a world of cheeseburgers and non-stop television. It’s much easier to discover when you understand that the vast majority of people in the world are very different from yourself, and that Jesus calls you to a dangerous life serving and befriending some of those people.

I recently read on someone’s blog (unfortunately I can’t remember whose) that the book Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation was the most influential book in the blogger’s life. I was intrigued by that statement, but wasn’t going to do anything about it until I found that a scanned copy of the book could be downloaded from the Internet for free. I couldn’t argue with the cost, so I read the book.

The author E Stanley Jones, who was a close friend of Gandhi, is a bit too fulsome in his praise for my liking, but he manages to capture some remarkable details about Gandhi’s life when he says (page 8), “I kneel at the feet of Christ and give him my full and final allegiance. And yet a little man, who fought a system in the framework of which I stand, has taught me more of the spirit of Christ than perhaps any other man in East or West.”

What would a Christian lifestyle look like today if someone really took Jesus seriously? It would surely involve living modestly, serving the poor, and fighting against the forces of oppression, but using love and not violence as a weapon. Gandhi, although not a Christian, took Jesus’s teachings seriously and used non-violent resistance and unfailing politeness as his main weapons in achieving independence for India, refusing to retaliate for the violence, derision and persecution which he suffered.

I haven’t found Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways to be easy to read. I’ve found it disturbing, irritating, uncomfortable and thought-provoking. One of the things that Alan says is that the missional church needs to have liminality and communitas. Liminality involves being on the marginal edge, possibly but not necessarily in a position involving danger and disorientation. Communitas means the sort of relationships formed through shared ordeals.

No longer can the church hide safely inside buildings in the confident expectation that people will come to it. No longer can church be something which affects only the Sunday mornings in a believer’s life. Church needs to be reincarnated as something in the community all day every day. The holy huddle of comfortable fellowship needs to be replaced by the sort of friendships which can only arise when comrades risk all in pursuit of a vital purpose.

Something that I’m not sure about is whether Alan is right when he seems to imply that the new missional approach needs to be done by smaller bands in informal settings. In my own experience, smaller missional groups have not been as effective as larger groups. Alan is right in suggesting that the larger the group is, the more difficulty you have in deploying the talents of all members fully; but it seems to me that the smaller the group is, the more trouble you have in finding people with gifts and talents sufficient to create momentum.

I have been talking a bit about church planting this week, so it’s appropriate to review one of the most interesting books around which relates to starting new churches – Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch, by Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas. The authors of this very practical book are senior pastor and teaching pastor of The Journey Church in New York, a church which was launched in 2002.

Searcy and Kerrick advocate ‘launching’ a church, rather than planting. Planting is slow and painful work. Launching involves starting as big as possible as soon as possible. The model of launching which they advocate is not likely to win the approval of ‘postmodern’ or ‘emerging church’ practitioners. It’s a more conventional style of church, not specifically designed to reach people who are furthest from God. Prior to the ‘launch’, the authors recommend holding a few monthly ‘preview’ services to build up numbers. There is certainly much to be said for the credibility and momentum which comes from having a sizeable congregation right from the start.

There are plenty of other features to enjoy about the book. One of the best is some of the unconventional reviews: ‘This book will help you grow a great church like Willow Creek or Saddleback. Only with less people and far less impact.’ ‘Just like Andy Stanley without the intelligent ideas or clear presentation.’

One of the embarrassing things about Christian books is that there aren’t very many of them that I feel comfortable giving to friends who aren’t “members of the club”. Nearly all Christian books assume that the reader holds particular moral positions and beliefs, and understands Christian jargon. Books that don’t have this failing often seem to assume that the reader has the intelligence and vocabulary of an 8-year-old, or that the reader finds reading polemic to be a helpful way of reaching an informed decision.

One book which avoids any of these failings, and which I am not embarrassed to give to my friends, is Soul Cravings: An Exploration of the Human Spirit, by Erwin McManus. In a series of “entries”, the book explores and interprets our cravings for intimacy, meaning and destiny, and shows how they point to the existence of God and our need for him.

Topics covered include “The elusive nature of love”, “Do you know who you are?”, “Destiny calling”, “Believing in the future takes faith”, “Making sense of this mess”, and “Just follow the signs”. Erwin says, “I don’t know how to prove God to you. I can only hope to guide you to a place where you and God might meet.”

One word strikes fear into the heart of many people: evangelism. It stresses out people who feel that they’re obliged to do it, and it alienates people to whom it is done: the hard sell of the gospel. In Galatians, Paul talks about the offense of the cross, but does this really mean that Christians are called to be offensive in the name of Jesus?

One of the best books I have read about evangelism is A.K.A. “Lost” by Jim Henderson, also published under the alternative title Evangelism Without Additives. The book talks about simple ways of listening to people, praying for them, and being generous, which can be practised without embarrassment. Jim’s website is also well worth a visit.

Not everyone is given the gift of evangelism, but every follower of Christ is called to make friends with unbelievers, let them know that you follow Jesus, humbly live a lifestyle which is distinctively and transparently Christian, accept invitations to participate in your friends’ lives, and where the opportunity arises invite your unbelieving friends into your life and into your church.

According to the way most people think about it, poverty is a problem caused by lack of money. The answer is simple: teach people who are poor how to make money. If they don’t have enough money it must be because they’re not smart enough to make it, so they need to listen to us while we give them the solution. That isn’t a very fair characterisation of foreign aid, but there are often overtones of superiority in the way aid is provided.

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York State University, explains why foreign aid has been so unsuccessful in his book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. According to Easterly, there are two types of foreign aid workers: Planners and Searchers. Planners keep coming up with utopian plans which don’t work, whereas Searchers keep looking for small ways to make a positive difference. Unfortunately, the aid world is dominated by Planners.

Easterly’s views are quite controversial, and they are obviously unpopular with the people who bear the brunt of his criticism. It is very difficult in this argument to know who is right, but judging from the responses of bloggers to his ideas, Easterly’s ideas are getting the upper hand. The book is a very entertaining and thought-provoking read, one of the best that I have read this year.