Category Archives: Book Review

Pagan Christianity?

27 Wednesday Feb 2008

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I recently read Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices by Frank Viola and George Barna. In case you haven’t heard anything about the book, Pagan Christianity? looks at many of the most taken for granted church practices in protestantism and argues that they come not from Scripture or the teachings of Jesus, but from pagan practices that were co-opted by Christians.

I found the book to be interesting, thought-provoking, and challenging. But I often got pretty frustrated with the basic premise that was, to me, applied too broadly and without nuance. To over simplify my understanding of the premise of the book: Anything that has become part of the practice of the church that did not come directly from Jesus and the New Testament is bad. (Like I said, I may be overstating it or oversimplifying the argument, but that is the best I can do in a nut shell.) Nevertheless, the authors make some excellent points about how much of what we do today in the church encourages a view of active clergy and passive laity. This is a huge problem!

In any case, I was intending to write a review of it in a week or two, in part in order to create the space to wrestle with some of the thoughts I had about the book as I read it. However, yesterday I read Dan Kimball’s review of Pagan Christianity, and it says what I would have tried to say much better than I would have said it. Kimball promises a second installment where he will post Viola’s response to the questions that Kimball raises at the end of the post. Kimball also references several other reviews in his post. If you have heard about Pagan Christianity? and you are interested in reading a review that is sympathetic yet critical, I would highly recommend this review.

For those of you who may have read this book, what are your thoughts about Pagan Christianity?

Good Readin’ Part 1

11 Monday Feb 2008

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I have been able to do a fair amount of reading lately, but I have not sat down and blogged about very many of the books I have read. So, this week I thought I would take the time to post brief reviews of a few of the books I have read lately. Today we will look at How Great a Flame: Contemporary Lessons from The Wesleyan Revival by James Logan.

How Great a Flame is a very quick read. The book is a smaller format than normal and is 96 pages. I read most of the book in one sitting. I have to say that I was a bit thrown by the Foreword, which was written by Rev. Karen Greenwaldt. Greenwaldt’s foreward made me think I was going to be reading a book that was very different than the one that I actually read. Her review on the back cover of the book has the same tenor as the forward, “James Logan offers a thought-provoking book that explores the interconnection between vital piety and social witness among those Christians who were part of the Wesleyan movement.” This would certainly be a worthwhile undertaking, but I did not find this to be a prominent focus of How Great a Flame.

Aside from the discrepancy that I found between the foreward and the book itself, I really enjoyed this book. Logan calls United Methodists to account a few times, like when he compares our desire for respectability, decency, and order to John Wesley’s. He writes, “But herein lies the difference between Wesley and us. It was ‘the cross’ he chose to bear, and the one which we leave to other churches and groups who don’t conform to our standards of decency and order” (16). Logan writes this in a discussion about field preaching, suggesting that Wesley was able to get out of his comfort zone in order to be faithful, while Methodists today are rarely willing to take these kinds of risks.

In the second chapter, Logan beautifully describes the distinctive features of the Wesleyan revival as: open-air preaching, the organizing of converts into two distinctive on-going structures, and the deployment of a two-tiered lay ministry (26). This chapter includes a wonderful description of the often gradual nature of conversion and how this related to the importance of sanctification. Logan connects the eclipse of the class meeting with the move toward altar call preaching aimed at instantaneous conversion. He writes, “With the eclipse of the class meeting, Methodists came more and more to accept and practice a truncated form of evangelism that focused exclusively upon a decisionistic, instantaneous conversion…. The eclipse of the class meeting marked a decided decline in the church’s sense of being a disciplined people. Without the class meeting the major structure for spiritual accountability was lost, and the church compromised its ecclesial identity, exchanging a missional consciousness for an institutional consciousness” (38).

In the final chapter Logan discusses some bad habits we have gotten into in relation to evangelism and then suggests some ways forward.

My main criticism of this book would be that it felt a bit unfinished. It may have been the point in which I stopped reading and then began reading again – but when I got to the last page, I was surprised it was over. It felt like more should be coming. Ultimately, that is at least a sign that he said many things that really resonated with me and I wanted to hear more.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a brief overview of Wesleyan distinctives, especially as they connect a Wesleyan understanding of grace, discipline, and Christian living to evangelism in the twenty-first century. I definitely found this book to be worth the read!

(Coming soon! Later this week we will look at Vital Signs: A Pathway to Congregational Wholeness by Dan R. Dick, Preaching as Testimony by Anna Carter Florence, and Deepening Your Effectiveness: Restructuring the Local Church for Life Transformation by Dan Glover and Claudia Lavy.)

Consumerism: The Major Threat to American Christianity

05 Tuesday Feb 2008

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Now I understand Matt’s enthusiasm for Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church. (Check out this post and this post that Matt wrote.) I may try to write a more organized review later, but for now I just need to tell you to go out and get this book if you haven’t already read it.

Sometimes you read something that you just need to go ahead and post. Hirsch’s thoughts about the threat consumerism poses to Christianity is one of those things:

  • “I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism” (106).
  • “Christianity has become a mere matter of private preference rather than that of public truth” (108).
  • “This is our missional context, and I’ve come to believe that in dealing with consumerism we are dealing with an exceedingly powerful enemy propagated by a very sophisticated media machine. This is our situation, but it is also our own personal condition – and it must be dealt with if we are going to be effective in the twenty-first century in the West” (109).
  • “I found out the hard way that if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will” (111).

This section just hit me pretty hard. Consumerism has become so much a part of our culture, even within the church, that we often don’t even recognize it. Hirsch encourages the Church to remember that “discipleship is all about adherence to Christ” (106). And that should impact everything we do, and how we do it.

Finally, please know that this is not the essence of this book. There is so much more, this is just something that really hit me as I was reading it and wanted to put it out there.

So, what are your thoughts? Is consumerism the major threat to American Christianity? Is Hirsch overreacting?

Vital Signs – Some Thoughts

04 Monday Feb 2008

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I just started reading Dan R. Dick’s Vital Signs: A Pathway to Congregational Wholeness. It is one of those books that as I am reading it, I keep thinking, I wish I had had this book when I started my first appointment. In Vital Signs churches are classified into four different types, decaying, dystrophic, retrogressive, and vital congregations. There is a diagnostic tool in the back of the book that is designed to help you identify where your congregations fits. The book is written based on research studying 717 different United Methodist congregations.

I just finished reading the chapter on Retrogressive Congregations. These are congregations that “are highly focused, highly stable congregations that are losing participants” (67). Churches usually only stay in this phase for a while and move from there to decaying or vital. They are retrogressive typically because the church has chosen to increase commitment and focus in a very specific way. This causes many people to leave, but those who stay are more committed than ever before. Thus, in retrogressive congregations the numbers are dropping, while more powerful ministry is happening than has ever previously occurred.

The main critique that Dick gives of these types of churches is that they often fail to balance acts of mercy with acts of piety, usually emphasizing acts of mercy and service at the expense of acts of piety. (Please understand that the point is not at all that acts of mercy are bad. Just that vitality comes from a blend of acts of mercy and acts of piety.)

A few interesting points of interest about retrogressive congregations:

  • Money and Giving: According to Dick’s research the average annual giving of a new member of a retrogressive congregation is $4,271 a year. In vital churches that number is $2,441, dystrophic – $1,487, and decaying – $1,156! That is an amazing difference.
  • Retrogressive congregation’s relationship to the connection: “There is no diplomatic way to describe the relationship of most retrogressive congregations to the connectional system: it’s bad. And where it isn’t bad, it’s worse” (87).

On the poor relationship with the connection Dick further writes:

The leaders of retrogressive churches deeply resent the fact that most connectional and conference leaders continue to measure inputs instead of outputs. Fifty people feeding one thousand hot meals a week is nowhere valued as highly as five hundred people feeding no one” (88).

That quote really brought me up short. Do you think this is true? What are the implications for the church and how we do business if it is true?

Reflections on Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Part 2

31 Thursday Jan 2008

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The clergy group that I am in met this week to continue our discussion of Bishop Robert Schnase’s Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations. In this post I will continue my reflection on the discussion we had from last week. (Last week’s post discussed the practice of “Radical hospitality.”)

My first comment is that I love that Bishop Schnase mentions in one of the side bars Meri Whitaker’s ministry at Canterbury Chapel in the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference. Meri Whitake happens to be one of the people are church intentionally supports as part of our efforts to be connected.

Second, I really reacted to this quote:

It’s amazing how good Christian folk vociferously and antagonistically resist launching a service they don’t plan to attend anyway! It’s not intended for them, and to sabotage the desire for worship of those who have different tastes is like unreasonable diners demanding that their favorite restaurant refuse to serve chicken to anyone, anytime, forever, because they prefer beef! (45)

I personally have not had to deal with that situation. But I have heard of far too many people who have. I have a good friend from seminary who was asked to preach at a new contemporary service that a church wanted to start. Even after a full year of that church bearing fruit through folks attending the service, the church still refused to support the service at all. They even refused to allow the money raised during the offering during the worship service to be used to support the basic needs of that service. My friend, who had been serving as a volunteer, was finally forced to realize that the church was not really interested in this service (even though it was being strongly attended!) and he had to step aside because he could no longer support it with his own resources.

Stories like that are probably easy for any of us to see as pretty ridiculous. But it is startling to realize that the people in that church did not see that they were doing anything wrong. I hope and pray I am not doing anything to quench the Spirit’s work in our worship service.

The final thought I had from this chapter was a sort of canary in the coal mine. “When a congregation loses touch with the purpose of worship, people come and go without receiving God” (37).

I think this is very difficult to measure as the pastor, at least on a week by week basis. But, I think far too many people come to worship today out of habit or out of a sense of obligation. I yearn for more and more congregations that have not just leadership that expects and desires passionate worship, but that have churches filled with people who have come expecting to encounter God’s holy and life-giving presence.

I would be blessed if you would share experiences or ways in which you have seen congregations move towards passionate worship. And of course, please share any other thoughts you have.

You can also read more at the “Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations blog.”

If You Could Only Read One Book on Methodism…

29 Tuesday Jan 2008

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I enjoyed yesterday’s discussion – If You Could Only Read One Book on Emergent – so much, I thought I would try again. This time I am just curious to hear what you would recommend in a different area. So, if you could have someone read only one book on Methodism what would it be?

There are a lot of different directions that you could go with this. Would it be a history of Methodism? A book on Methodist theology? A book on renewing Methodism? I am curious how you would choose from all of this, what would be the one book, and why.

I am going to actually obey my own rules this time, and only pick one book. Here is the one book I would recommend if I could have them read one book on Methodism:

  1. John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology, edited by Albert C. Outler and Richard P. Heitzenrater. I would recommend this because I believe this is the best one volume book that would give someone a solid grasp of Methodist theology as well as insight into the passion and zeal that Wesley and the early Methodists had for becoming deeply committed Christians who relied upon God’s grace to enable them to have a relationship with God and to grow in it. My one hesitation is that it is not the most readable book, as it is Wesley’s own sermons in that good olde English. But I am going with this book, because my premise is that I am recommending a book that the person I recommend it to will read.

So, what would you recommend?

If You Could Only Read One Book on Emergent…

28 Monday Jan 2008

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Bart asked a great question in a recent post about They Like Jesus But Not the Church. His question was: If you only had time to read book on “emergent” what would it be?

I wanted to answer this question as a separate post because I am hoping more of you will notice the discussion and contribute your ideas. So, what one book would you recommend on emergent if you could only recommend one?

I am going to immediately break my own rule, because I can see a few different ways of coming at this. So here is the one book I would recommend if you wanted to learn more about emergent but you only had time to read one book:

  1. They Like Jesus But Not the Church by Dan Kimball. I think this books is just a great book, so I want everyone to read it. But I think it also lets you inside Dan Kimball’s heart. It lets you see why the whole emergent conversation matters. I have to confess that this book doesn’t really explicitly deal with emergent at all, so if you are trying to learn about what emerging folks believe, etc., this is not the one book you should read about emergent. But it should be the one book you read to learn about how to better love people who are outside of the church.
  2. A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. My perception is that this is one of the books that really started to gain attention and build momentum for the emerging church movement. This books describes a conversation between a pastor who is close to burnout and someone who helps him rediscover his calling. I have to be honest and say that most of the books I have read like this were somewhat frustrating for me because I wanted them to be a little more concrete. I much preferred McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy and The Secret Message of Jesus.

So that is my .02. I am sure that there are other folks out there who have an opinion. What one book about emergent would you recommend if you could only recommend one book?

You can also find more resources at Emergent Village, Dan Kimball’s website, or Brian McLaren’s website.

Reflections on Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Part 1

23 Wednesday Jan 2008

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The clergy group that I am a part of met yesterday to begin our discussion of Bishop Schnase’s book Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations. I thought I would try to blog my way through the book the day after our discussion. Here is what I learned from the first chapter on “The Practice of Radical Hospitality.

The first thing I learned from this chapter is that radical hospitality is about loving people as Christ loves them, not about perfecting a technique for making people want to come to your church. What really hit me as I read this chapter is the difference between reaching out because we need new people to come to our church, or reaching out because we really believe that we have something to offer that will bless others.

Because this is a clergy group, I guess I found myself thinking about hospitality as it relates to the way clergy act around each other and the way that clergy treat new comers. I had a few general thoughts in this area:

  1. Some of the most uncomfortable experiences I have had in ministry have been at clergy meetings. It is not that people are rude to me, it is just that I am ignored. I went to seminary in Washington DC, straight out of college. So when I came back to the Oklahoma Conference, I basically knew two pastors and the names of a handful of others. The group I am in now is really helping, but I hated going to Annual Conference and the orders meeting and Board of Ordained Ministry retreats because I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t know how to break into the groups of people that seemed to just form all around me.
  2. This got me thinking about another thing I noticed (maybe this is more of a rant) at our recent orders meeting. We had a catered lunch which was very nice. Lunch was served on throw away plates and plastic ware. There were large trash cans at every exit. Yet, I noticed that when we left most tables had dirty plates all over them. There seemed to just be this assumption that someone will come clean up after me. What got me is that all they had to do was pick up their own plate and put it in the trash can they had to walk by anyway. How’s that for servant leadership?
  3. One more thing about inhospitable pastors: I remember a friend in seminary commenting that pastors (meaning the other seminarians we were around) were the worst listeners she had ever been around. I think she is pretty close to right. Isn’t that ironic? We are supposed to tend to others souls, but much of the time we are too busy talking to listen.
  4. Finally, there is so much talk about the need for young clergy. But, do the people calling out for young clergy ever carefully think about how inhospitable the appointment process is for young clergy? Most people who go to seminary straight from college are full-time students who do not start pastoring until they graduate from seminary. That means that most of them live around younger people, go to a church that has a lot of younger people, and most seminaries are in a large city. Which one of these characteristics is typical of the first appointment that young clergy usually receive? But we are surprised that more young people aren’t lining up to go into ministry. It reminded me of another great quote from Five Practices, “Too many churches want more young people as long as they act like old people” (27).

This may sound shrill or too harsh. That is not my intent. I just think we can do better. My point is, if pastors are to play a leading role in helping their congregations practice radical hospitality, we may need to work on fostering a culture of radical hospitality at the conference level. We may need to learn how to really love and care for one another first. I am blessed to have a wonderful sign of hope in the clergy group I am a part of, because I believe we are really doing that.

Here are two great quotes that really stimulated my thinking for this chapter:

  1. “Jesus says, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25:35). ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:40). We would change our behaviors toward strangers if we lived as if we really believed this!” (13)
  2. “Every member of the Body of Christ is the fruit of someone’s ministry and faithfulness. Who is the fruit of yours?” (31)

I know whose ministry I am the fruit of: Dallas Griffin, Steve, Shalom Rener, Scott Meier, Phil Fenn, Doug Strong, Scott Kisker, Sondra Wheeler, Amy McCullough, David Evans, David Gilland, to name a few. Thank you to each of you for the role that you have played in my life. I have been blessed by your ministry.

One of the hard things about hospitality is that it is probably much easier to see whose hospitality changed our lives than it is to see whose lives were changed by our hospitality. Are there people whose lives you have been able to see change because of your ministry? Whose ministry are you the fruit of? Have you told them the impact that they had on your life?

They Like Jesus But Not the Church, Following Up

22 Tuesday Jan 2008

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I do not have the time to write a thorough review of Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus But Not the Church. But since I mentioned starting the book in a previous post, I wanted to briefly follow up.

The short version is that the book was every bit as good as I hoped it would be. The book is very readable and flows more like a conversation than a lecture or a technical discussion. The basic organization is that it gives some thoughts about why it should matter to Christians that non-Christians like Jesus, but not the church. The second part of the book discusses in more depth what it is about the church that they don’t like. Kimball does this in a helpful way that respects both those who don’t like the church and those who are in the church. The final part of the book discusses what we can/should do about it. You really sense Kimball’s heart here. I think if he could get you to do one thing as a result of reading his book, it would be that you would commit to getting to know people who are outside of the church. Listening to their stories, befriending them, and praying for them.

If you have discovered that you have become trapped in the Christian bubble, this book will help you plan your escape. I highly recommend it.