Go here to see the full list, but these would be my three favorites:
Erwin McManus On Faith and Fear
I have been very slowly working through Uprising by Erwin McManus because I keep reading other books. This is not meant as a slight to Mr. McManus. In fact, I think I keep finding other things to read because Erwin challenges me too deeply. To wit, from today’s reading:
We are seldom afraid when our opposition is smaller than us. When we keep our challenges manageable, we not only manage our fear, but squelch our faith. One way to deal with our fears is to surround ourselves with security and predictability. We may look courageous when in fact all we’ve done is minimize our risk. Whenever God calls us to something, it inspires not only faith, but also fear. God always summons us to something bigger than ourselves. When he calls us to battle, the opposition will always be greater than the strength we have.
There Are No Atheists; Or, Everybody Worships
Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
These are the words of David Foster Wallace, an author I somehow had not heard about until his untimely, recent death. Infinite Tragedy is now on my ever-lengthening to-read list.
The above quote was copied from Purple State of Mind, the blog of Craig Detweiler.
Pop Goes the Church, Tim Stevens
Pop Goes the Church makes the case for the wise and effective use of popular culture within a church service. Stevens does not approach the subject lightly, nor does he speak from an academic or merely hypothetical point of view. As Executive Pastor at Granger Community Church in Granger, Illinois, Stevens speaks from years of seeing his opinions put into effective practice.
Television, movies, music, the internet: these are the means of communication in the 21st century, the way in which we (especially in America) learn the greater narrative of our times. It is mass media that entertains us while simultaneously telling us who we are and what we value.
As the church has had to adjust to the printing press and every other major technological innovation of the last 2,000 years, so to must today’s church. It would seem that the church has chosen both the path of most resistance and the path of least resistance. Most traditional churches err on the side of maintaining the Christian bubble, wary of the needles of pop culture that threaten to burst what must be a fragile faith in the first place. On the other hand, hipper-than-thou churches err on the side of accommodation, sacrificing substance for style in the name of the trend, the fad, and the holy most, otherwise known as a popularity contest.
Stevens pleads the case for the wise use of the culture around us to create welcoming and familiar places of entry into a church service for those that would otherwise be disinclined to step foot into a place of worship. Citing more than a few biblical instances, including Paul’s speech at the Aeropagus regarding worship of an unknown god and Jesus’ use of stories (parables) relevant to his culture, Stevens devotes half of the book to the theoretical underpinning of his belief. Fortunately, for those that don’t know what such a church service could look like, Stevens then uses the last half of the book to give concrete examples of how such positive use of popular culture has worked in American churches.
As a seemingly lifelong church service attender, I appreciate the changes Stevens proposes. Instead of escaping the culture, boycotting the culture, or diving headlong into culture, I agree with the notion that we, as the church, should be engaged with the culture, as long as the end result is life change.
“Stay alert. This is hazardous work I’m assigning you. You’re going to be like sheep running through a wolf pack, so don’t call attention to yourselves. Be as cunning as a snake, inoffensive as a dove.” - Matthew 10:16, The Message
www.popgoesthechurch.com - the book’s site
www.leadingsmart.com - the author’s blog
The Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde
MOTS (More of the Same, see Lost in a Good Book). Unlike movies, there are more book series that maintain interest and become more inventive over time and their various sequels. Fforde’s Lost Plots contines the story of Literary Detective Thursday Next as she now inhabits the Book World. I loved the way Fforde equated updating books as if it were software. Of course, there’s a vast conspiracy in the Book World to keep the upgrade on schedule…until Thursday Next catches wind of it.
Who’s Your Caddy (Audiobook), Rick Reilly
Very funny book by sportswriter (and Leatherheads scribe) Rick Reilly who tries to answer that eternal question - what’s it like to be a caddy? With stories about looping for John Daly, David Duval, Donald Trump, a blind golfer, and others, Caddy is quite humorous, a little ribald, and wholly entertaining.
Simple Church, Thom S. Rainer & Eric Geiger
A book written based on the assumption and corresponding research that complexity in churches is not beneficial to the life of the church. Paring down to the basics (see Google’s search page vs. Yahoo’s search page) and focusing everything about the church on a few principles seems to make churches grow better (i.e. deeper). These principles are three-fold: loving God, loving others, loving the world. Seems easy enough, but putting it into practice in a complex organization full of ministers doing “good works” is much more difficult.
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A.J. Jacobs
More like 4.5 stars. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As a near-lifelong Christian, this book was eye-opening. An agnostic, liberal-leaning, New York City-based, Jewish editor of Esquire attempts to follow all the rules of the Bible. His fresh eyes, insightful mind, and open heart reveal the often dueling claims of both the Old and New Testament, showing both the beauty and the flaws of being a literalist. Fortunately, his year-long venture provides more than just intellectual fodder; it engages his life, transforms his worldview, and connects him with a religious and familial history he otherwise took for granted. I’d recommend this work to anyone, but especially to “lifelong” Christians that could use a fresh take on the Word of God.
[P.S. A few weeks after this post, I found out a friend of mine was actually quoted in this book from an article he'd posted online years ago regarding Alcohol and the Bible.]
Dave Barry’s History of the Millenium (Audiobook), Dave Barry
More like 2.5 stars. I probably shouldn’t count this as a read book since I listened to it, but either way, it’s an easy listen/read, as are most of Barry’s works. But he knows funny, and hyperbole, and brilliance disguised as ignorance. Who wouldn’t want Dave Barry to be their history teacher? Still, after reading Big Trouble and Tricky Business, I’d recommend his fiction over his non-fiction.
I Call the Shots, Johnny Miller
Only for golf fans, of which I am one. Johnny, current NBC broadcaster and former PGA prodigy, shares his views on a number of things relating to golf, from why Tiger won’t bypass Nicklaus’ 18 majors (to which I wholeheartedly disagree), to his ruminations on course design, his dream team, and what the future may hold. Written in 2004, it’s amazing, even then, how much Tiger Woods
changes the tone of the book. Tiger is the exception to every rule, the behemoth that casts his shadow into every facet of the game.
