The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an intense experience. Like the characters in the story, I had to keep moving on through its devastation, to discover what there was for this father and his beloved son at the last.

The Road is set in a future where the earth has been engulfed by a holocaust – everything is burned. Living nature is dead; there are no plants, just their charred remains, and ash everywhere. There are no animals, there is no sunshine. The skies are permanently shrouded in cloud, and winter has gripped the planet.

A Secular Age

It has taken me a couple of years to work slowly through Charles Taylor’s massive tome A Secular Age, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the journey. It has been like a good fruit cake; eaten in small slices (mostly) but each piece rich and delicious. This will be not so much a review as an impression: the book is 776 pages long, with another 75 pages of notes at the end. Taylor is Canadian, now Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal after a long and distinguished career as a philosopher. He is also a believing Roman Catholic.

Taylor opens his book with the question, ‘What does it mean to say we live in a secular age?’ He is not going to give the kind of answer that some give – that is that to live in a secular age is to live in an age which has (rightly) outgrown religious belief and where more and more people have been freed (and will be freed) to live without the distortions that such illusions foist on us. He has the eyes to see that things are more complex than that.

The God Who Is There

I think Don Carson has written the book that I have been hoping to find for a while now. I have wanted a book to recommend to people who are not Christians but are looking for a substantial introduction to the Bible, written from a thoughtful Christian perspective, and that is not written for teenagers, Christians or academic students, but for the interested, capable general reader, who hopes to find the spirit of the Bible’s account of God and the world illuminated. It seems to me that The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story is the best offering in this sparsely populated category.

How People Change

This book by Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp from the Christian Counselling and Education Foundation (CCEF) caught my interest because it is focussed on this area of the Christian life I am interested in exploring and which I feel may often be neglected in my kind of churches (see my earlier review of You Can Change by Tim Chester). That area is the question of what change should the gospel bring to Christians and how can that change be pursued and experienced. If Christians’ lives are caught in the same patterns as their non-Christian neighbours then is Christianity just a promise about pie in the sky when you die by and by, rather than a putting off of an old life and a putting on of a new life? What then of the New Testament exhortations to do just this? What of the New Testament expectation that the lives of Christians would not be what they were or would otherwise have been (eg 1 Cor 6:9-11)?

Starting A New Church

Ralph Moore is a pastor, writer and church planter, founder of Hope Chapel Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, and other churches. Further, Moore has seen many other churches started out of his church plants, because he inculcates in his own apprentice leaders a philosophy of focussed leadership development through the local church. More than that, he aims to produce leaders who begin new churches which themselves raise up leaders who plant new churches – and so the dynamic of ministry multiplication is set in motion. Moore has not simply articulated this ideal – he has worked for it to happen in his own ministry.

Solar

When I saw that Ian McEwan had a new novel in the bookshops, I was very excited – he is one modern novelist I enjoy reading (see my earlier review of On Chesil Beach). McEwan has plunged into the world of scientists and in particular the issue of climate change, and he has produced an absorbing novel that I read quickly and reflected on for some time afterwards. As ever, McEwan’s real interest is human beings, especially their frailties and even deformities and uglinesses. And these are here in spades in this story that makes you wonder whether humanity really should survive any environmental catastophe that may be looming.

You Can Change

Christians say they believe in personal change, but how does this change happen? Willpower? Counselling? Letting go and letting God? Reading your Bible, going to church and saying your prayers? Can the process of personal change that being a Christian is supposed to involve be made more concrete, more explicit, more intelligible?  Can it be more consciously pursued, or is it just the indirect product of learning more Bible and theology? Tim Chester, of Total Church and The Crowded House fame, has written on a topic that appeals deeply to me, since as a Christian I am supposed to mature, and as a pastor I am supposed to help other people mature as Christians. The cover and contents pages of this book had me hoping for something detailed, thoughtful and practical on the topic.

The Trellis And The Vine

In this book, Colin Marshall and Tony Payne have sought to articulate a comprehensive and practical philosophy of Christian ministry, a philosophy that has underpinned the vigorous and productive ministries that have emerged from Sydney Anglican circles, and especially from the stables of Phillip Jensen. The names of Jensen, and Sydney Anglicans, are the objects of suspicion and derision, (hatred, even!) both inside and outside the churches, but these names also have many, many admirers, grateful for what they have received and learned through this school of Christian ministry. The Trellis And The Vine seeks to put the thought of that school in print and introduce it to a wider audience. The international collection of endorsements indicates the intention to reach a global evangelical audience with this book. And perhaps it would be no bad thing if they did.

Planting Missional Churches

Ed Stetzer has planted three churches, recruited, trained and coached church planters, and thought and written much (both in print and online) about church planting, particularly in the US context.  There are a host of enthusiastic endorsements of this book from various luminaries (headed by Leonard Sweet’s claim that, “Ed Stetzer has written the ‘killer app’ … for church planting”), so I headed into it hoping to be impressed; dazzled even.

The Persian Blanket

Tim Chappell (from St Matthew’s 5pm) has written a very engaging biography of the remarkable Janina Milek, a woman Tim has known and loved since his childhood, a woman who endured a testing series of displacements, beginning in Poland and ending in Perth, as she was driven along by the chaos of WWII. From extensive recorded conversations, Tim has set Janina’s story down in an engrossing first person narrative, which allows the reader to encounter Janina’s unique voice and perspective in his prose. From the intriguing map of Janina ‘s journey on page 6, through to the book’s wonderful close, this is a mighty story, lightly and lovingly told.