Book Review: Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me

I first heard Ian Morgan Cron, the author of Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me, read from this book at International Arts Movement‘s Encounter 11. The story about his father’s car seat falling through the floor on the way to breakfast was hilarious, and he his reading and inflection were amiable. I remembered really enjoying the reading.

But I passed over the book at the bookstore’s tables (I bought Supper of the Lamb instead).

Then Ed Cyzewski sent the book to me and it sat on the pile for a while, but I recently dug into it.

I find it difficult to critique memoirs. If I do not like one, what am I supposed to say? The person’s life is boring or has a poor plot?

One thing is for sure, Mr. Cron’s life was not boring.

While I sometimes found Mr. Cron’s humorous similes or metaphors a bit on the lame side and too tongue-in-cheek (I might just be too cynical and sarcastic!), he approaches his life with a crystal clear reflection that is startling. For someone who had a life so affected by alcoholism and family issues the memoir is quite well-adjusted. It does not grovel in sensational stories of abandonment or shock the reader with tantalizing family secrets. Cron’s writing is refreshingly matter-of-fact.

This matter-of-factness is the foundation of the book, and the depth of Cron’s story of redemption, could be missed if the reader chooses to not read between the lines. The spiritual journey that encapsulates Cron’s entire life is not forced or contrived. It does not follow the conventional Protestant plot of altar calls and dramatic conversions. The story Cron shares in his memoir is a gradual journey which—while not as riveting as a thrillingly repentant and weeping conversion might be—is far more accurate to how most people’s spiritual lives operate.

There is profound wisdom in this book. It is not in pithy one liners or sappy drama. It is in the journey. If you read between the lines, the spiritual journey of Cron from childhood to adolescence and then adulthood comes alive and begins to intersect with your own. And for me, that is what can set apart a memoir from the others: the ability to use biography to breathe fresh life into the reader and to sit alongside them and commiserate.

Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me: A Memoir…of Sorts
Ian Morgan Cron
Thomas Nelson
$10.37 (Book Depository)

The Paraclete Book of Hospitality

Short, sweet and pithy, The Paraclete Book of Hospitality is an excellent resource for any one interested in hospitality, whether you are wondering what Christian hospitality is or your friends call you the Christian Martha Stewart.

The Paraclete Book of Hospitality is compiled from a selection of quotes and stories, mostly pulled from Paraclete’s catalog of titles and first person tales of hospitality from Paraclete Press staff. Paraclete has the rare distinction of being both a publishing house and a retreat center, so the editorial staff literally eats, sleeps and breathes the Christian virtue of hospitality.

This book reminds me of the Very Short Introduction series that Oxford University Press has published for the last several years. The book, at a pocket-sized 108 pages, is a quick read (it took me about two hours). The title strikes a great balance between scriptural and theological discussions about hospitality and primary accounts of how hospitality has made the difference in a person’s life. The many stories of simple acts of hospitality breaking through the barriers in people’s lives and letting the love of Christ burst through are particularly poignant and touching, even poetic. Following the examples of hospitality in the Rule of St. Benedict, the book takes the reader on a tour through what makes Christian hospitality such a truly radical act of love, selflessness and compassion in a world that does not hold to those Kingdom ideals.

I heartily recommend this title to all, whether you are just starting to think about incorporating hospitality into your home life or you are a seasoned pro. This book is especially suited to churches that are trying to incorporate missional practices into their community life: the text is chock full of practical examples of making hospitality an integral part of your faith community.

The Paraclete Book of Hospitality
The Editors of Paraclete Press
Paraclete Press
$12.99 (Paraclete)

The Illumined Heart

Picking up on the conversation about being in charge of your own spirituality, one of the books that keeps coming to mind for me is Frederica Mathewes-Green’s The Illumined Heart: Capture the Vibrant Faith of the Ancient Christians. In this short, pocket sized  book Frederica uses realistic accounts of ancient Christian’s lives to illustrate the power and focus of ancient Christianity, and how it is sometimes so different than ours. Mathewes-Green makes it clear that she is not putting forth any new five step plan for spirituality or her own spin on an ancient concept. She is just a vessel for repeating the wisdom handed down by our Christian forefathers and foremothers, as she writes, “I hope not to say anything original. If I do, ignore it.”

The best example of this is the sheer fact that two whole chapters of the book are dedicated to returning to a pattern of repentance. Mathewes-Green is no poser: when she wants us to capture the spirituality of ancient Christians she really means it.

Community was a big deal for ancient Christians. Thankfully, it is becoming a big deal again through the use of small groups and other communal ways of organizing the modern church. We still have a long way to go in terms of understanding why we are gathering together. For many of us, myself included, I too often treat small groups like a communal experience: I am gathering together to experience something with other people, like going to the movies or a concert. We share what is going on in our lives and pray for each other, but we seldom take ownership of each other’s spirituality and actually journey together through spiritual darkness or common struggles. Lent and Advent are great teaching moments for our communities to learn how to do the heavy lifting of faith together, and Mathewes-Green spends the majority of the book going over the ways that worship, action and prayer can bind a church community together. Speaking about church communities, she writes:

In communities, at work, and particularly in families, people are put together in something like a three legged race. God means us to cross the finish line together, and all the other people tied together with us play some part in our progress. They are there often times to rouse our stubborn sins to the surface, where we can deal with them and overcome them—striking them in the head and the chest, as St. Theophan says. (84)

It is hard in our culture to let others play a part in our progress. We are taught in school and in old westerns that a rugged individual can do anything if he just puts his mind to it. What Christ calls us to is different. It’s a togetherness, a sharing of our responsibilities with one another. We are all brothers and sisters, sharpening each other into the persons God has called us to be.

The Illumined Heart: Capture the Vibrant Faith of the Ancient Christians
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Paraclete Press
$9.69 (Book Depository)

The Art of Curating Worship

A book that has me absolutely brimming with ideas is Mark Pierson’s The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader. This book speaks directly to how worship can be a means of discipleship for a community and the needs of artists within their faith communities to grow and thrive.

It’s not often I feel like I read a book that confirms my dreams like this one does. When people have asked me how I envision a future role in full-time ministry I tell them I want to be a worship pastor. This is often met with puzzled looks.

I don’t play guitar.

I don’t sing melody.

How could I be a worship pastor?

To me, the point of being a worship pastor is to shepherd (pastor) people in worship, in a holistic sense. Just like preachers don’t accomplish their whole job in a half hour on a Sunday morning, why is it expected that a worship pastor’s sole focus is a four song music set on Sunday morning. Quite frankly, why do churches have full-time job roles for that? A worship pastor should lead and disciple people in worship.

To me, that means helping people in prayer, Scripture reading, music, serving others, discipling others, cooking, cleaning, painting, writing, etc. If we want to take seriously that all work should be worship, then the worship pastor should be uniting people’s vocation with their spiritual disciplines to bring glory to God in all we do.

This book speaks to that sentiment. Focused on doing stations based worship on Sunday mornings along with “guerilla worship” (doing worship events in the larger community, like art installations), this book shows that the role of the worship leader is to facilitate the  faith community’s participation in worship by utilizing individual talents to create art and bring glory to God. In its pages you will find dozens of examples, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, of how worship leaders are curating worship installations that allow God to speak to people through all of their senses. It is a view of worship as immersion—a setting aside of time to be immersed in the depth of the human condition and how God speaks to this depth.

I know I am not alone. I had a good friend lament to me a couple of months ago about how she set up an art event at her church and only one person showed up. This book is for people like us, who struggle with how to lead worship in a holistic way that connects with your diverse faith community and disciples people in their strengths and vocations.

The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader
Mark Pierson
Sparkhouse Press
$15.92  (Amazon)

Book Review: Light for the Journey

Christine Sine’s prayer book Light for the Journey: Morning and Evening Prayers for Living Into God’s World is a wonderfully comprehensive companion to prayer. More adaptable to group prayer than personal prayer, Sine’s book is full of rich litanies for mornings and evenings each day of the week. The litanies, readings and prayers are well developed and thematic, presenting a challenging focus as you go about your day.

The best feature of the book is Sine’s thought provoking “tasks” for the day that follow the morning and evening prayers. These questions and suggestions for further thought and action encourage an attitude of unceasing prayer, and they made me notice how even when developing a rule of prayer how fleeting our minds can be and how often we can forget the purpose of prayer to indwell our whole day. Sine has crafted a prayer book that pushes the reader into living out the prayers, and that is probably the best praise a prayer book can be given.

Light for the Journey
Christine Sine
Buy it from Mustard Seed Associates, $18.00 (includes S&H)
Your purchase will support the work of Mustard Seed Associates

Erasing Hell: A Rational Response to Rob Bell

There has recently been a flurry of publishing pushing back against Rob Bell’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Francis Chan’s book Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and what we made up, Mark Galli’s book God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins, the book of essays Is Hell Real or Does Everyone Go To Heaven?, Brian Jones’s Hell Is Real (But I Hate to Admit It), and Michael Wittmer’s Christ Alone: An Evangelical Response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins are all responses to Bell. Bell has created a cottage industry overnight.

So what should a proper response be to a book that has caused such fury, disdain, contemplation, confusing and rebuttal? Francis Chan delivers a healthy, rational response to Bell in his book. Chan’s book is a concise overlook of conservative evangelical theology on hell with a surprising openness to mystery concerning the afterlife. Chan takes a different route than typical response books, which is appropriate in responding to a book that is as contemplative as Bell’s. He keeps away from explicit dismissal for the most part, there are a few in there that would have become heady and might have bogged the conversation down. He also keeps away from gross over-generalizations of Bell, though he does sweep him up into an oversimplified discussion of universalism at the beginning of the book.

Chan’s response to characterizations of Bell is actually pretty weak. He tries not to be academic and ends up glossing over nuances of Bell’s conversation. A response to the aura of criticism around Bell should not be tucked into a few paragraphs and a bunch of footnotes.

On the other hand, Chan’s response to the questions and assumptions Bell makes is solid. The best chapter in the book is Chan’s outline of first-century Jewish thought on hell, something that is very valid to the conversation and completely absent from Bell’s work, which does not help Bell’s work stand up to any historical or critical scrutiny (the excuse that Bell’s work is pastoral and not academic may not be able to hold up to the weight of Chan’s use of Dunn and Wright’s methods of exploring first-century Judaism).

The book does start out a bit fluffy, but the more Chan gets away from the aura surrounding Bell and how one should respond the stronger the book becomes. Additionally, Chan sets a great tone in the last chapters by trying to set down an apologetic for a conservative evangelical theology of hell while appreciating and realizing the severe limitations anyone has when discussing the afterlife. Chan tries to work with the Scriptures as best he can without reading Protestant theology into the text, though in places Chan does make some connections between judgment and hell that are not anywhere in the context of the gospels, epistles and Revelation. He should be commended for the effort.

In short, Chan’s book is a rational response to Bell because he keeps the dismissals and generalizations to a minimum and presents a solid argument while allowing for God to be judge and not humankind.

Erasing Hell
Francis Chan & Preston Sprinkle
David C. Cook
$8.99 (Amazon)