I finished a book I hated and here's why...

I finished a book I hated yesterday. Now, just to clarify, it wasn't a book I hated because it challenged me or struck a nerve that revealed the need for painful, but necessary change. It was a book I hated for all the wrong reasons.

While the book carried a pretty impressive list of endorsements, I found the author (a pastor of a large church) to be arrogant in much of his delivery and ill reasoned and contradictory at times. There were sections of the book that I found myself agreeing with, but they were completely overwhelmed by charicatures of those with differing viewpoints and complete misrepresentation on certain topics. The book was incredibly divisive and cast all but a narrow portion of the Body of Christ as being completely off the rails in their view of the Gospel and the work of God in the world. The arrogance which was expressed in dismissing any sort of a dialogue with anyone representing any other perspective was frustrating to say the least.

No, I will not share the name of the book or the author who wrote it. That would not be the point of why I bring it up. I quite nearly threw the book across the room in its final pages though, so you might say that the temptation to rant about the particulars of the book is extremely high.

So why am I writing about my reaction to the aforementioned, unnamed book? Partly to vent, partly to encourage people to read critically, and partly to challenge people to read things that they may not necessarily agree with.

In a culture where our access to everyone else's opinion on books, movies, music and any other form of expression makes it easy to simply rely on their opinions rather than to form our own, I see a great need for us to actively engage in stretching our critical muscles and develop our discernment in very deliberate ways which, in this case, led me to finish a book that I disagreed with more often than not. In doing so I gave myself the opportunity to critically consider a differing viewpoint, but more importantly, I gave myself the opportunity to clarify why I believe what I believe.

Prayer focus

Here's a prayer focus that I sent out to our staff at Embrace today. If it connects for you in your faith community, feel free to share it, adapt it, and pray it. -Matt

 Jesus, we pray today that your name would be always on our lips, your Spirit would be evidenced in our interactions with those around us, and that your love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control would be the very things that people would use to describe us as we become more and more like you. God, we pray that you would give us faithful hearts to pray for the same in the lives of those you have called us to serve and that you would release something in the heart of Embrace that we haven't experienced yet and haven't even thought to ask for. That in doing so you would spill out of our lives all over our families, our communities, and anywhere else that you would choose to send us to do your transforming work in this world. Be praised in all, through all, and by all. Amen