Review of “Jim & Casper Go to Church” by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper.

The church staff has just finished reading this book, a few weeks ago I think, and like many of the books I read, this one was recommended to me by several of them. Usually I’ll grab a used copy of whatever book they’ve recently read from the bookshelf where someone has discarded it, but this time, I couldn’t find one so I borrowed Wilson’s. It has his name in the front cover and some notes and highlights here and there. The interesting thing is that I obviously got something different from it than he did because of the things he highlights and the notes he wrote. I considered using a different highlighter and highlighting my own stuff, but I decided I was too lazy to find one.

This book is about a guy and his atheist visiting churches. Jim actually has at times paid people to come to church and gotten their opinions about what to do better, and it becomes glaringly obvious in the first chapter that what Christians think attracts non-believers is actually the thing that they may dislike the most. It ends up being a tickle me Elmo show, preaching to the choir. Elmo is meant to be tickled; it doesn’t really help anyone or accomplish anything. Coincidentally, the first church they visit is Saddleback, and Casper’s reviews are the most telling. He says things that all Christians know but choose to ignore because they like it how it is or because it’s comfortable. I’ve read the Purpose Driven Life book, and it taught me a few things, but like Casper says, where’s the call to action? We talk about our faith being lived out in our works, but besides not breaking the rules, where does that leave us? It leaves us doing nothing bad, but also nothing good.

As I continued reading, Casper’s words often struck me much more than Jim’s did. He was very straightforward and honest, not hiding things, not beating around the bush, very blunt, like me. He saw through all the B. S. and whitewash that we regular churchgoers just accept as normal and don’t even notice. It brought to my mind the prayers that pastors and others pray before and after the sermon, or at other places in the service. They sound so fake. They sound like an extension of the sermon, if the sermon was about King David, surely the prayer would mention something that we should do, either like him or not like him. Where’s the honesty? If I am ever asked to deliver a message, forget you congregationers, I’m gonna be prayin’ for me. “Oh Lord, help me not to crap my pants or wet myself or sweat through my shirt up in here, stretch forth your mighty hand and keep me from saying something really stupid.” Not something worthless like “Thank you Lord for the example of [Bible character] [doing something/not doing something], let us [have/not have] the [trait] [like/not like] [him/her].”

One of Casper’s most common references was to the lack of a charge to do something, or the lack of hearing what others were doing. I agree with this wholeheartedly. My favorite church memories are of missionaries and others sharing their stories, the things they have done, the things done to them, the miracles they have seen or experienced. I love to read what others do to change the world, not just Mother Theresa or Shane Claiborne, but even non-Christians like Gandhi or even Ed Begley Jr. You see, the heart of Evangelicalism is action, and that’s why politicians can’t get things done, they can be pro environment and preach all day long, but they will never get people to change like say J. Matthew Sleeth can because he actually lives what he preaches. He, Mother Theresa and Ed Begley actually made sacrifices in their lives to match what they believe. Who would ever think of a real live movie star riding a bicycle to the set because he doesn’t believe that the best way to get there is a car. I want to know what the faithful are doing in Honduras, East Asia, Albania, and wherever else they are because that will give me an idea of what I can do. Because following Jesus is not simply about believing something. If I am believing that I am following someone down the road, but not actually moving, then I am not actually following am I? I believe the way to get people to do things is to ask them to do things. Why do kids slave and work to their limit and get yelled at by a football coach? They sure aren’t getting paid. They need something do accomplish, and the church is the same way. Contemporary churches are languishing in their comfort, in the “bless us, love us, make us happy” mentality. And that’s because that’s not the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, he taught us “your will be done, only give us what we need to do it.”

I used to think my faith would never be fulfilled unless I led someone to Christ. But eventually I came to understand that God’s plan may or may not involve anything I plan or expect to do. However, many in the church think that their sole purpose in life, no matter how unsuccessful they may be is to “win souls for Christ.” I can appreciate the enthusiasm, but you will be held accountable at the judgment for those you drive away I believe. This is something Casper works through in the book. He sees that many times, Christians only have non believing friends as projects. The only reason they keep them around is to try to convert them. That is no friendship at all.

Another common thing in contemporary Christianity is the notion that we have to pray some kind of prayer to accept Jesus into our heart and “get saved.” Jesus didn’t work that way. He just walked up to the tree and said “Zaccheus, I’m coming to your place tonight.” I don’t know how much of the conversation isn’t recorded, but interestingly enough, Jesus never tells Zach to ask himself into his heart. No prayer, all Zach does is offer to pay back all he has taken and to help the poor, and Jesus says he has salvation. That’s all it took from Zach. Jesus didn’t even tell him to be baptized. All Zach had to do is repent and to do what was right and to do the kinds of things Jesus did and he was in. Now of course, I say “all he had to do” and it ends up being in a sense way more than simply praying a prayer, but that is my whole point. True faith in Jesus was never just praying a prayer and showing up to church, maybe tossing a fiver in the plate once and a while. True faith in Christ was and has always been a radical change in your life, your way of thinking, and I’d say in a sense, who you are. Salvation is simple, but it should not be made easy, it is also hard, but it should not be made difficult. A single prayer or full-blown legalism, either way is not the real way. The right way is what Jesus said, “follow me.”

Later on was the chapter about Emergent churches. Here I think Jim needed to do a little more research because the two churches he visited were not really all that emergent, and Mars Hill especially. Imago Dei was closer, but still not on the caliber of some of the others like Mars Hill Bible. At any rate, I don’t know if any of the three churches even claim to be part of the movement anyway. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Imago Dei, and this book is no exception. Casper found it very refreshing, a church in an old building, a video of restoring a park, sermon on giving in a real way and stuff like that. It was practical and relevant. Mars Hill on the other hand was more fundamentalist, more focused on not sinning, and mentioning sex a lot as Driscoll tends to do. I do listen to Driscoll quite a bit, every week generally, but I don’t really agree with him on a whole lot of things. I do understand what he has to deal with being in one of the centers of modern “Rome” as it were. These are the people needing “spiritual milk” as Paul would put it. However, he is quite rough, he used to be known as the cussing pastor and he is definitely Calvinist. But he is a good teacher. But like what Casper was looking for, I like the calls to action, and Mars Hill doesn’t support too many missionaries that I know of.

And finally were the mega churches of Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes. These two churches tend to typify all that non-believers find hypocritical or off-putting about the Church today. It’s all about the glamour, the hugeness, and mostly, it’s all about you and your money. I agree with Casper when he says that it’s pretty hard to come up with “God is gonna make you rich” from the bible. There’s the problem of having a camel and a needle to fit him through. Leave it to an atheist to figure out the obviousness of that one. This section of the book is where I pretty much disagreed with Jim. He came from a Pentecostal background and could relate to T. D. Jakes’ church and how black people tended to use money to show they had overcome diversity. But what does that do for God’s work in the world? Sure, it makes them American, and shows they have over come American racial problems, but Christians are Christians first, not Americans first. Additionally, poverty and adversity is not only attached to people with dark skin, I know because I’m pretty darn white and I grew up poor. Poverty is not about lack of money, but I’ll explore that one at some point in the future.

In conclusion, it is Casper’s question that really tells the point of the whole book. “Is this what Jesus told you guys to do?” Wow, it hits the heart. We love us some church, but Jesus never mentioned church. He mentioned the congregation. He mentioned the poor, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged and the religious. WWJD. Again, leave it to an atheist to really put meaning to a Christian cliché, which is what has become.

WiredForStereo

Review of “The Shack” by William P. Young

I just finished reading “The Shack” by William P. Young. You should know that as I begin to write this post it is 12:23 AM, and I’ve just spent about he last hour and a half finishing the last several chapters in the quiet of my office in the late evening. A bit of that time was spent weeping. For a time, I wept about once a page in the early parts of chapter 17. A bit of that time was also spent on my face on the floor weeping and praying, praising God, and all I could tell him was that he was good. My face is stiff from the salt in the tears, and my eyes and cheeks ache from crying, but it is an ache that I would not trade for anything. You see I know now that the God I worship is good. But more about that later.

The story is told by Willie, the author, he inserts himself in the story as a friend of Mack, Mackenzie Allen Philips. Mack’s daughter Missy was kidnapped on a camping trip while he was rescuing his son from drowning in a canoe. Evidence was later found in an abandoned shack in the woods that she had been brutally murdered. More than three years later, he receives an unstamped letter in the mail from someone named “Papa” inviting him back to the shack for a meeting. He decides to visit the Shack and what he finds changes his life forever.

That is my synopsis, it is similar to the one on the back of the book, and it really covers about four chapters of info that is important for the story, but less important for the truth contained within the story, which is what I want to talk about here.

First is the familiar term “Papa” which is used for God the Father principally by Nan, Mack’s wife. A well remembered name for the Father used in the bible is “Abba.” Abba is an equivalent to Dada or Papa depending on the language you speak. It is a term a very small child, perhaps barely speaking, might use to refer to his or her father. But let me ask this question, how many of us speak to our Heavenly Father in those terms? I think in all my (right) years, outside of people simply quoting the verse saying “Abba Father” I’ve only heard one person once call God “Daddy.” She is the very wonderful co-leader of our church youth group. And this brings such sadness to my heart, in the same way that verses in Psalms about singing and dancing with all your might and playing all sorts of instruments with all our might before the LORD are largely ignored in our contemporary church, as will most churches for the last millenniums. At least I have found a church where we can at least joke about it (“I guess we shouldn’t sing that song any more ;-). ”) All joking aside, it is a travesty that the God we love and worship, we cannot invite into our hearts far enough to be able to call him using a name which has a purely personal meaning. We evangelical Christians who believe in a personal relationship with God, largely do not live that out in our lives. It is not that I am criticizing the way we are, but begging that we change because we need so much to be embraced by Papa’s love, and that can be made more available, I believe, by using a name we might call our own father.

This book really does play with your mind, and it is meant to. Papa even explains that if he were to appear to Mack as someone who looked like Gandalf, it would serve only to reinforce his religious stereotypes. So Papa appeared as a large black woman named Elousia. The Holy Spirit appeared as a distinctly Asian woman named Sarayu, which apparently means “wind.” From what I can pick up in the book, she was difficult to look at, not because she was too bright or anything, but simply because she was difficult to see when looking right at her. She seemed to come and go as she pleased, appearing and disappearing at will but reminding Mack, that she had never disappeared at all, she was there all the time, and is everywhere all the time. Lastly, Jesus was portrayed as a slightly unhandsome average looking Middle Eastern man with a big nose, which Jesus was (likely big nosed and all.) There was much emphasis on Jesus being truly, fully and purely human, while at the same time being all that of God as well. I thought as I was reading that, logically speaking, if Jesus was a physical being when he ascended into heaven, then of course, he still is. He has not disappeared anywhere; he still is that way, up there somewhere. I believed it, but never really thought about it before.

Actually, I thought that way about much of the stuff in the book. Really, these things had never come to me in this way before, but I knew of them, and already believed them, but had never really understood them. It made God real to me in a way that he has never been real before. A major breakthrough for Mack, as it was for me, was that a huge gap created between us and God in our relationship with him is that we do not really believe that he is good. Sure, we say he is good, but deep down, most of us do not really believe that because all we can imagine of God is all our best traits to the nth degree, smashed together with all the goodness we can think of, with super powers, and God is not that way. God is in no way confined to our imaginations, because they don’t really exist, and God has no need to be a part of something that doesn’t even exist and never will. Therefore, we see things that we have decided are evil, and then judge God based on our own preexisting judgment. The truth is, the things around us are not ours to judge, to decide whether they are good or evil. Their inherent good or evil is in no way based on our perception of them. In the same way, if I look at a shiny piece of metal and say “That is obviously aluminum,” it has no bearing on what kind of metal it actually is, or even if it is a metal at all. Its essence and existence is entirely outside that of our own. Take that to the infinite power, God is the same way, which is why he says in the bible that his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts.

A number of negative reviews that I have read have complained of the author doing something like creating God in his own image. I could not disagree more. God in this book is so much different from that. I think if you wanted to pare down everything he said in the entire book, it might fit into the sentence “I am nothing like you.” This is a God who cannot be predicted but can predict your every move, a God who is infinitely loving, caring, and patient and who affects change in your life. These things a human cannot do. So, no, no one made God in their image, they just stood well back and said “I still can’t see all of you Papa.”

One belief that this book specifically challenged was one of my basic beliefs about good and evil, or comfort and discomfort. When my wife and I were attending pre-marriage counseling, I told the pastor that I did not always want sunshine and roses, I was a kind of a realist, believing that you could not truly understand good unless you experienced bad. In a way, I believed that there could not be good unless there was bad, you know, to counteract it, to be the opposite of it. My belief has changed. It is the other way around. You cannot have bad unless you have good. Our infinitely good God came first. His light has always existed. His eternal good has always existed, and evil has not nor will ever overcome it because in the face of light, darkness flees. Darkness can no more resist light than I am able to come up with an apt comparison. By very nature, that is what it is, and what it does. Unimaginable distances of the pure black vacuum of space cannot erase the light of a single star. So, no, I don’t need to experience evil to truly understand what good is. Good is good, it is not confined or defined by evil, rather, like darkness to light, evil is confined and defined by good.

At one point in the story, Mack is directed to follow a trail which leads to a rock wall which he is miraculously able to walk through. Inside he finds a woman who is exceedingly beautiful, and whose words he would be happy to sit and listen to forever. We find out in the next chapter that she is Wisdom from Proverbs and that her name is Sophia, which is not a stretch since Sophia, is actually Greek for wisdom. Sophia is the one who tells Mack the way it is, not that God already hadn’t, but Mack had much to work through. Sophia told Mack that he had come to a judgment, and to his surprise, he was to be the judge. The catch was this. Mack had five children. Two of them would make it into heaven, and the other three were condemned. It was Mack’s job to decide which ones. Understandably, Mack was faced with a difficult choice, and as no father should be able, he was unable to choose which children would face condemnation, so he cried out and begged that he could take their place. We often think that God is some cosmic Judge Judy, going to sit behind a big desk on his throne and judge us for all we’ve done, and we have to find a way (Jesus) to avoid that. We end up loving Jesus, but not really loving our Father because of this misperception of him. What this part of the story says is that God no more wants to condemn us than we want to be condemned. He is our Papa, he created each and every one of us as his children, and his true love never wants us to leave him. That is why Jesus became sin for us, to take our place, because Papa loved us so much, he wanted to save us, and would sacrifice himself more than willingly to redeem us from our independent streak.

This leads to another point. Some I’ve talked to seem to catch a hint of Universalism or something in this book, but they miss what Papa says about relationships, they are a two way street. God can do all the loving in the world, he can reach out, he can perform miracles, he can redeem us from our sin, but he can never nor will never force us to come to him. That is what true relationship is, it is expectancy, not expectation. Expectations leave us hurting when they are not fulfilled, but if we live in expectancy, just waiting to see what wonderful things might happen between us, then there is no hurt, only joy.

One of the most wonderful things about this book was how it treats evil, and what happens when God works through evil to affect the best in the world. Throughout the book, Mack is overcome by what he calls “The Great Sadness,” a darkness shrouding his heart after his daughter Missy was kidnapped and murdered. Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle was talking about Calvinism and mentioned a woman he knew who had been raped who was a staunch Calvinist. She asked him “Why did God have me raped?” A similar question was asked in “The Shack.” Mack asked if his daughter was murdered so that he could be rescued as it were. God made it clear that it is not he who causes evil to happen though he is able to work good through it. This kind of human thinking causes us to be able to sacrifice a few to save many, where God’s way of doing things sacrifices only one, himself. God never works any kind of evil, and it is never in his purpose for any sort of evil to happen, what God does is to work through evil, our choices and independence from him to make good things happen for his purpose. God would never have anyone raped, or murdered, or anything else to bring about anything, no matter how good the ultimate result would be. He uses evil for good, he does not cause evil to happen.

Another complaint I’ve heard, is that Satan and his power is conspicuously absent. In fact, as I remember, Satan is not mentioned once. I don’t have a problem with this. I don’t think this is a story about Satan, I think it is a story about God’s love. It is a parable. In the same way that the parables of Jesus do not mention Satan, neither does this one because there is a specific point to be made, a hurt to be healed, and Satan is not needed to convey the love of our Father toward us. I think the only nod to Satan in this book is when one of the characters says that all sin is a result of the desire for independence from God, and that certainly fits Lucifer as much as it does us. The point of this story is to release people from sadness and anger toward God, and to show that Papa really is good, and as I mentioned before, we don’t need evil to show what good is, it is the other way around.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend reading this book, many have said that it is the most impactful book they have ever read beside the Bible, and I would tend to agree. Whether or not we know it, I think we all need the kind of healing Mack received, because we all tend to hold grudges against God whether or not we know it. We don’t understand God and in our limited human understanding, we hold that against him. We need to know him personally to understand him, all the rules we put upon ourselves do nothing to bring us closer to him unless we can realize that we are powerless to follow those rules. And that’s what the rules are for.

I dare to call him Papa,

WiredForStereo