Saturday Good Reads: Two on Faith, One on Writing

Three blog posts stuck in my head this week. Three different subjects, three very different writers, and yet they do share at least one thing in common. They look deeply into what they write about.

Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk posted on Evangelicalism as a Way Station, making the statement that evangelicalism works best as a mission, not a church tradition. It threw me, because so much of my faith has been shaped by evangelicalism, although I’m in a more denominational church now and have been for the last eight or nine years.

On the same day that I posted about an experience in Erfurt, Germany, Emily Wierenga at Imperfect Prose posted about what happened in her own house: “The Day I Met Jesus in My Bedroom.” I read it, and I didn’t doubt it for a minute. I recognized what she was describing.

And then Seth Haines at On Writing, one of my favorite writers (even if he is a lawyer in his day job). It’s a short post, but packed with meaning and asking the question, “Why do you write?” And the post begins with a poem by Billy Collins, which immediately hooked me.

All good stuff. Great stuff.

Painting: Writing to Father by Eastman Johnson (1863), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Saturday Good Reads: The Church

Last Sunday I posted about the church, and a conversation started by Marcus Goodyear over at Good Word Editing, The Uncertain Future of Traditional Faith Communities.

The church, and the future of the church, has been much on my mind. It’s not that I have the answers to the problems plaguing the church, and especially the American church. But I’m seeing more and more people beginning to raise the questions, and raise them seriously.

These are four blogs I read on a regular basis that raise and discuss questions about the church. I follow more; these are only four examples.

Slow Church. Chris Smith is the editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He writes this blog for Patheos with John Pattison, deputy editor of the Burnside Writers Collective. I don’t agree with everything they write, but that’s not the point. The point is to gain an understanding of the whole conversation that’s beginning to happen, and Slow Church is a vital part of that.

Internet Monk. Internet Monk was started by Michael Spencer, and he wrote for it for years until his death from cancer. Now it’s led by Chaplain Mike and Jeff Dunn, with occasional other writers (Like Martha of Ireland). The posts are consistently good and always provocative.

Informing the Reformed. This blog by Canadian pastor Tim Challies is widely read. Tim in unapologetically reformed (well, so am I, for that matter). He shares books, opinions, thoughts, theology, and always well-written posts.

Canterbury Tales: Dr. Taylor Marshall is Roman Catholic. His blog is about questions and issues of concern for Roman Catholics. But much of what he says applies to the larger church (I’m referring to the “church universal” here).

This Monday, The High Calling is beginning a new weekly discussion on David Platt’s Follow Me. Two years ago, I reviewed Platt’s Radical for PRISM Magazine; unfortunately, the review is not available (for free) online. But it was good.  I’ve read the first three chapters of Follow Me (and the introduction by Francis Chan) and I think it is exactly the kind of book I need to be reading to understand these questions about the church. And myself.

So please visit The High Calling on Monday and see what the discussion is about, and perhaps read the book and join in.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Michael Spencer's "Mere Churchianity"

I had planned a blog post on a different subject. But I’ve spent most of the last week reading and re-reading Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. The title is a nod – perhaps more than a nod – in the direction of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. But Spencer’s subject and thesis are very different – that people are leaving the church to find Jesus.

No, this is not a treatise in favor of the “emerging church.” Spencer experienced all of the ways one leaves the church –from belonging nowhere to considering Roman Catholic and Orthodox, to emergent and house churches and all the other possibilities that exist within a Christian context. And he doesn’t advocate not attending church.

Instead, he speaks to those who have left or are considering leaving the church, he explains why this is happening, and then he takes great care in pointing to a different way.

We attended a church for 15 years that – with great sadness and feelings akin to divorce – we left. Worship had begun to resemble entertainment; Bible study had been replaced by discussions of popular books; and success was measured by numbers. We weren’t the only ones who left; we were , in fact, at the tail end of an exodus that left the church financially strapped and spiritually depleted.

We joined a very traditional-type congregation. And then the same elements we had fled began to creep in. We’re still there, but there’s now this sense of having to deal with this all over again.

And then I read Mere Churchianity. It is perhaps the most hopeful work I have read about North American Christianity in more than a decade. That’s an odd thing to say about a book that basically says the North American church has replaced Jesus with …something else. But it is hopeful.

From 2000 to earlier this year, Spencer blogged at Internet Monk. He died from cancer in April, and several friends are continuing to carry on his work. And they should. What he did was and is important. It’s also very personal – for Spencer himself, for the people he wrote this book for, and for me. I’ve been profoundly affected by what he’s written.

I’ll be posting a few blog posts on the book and my own thoughts, beginning late this month and into August. I’m also working on an extended draft of a post for Christian Manifesto, which will be posted first.

For now I will say this: Michael Spencer knows what I’ve been going through for close to a decade, because he’s gone through it himself. He knows the pain and the isolation, because he’s lived it. And he cared enough about the rest of us to write this book.