“Living the Dream?” by Tristan Sherwin

If a non-believing friend ask you to define or explain Christianity, how would you respond? It might take some thought and some understanding of how much the friend might or might not know, but most of us would likely explain the central figure of Christ, the Son of God, who died for our sins, was resurrected on the third day after his death, and ascended to heaven. But what if the friend went further, and asked you to explain why there are so many denominations, so many variants, so many forms of Christianity, and so many disagreements on basic tenets of the faith?

That might be a more complicated answer. In Living the Dream? The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity, Tristan Sherwin has a relatively simple answer that itself has a complex explanation. We’re understanding our faith as an extension of our personal dreams. “Jesus didn’t die so that our dreams could come true,” he writes. “He gave his life for the dream of God.” We’ve allowed our personal dreams and ambitions, including how we are shaped by the culture, to shape our faith and how we respond to God. 

It’s no wonder that Christianity is so fractured and splintered, with the breaks and divisions seeming to grow every day. 

Tristan Sherwin and family

Sherwin begins at the beginning, with the book of Genesis and how we generally understand it and what we read into it because we’re either embracing what the culture says or fighting what the culture insists we believe. We often get into the weeds here, and we like to have our own weed patch. Scripture has been used to justify everything from slavery to war. In a self-therapeutic culture like which grips most of the Western word today, we can consider Scripture as the way to make us feel better and loved, or that it gives us special knowledge (and gifts) that others don’t have, or that it justifies political globalism and political nationalism. (Remember Jesus telling Pilate that his kingdom wasn’t of this world?)

Our individual faith is directly affected. Consider worship services that are emotionally charged. “All this stimulation may help to explain why many of us struggle with prayer and contemplation in the privacy of our homes, and why so many of us struggle to sense God during our own periods of suffering.” Despite what we experience on Sundays, he says, “God-moments” aren’t hyperactive or adrenaline-fueled. 

God, he says, is “at home in the stillness; we’re the only who get restless.”

One of the most beautiful images Sherwin uses in the book is the idea of soliloquy, that “Jesus is the soliloquy of God spoken into the dissonance” of our struggle to fully understand and explain our experience of God. There is a wonderful stillness about that idea, a freshness that speaks to our deepest souls.

Sherwin is a teacher at Metro Christian Centre at Bury, England, near Manchester, where he lives with his family. He’s previously published Love: Expressed. 

If you’re looking to challenge or test your own ideas about Christianity and your personal faith, the well-written and engaging Living the Dream? is a good place to start. You will rethink how you understand many parts of scripture and discover how you read your own cultural context into what you believe about God. 

Related: Tristan Sherwin’s Love: Expressed.

Tristan Sherwin’s “Love: Expressed”

It’s a familiar story in the New Testament, recorded by both Matthew and Mark. Religious leaders, sometimes the Pharisees and other times the Sadducees, keep trying to trip Jesus up. They fire one question after another, like should taxes be paid to Rome (unpopular with the people and guaranteed to get a response from Roman authorities) and a really tedious one about a man who marries seven times and which one will he be resurrected with in heaven. Jesus bats each one down, so effortlessly and authoritatively that the crowd is astonished.

Then the Pharisees “get together” and hand him a question that they think will finally do the trick. “Teacher,” one asks, who is “an expert in the law,” “which is the greatest commandment in the law?” The purpose here was the hope that the answer would generate controversy and division among the people.

Jesus, who knew the law (and the experts) better than any of his questioners, responds with a two-part answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:34-40).

Familiar story, yes, but what does it mean to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind? How do we love our neighbor as ourselves?

Tristan Sherwin, a pastor with Metro Christian Centre in Bury, England, has answers to those questions. And those answers come from Scripture, from his own life and that of his family, from his church, and from the people in his neighborhood.

A pastor at Metro Christian Centre in Bury, England, Sherwin has created Love: Expressed to answer those questions about love. His answers are as simple as they are profound, written in an engaging, conversational that may make this my favorite book about “theology” this year, perhaps because it is less about theology and more about living one’s faith.

Tristan Sherwin

Sherwin structures his discussion around eight chapters: obedience, learning, mercy, service, worship, Sabbath, prayer, and humility. Each is filled with both Scripture passages (like the parables) and examples from daily life. Both questions about love – how to love God and how to love one’s neighbor – are answered in each chapter. But this isn’t some rigid formula he follows; instead, as he writes and tells his stories and discusses passages from both the Old and New Testaments, the answers unfold in the readers’ mind.

He reaches deep in his discussion. His chapter on the Sabbath describes a time in his own life that will seem all too familiar to many if not most of us – when we get become so caught up in success (including “success for the Lord”) that we bring ourselves to the point of breakdown, and sometimes beyond.

Love: Expressed is itself an expression of love, a discussion from the heart about what it means to love. 

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.