Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to have you with us.
Thanks for joining us as we begin a new series today on some of the books that have been important to us.
And obviously, in the process of seminary and the education journey to be ordained as a pastor,
there’s a lot of reading.
And we continue, both Michael and I continue to be people who value
the contribution of thinkers and authors and scholars.
And as we put this series together,
we just thought, what would it look like for us to kind of highlight some of the books that have
been important to us in our own faith journey from a leadership perspective,
a little less than just
simply books that have meant something to us.
And we’ve tried to focus not so much on scholarly
books, not on deep theological works or historical works,
but on the kind of stuff you could find
at Amazon, the kind of stuff in many cases you could find at,
say, a Christian bookstore or Christian book distributors,
something along those lines,
things that are readable,
things that are helpful.
And we will try to group them so that the order makes some sense.
But we just thought that
there might be readers out there who would enjoy some of the books that we have enjoyed.
And so we hope this is helpful.
We’ll do our best to give you a pretty good summary of what the book is and
why we like it.
And we start today with,
Michael, books I think you’d call kind of discipleship or
Christian living, books that are designed to be helpful for people thinking about how it is that
we live out our faith.
Yeah, so we’re just hoping,
you know, that maybe you,
in every conversation, maybe there’s one book that strikes your attention.
And the nice thing about having two different people is,
you know, we’ve read different things and we have different preferences in our own
reading.
And so I think that’s a little bit of the case here today.
I was looking at this book here
called UnChristian, which now I think you would probably say,
Clint, is actually kind of old.
It’s a research book.
At least it came out of research and it’s published here in 2007.
So in the world of research,
you know, now we’re looking a few years out.
But I remember reading this book
and it kind of, for me,
it put a little bit of a bookmark in the topic of thinking about what
others outside the church think about Christians.
And the short synopsis of this,
Clint, is that Barna did a research project where they surveyed people who were outside the Christian church as
to what their impressions of Christians were.
And then they collected that research and then they
filtered those down into a few key areas,
sort of some of those themes that came up over and over again.
And then the author does a little bit of work reflecting upon,
you know, what the majority themes were,
what some of the biblical sort of witness might have to say about some of those
impressions that we have,
and then maybe some ways that we could live into the future.
Of course, like I said, that time snapshot was 2007.
But what I think this book did for me is,
number one, it’s very readable.
This is the kind of book you could easily read this in one or two sessions.
But what it did was introduce this majority question in my own mind, and that is,
as someone who has always lived firmly and deeply inside the church,
for a moment, imagine that that’s not your experience and that you’re someone outside the church and you’re looking in and
your only interaction with the church is maybe through news articles or maybe through family conversations at Thanksgiving.
It is for that very strange moment when you go to a wedding and
it’s inside a church.
You know, if that’s your experience of the world,
what do you think about
Christians and our witness?
And this book,
I’m not gonna lie to you, Clint,
it is challenging.
There are some themes about the church that are,
if you’ve been a lifelong Christian,
maybe a little hard to read.
They may sound pretty critical.
I think the author tries to soften
that, but certainly they’re honest about the fact that not everyone views the church with a positive lens.
Yeah, I’ve not read that book,
Michael, but my guess is that in 15 years that has only increased.
It seems to me that in some circles there is a kind of negative bias toward the
church, some of which we’ve probably earned,
to be honest, and some of which I think we haven’t,
some of which I think is probably overdone.
Is that the tone of this material?
Does it tend to
skew negative?
Does it tend to highlight things that people think the church has gotten wrong
or the places in which the church has unfortunately shown some hypocrisy?
It seems to me that that would characterize a significant portion of the population’s current assessment of the church.
Does that seem to be the case in that time frame as well?
Yeah, you know,
I don’t know the whole scope of that research project and exactly everything that
they found, but I can tell you some of these major themes.
These are some chapters that Christians are hypocritical,
very, very focused on getting you saved and a particular idea of what that means,
sheltered,
that Christians are very sheltered in our understanding of the world
that we’re too political,
that we’re judgmental.
I would say each and every chapter does address
these and, you know, when you shine the light on some people’s impressions of what the church is
interested in, I mean, that is critical.
It’s certainly challenging.
My experience was the
author was not trying to beat us up.
In other words, Christians, the author is not trying to
make us feel bad,
but rather to suggest maybe we should look in the lens of culture,
not because that is going to be instructive of what we do or say.
I mean, we were people who
are driven by the gospel and our compulsion to serve in the name of Jesus Christ,
but I think the strong point that has always stuck with me is if what other people see of our
fellowship is judgmentalism, that does have something to say about how we’re communicating
that and what impression our faith and our discipleship is having.
So for me, I think that was a generative conversation that this book raised.
And like I said,
it’s a relatively easy
read.
So if that’s, if you’re a kind of person that likes nonfiction,
maybe you’re a person who
finds research interesting, this would be a great book to open up.
It’s really interesting to think through the lens of what people who aren’t us think about us.
And on one hand,
yeah, that may not be fair because there is a certain ignorance.
And I don’t mean
that from a value perspective.
I mean, in the terms of unknown,
there’s things that you don’t know.
So on one hand,
you only have your assumptions and your perceptions from which to make those evaluations.
On the other hand,
I think you bring up a good point,
Mike.
I mean, the church is to be conscious of our witness to the world.
What is it that we present?
What is it that we
look like to those on the outside?
As you recall,
reading through the book and interacting with some of those themes,
do you remember at some point thinking it’s fair,
it’s unfair,
we deserve that, we don’t deserve that,
that’s too harsh?
What was your sense of the accuracy of some of the
evaluation from people who are on the outside?
That’s a really interesting question because I
actually think that’s a moving target.
So what I mean by that is we who have been inside the church
family for a long time know that there’s a lot of families,
there’s a lot of diversity on that range.
And if you know someone who is a Missouri-Sinted Lutheran,
you know that that’s very different
from a Pentecostal, which is also very different from, let’s say,
ELCA Lutheran or Methodist.
There’s a diversity of Christian voices.
What struck me about this book, Clant,
is so much of the cultural understanding of Christianity does seem to be derived from
a relatively few number of those Christian families.
And if I’m going to give name to that,
certainly the more evangelical-leaning church families,
those who have generally emphasized
theology, who have generally emphasized a particular understanding of certainly family,
certainly culture,
you know, there’s been some political interest over the last 30 years and
maybe that’s even grown since this book has been written.
But there’s certainly, at least as these researchers,
as they interpreted the data and then they later came and they offered some thoughts on top of it,
their impression is that some of the things that culture has really begun to assume
about Christianity flows out of some of those basic assumptions.
And so I think that’s fair.
In other words, I think that many of the culture’s reception of Christianity is true to some of those
church families’ theological convictions.
What’s interesting to me is, though,
certainly there are many Christians who would think differently on those matters,
or Christians who would nuance it in interesting or different ways.
And so in those cases,
I don’t think it is incredibly fair.
But I don’t know,
I certainly can’t speak to it.
I don’t remember if the research,
how extensively they laid out,
you know, are there more
evangelical Christians numerically than there are other Christians for different stripes?
I don’t know some of the answers to that.
But I do know,
I felt like in some cases,
yeah, I mean, that’s fair.
That’s a fair critique.
In other places, I thought, well,
I mean, that’s fair in some circumstances,
but I don’t think that’s fair for the whole
of the Christian witness.
What’s intriguing about that,
I think, Michael, is it really becomes,
at some level, if you’re going to say that we’re going to talk to people who don’t go to church,
who don’t have a church,
who haven’t been in a faith community,
really,
that means you’re going to talk to people who
have received their information from somewhere else,
right?
And you think, well,
where are those places most likely to happen?
One would be media,
which is natural.
But when does the church make the news?
When it drops the ball,
when it says or does something pseudo offensive or perceived to be offensive,
when it has shown hypocrisy,
right, that we don’t make the news when we feed people,
we don’t make the news when we visit people,
we don’t make the news when we send missionaries
to other places.
We make the news because of the way news works when we get it wrong.
And so, almost by definition, you have a group whose perception is going to probably skew toward the
negative, and then you think about,
well, who are the most outspoken Christians?
In other words, a non-church person in,
say, an urban area,
who are they going to relate to that is from a Christian perspective,
the street evangelist,
the outspoken friend who is telling them the Facebook persona,
right?
So,
it almost, by definition,
sets us up for a kind of critical examination.
And I’m not saying that’s unfair because,
again, we’ve done some of that to ourselves.
But it is interesting
to think that if you’re going to talk to people whose primary experience of church is outside of the church,
they are likely to get maybe the negative part of our family story.
Right. So, one of the things the authors do is they say,
“This is where we,
in the research, this is a theme that we think is consistent.” And then they offer what they call a new
perception or a way that Christians might want to be perceived in the world.
And on the chapter of
politics, saying that Christians are too political,
the new perception that they offer—I want to just remind you,
this is written in 2007,
okay?
So, this is before a lot of our more recent last
five years kinds of conversations.
This is what the authors say.
Christians might want to be
perceived as respecting people, thinking biblically,
and finding solutions to complex issues.
That could have been written today.
I mean, that’s exactly what I think the Christian family would
want for ourselves, that we are deeply grounded in the Bible,
that we respect and care for everyone,
including those that we might call our enemy.
And then, yeah, this idea that we are finding
nuance and dealing with complex issues in the world,
we are all aware of how complex the world
is.
And that is, I think, a very helpful way to,
even in a book that was written, you know,
13, 14, 15 years ago,
to begin to sort of engage with this idea of how might we want to be perceived in
the world.
Because that does have individual implications.
It has for me.
I know that as I’ve
gone in my own faith development,
I have at times asked myself,
then I have family members,
as I’m sure we all do,
who find themselves more on the outside of the church than they do on the inside.
It makes me ask myself,
what vocabulary do I use to describe my faith?
When they ask me about what I do,
do I talk to them about the positives,
or do I share the frustrations with them?
Do I share it with the moments I’ve got to see real transformation in people’s lives?
We talked about that a couple weeks ago as one of the joys of being pastor.
Or do I share with them the frustrations
of living with people in church?
It’s easy for me to present the church in a way that’s negative,
because as with anything that we spend a lot of time with,
we know the downsides as well as we know the upsides.
But I think this book has helped me personally frame,
you know, this is thinking in a much more cultural way,
right?
Because this is big,
this is researching thousands of people,
but for me, it has instructed how do I,
in the things that I choose to say,
maybe more importantly, to choose the things I choose not to say,
how do I represent the faith in the world?
And I also want just maybe a quick slide in here,
I don’t want this to go too long.
I think this is particularly
personal in an age of social media.
This book was not written at the height of Facebook and Twitter
and all these things.
I think it is important for us as Christians to remember,
we do have a witness
to the world when we start sharing things and writing things,
and we start putting our name,
our profile picture, next to a thing.
So I do think there is some caution to be offered.
There’s your time in history for us to share things without realizing the impact it might have on
those outside of our circle.
And this book for me,
certainly all the way back in that prior time to
social media, it called me to think about maybe what image of Christianity I’m presenting by what
I say and don’t say.
Yeah, you know,
the risk is that it may skew toward the negative for the
reasons we’ve discussed, Michael.
But I think the benefit is it is good to hear an outside perspective
because in that you’re most likely to confront your own blind spots.
You know, think of a church
where a visitor comes in and says,
“Your church is hard to…
I don’t know where things are.” And
we say, “Of course, well, the bathroom’s over there and the nursery’s over there.” And they say,
“But you don’t have signs.” And we think,
“Well, we didn’t need signs because we all know…”
We all know where it’s at.
Yeah, or we don’t know when to stand up and sit down.
And those things that inside the community
we can kind of take for granted,
I do think that outside perspective is helpful because it forces
us to say, “Oh,
we didn’t think about it from that perspective because we all know that in here.
We all know there’s differences in the family.
We all know that there’s left and right and you have
to try and balance it.” But an outsider helps us maybe take stock of what some of those things are,
maybe some of our blind spots and some of our opportunities that are in those blind spots to
send a better message or to engage in conversation in a way that’s helpful.
That’s really interesting.
I think it’s worth the risk.
So the book is UnChristian.
It is, once again, published 2007.
I’ll put this.
If you’re interested in this, if you’re a research-minded person,
or if you find the idea of thinking
about the inside experience of the church from an outsider’s perspective and you would like to
engage with this, I’ll certainly put a link to where you can pick this up on Amazon.
I’m sure you can get this used in lots of different places now that it’s a few years out of its original publishing date.
But yeah, definitely if you’re interested in research and that seems interesting,
UnChristian, take a look at it.
Great.
Thanks, Michael.
I kind of did a two for today,
so I brought two books with me,
both by the same author,
a man named Philip Yancey.
One is called The Jesus I Never Knew.
The other one is What’s So Amazing About Grace.
I think both of these books were fairly popular in their release.
Particularly What’s So Amazing About Grace,
I think, was a really pretty good seller for Philip Yancey.
They’re both a little dated.
I think ’95 and ’97 are the
publication years, so they’ve been around a long time.
Maybe you’ve read them.
I think they were
both used in churches.
There are study guides that go with them, I believe.
But what I like
about Philip Yancey is he writes almost like a preacher,
chapter to chapter, and even within the
chapters, there are good illustrations.
There’s almost a kind of sermon quality to some of his
material.
And I would say these are easy reads,
except that I would also say that as I read them, particularly,
well, no, I think in both cases,
as I read them,
I would find myself stopping
fairly regularly to think something over.
So it’s not complex.
It’s not deep.
But it is thought-provoking.
It is challenging.
I kind of have a habit when I hit something in a book
that I want to keep.
I dog-gear the pages.
This is actually my second copy of this one.
My first one kind of got worn out,
and I had dog-geared maybe hundreds of pages in this book.
Some of that was sermon illustrations.
There’s just a lot of good in there.
I’ll start with What’s So Amazing About Grace.
Obviously, if we’re going to talk
inside the church, Michael,
grace is a word we use all the time, graciousness,
the grace of Christ.
And I think we can do that almost without thinking deeply about what it means.
And so as Yancey takes that challenge on,
he tries to unpack this word by giving us pictures of it,
by giving us the history of it,
the challenge of it.
This is very much a call to incorporate grace
in our life, what it is and what it isn’t.
Yancey’s own experience is with a very conservative
church in his childhood,
and he honestly assesses that in this book and says that he didn’t see much
grace in the tradition of Christianity he learned,
and that he struggled with that.
And I think it’s a wonderful call.
I won’t say that this book made me think about grace as a
theological topic.
What I think I appreciated about this book,
Michael, is I felt it challenge me
as a Christian how I could live more graciously,
how I could exhibit grace and extend grace,
also receive it, but I think more so for me at least how I could offer it to others
in the way I react,
in the way I live.
And again,
this is a dated book.
Some of the
illustrations are going to read a little out of time,
but we are only more in need by my assessment
of Christians struggling to be gracious than we have been.
It is not a gracious time,
and I think though in a little bit older book,
it does offer us a pretty significant challenge
of how to live out this word that we put so much stock in inside the church.
You’ve said it’s not so much a theology book.
You read somewhat like a sermon.
It sounds like it’s not a devotional,
but it has devotional leanings.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
You know, he does some things where he kind of sets off a story and then he’ll unpack it.
So you could read,
it would be hard to say you could read two pages a day or four pages a day,
but it is in chunks and you could easily make this a kind of daily or weekly devotional.
It’s the kind of book you could pick up and put down.
You wouldn’t need to read it in one setting.
In fact,
I think you’d miss something if you did.
This is the kind of book I would say is good to
spend some time with.
I think you’ll find yourself highlighting some things,
marking down some things.
It’s a sort of a buffet.
I mean, there is theology in it.
There’s some church history in it.
There’s pretty good.
I mean, I think if you’re a narrative person,
you’ll find that in it.
If you’re a kind of careful,
deliberate thinker, you’ll find moments of that in it.
And I think, you know, he’s done a nice job in my estimation of ringing that central bell of grace and then looking for the ways in
which it moves out or the ripples it creates and what it would mean for those who seek to be gracious.
Yeah. And like you say, I mean,
is there a more timely topic for the church to engage
deeply in than the idea of grace?
I mean, we have in our cultural conversation so much about
sort of lashing out and dogpiling others and argument,
the idea that a Christian would take
some time to really focus on the center of a gift given to all of us,
which we’re called to share
with others that comes freely with no work or privilege attached to it.
I mean, that is very much so one of the core parts of the gospel message that needs heard today.
Well, to dovetail this with the book that you just highlighted on Christian,
I think that unfortunately,
many people’s perception or experience of Christians and church is not particularly
grace-filled.
They see Christians arguing with non-Christians.
They see Christians arguing with one another.
They hear Christians saying very unkind and very ungracious things to and about one another.
And I think Yancy gives us, you know,
I said this is a little dated,
but it is a timely
book in that we are always called to think deeply and pursue passionately how we can incorporate
grace in how we interact with one another and the face that we show to the world, hopefully,
in the name of Jesus.
And this book convicts us where we haven’t and I think encourages us to do
more even where we have.
So I find this helpful.
Like I said,
it’s not something that’s difficult
to read.
You’re not going to encounter things.
This is not a
theological unpacking of the word grace.
This is a what does grace look like in the way that we live and in the way that we
treat one another and how can we get it right more often because we’ve often gotten it wrong.
And I would, yeah, I think people would,
I can’t imagine you wouldn’t find something in this that
would be helpful.
Yeah.
Well, so talk to us about the other book.
Yeah.
So he has a second book.
He’s written a lot of stuff.
And in some ways,
Yancey is consistent as a writer.
I think he comes from the same kind of perspective,
most books.
This is a really interesting one called
The Jesus I Never Knew.
And he writes this out of an experience of kind of realizing that as it came
to his own understanding of Jesus,
we receive that in our own context.
And sometimes when we
receive it in our context,
we underestimate the context in which Jesus was a product of
his own environment.
So this isn’t quite fair,
but I would say,
Michael, that he stumbles upon this
when he makes a comment,
something to the extent of,
that he drastically underestimated Jesus’
Jewishness,
that he never thought seriously about the fact that Jesus kept a kosher diet,
that Jesus went to the synagogue,
that Jesus kept the Sabbath,
that Jesus lived as a first-century
Jew, that we tend to,
in the American church and the Western church,
I think we’ve tended
to highlight that idea of Jesus as a spiritual figure and maybe less so as a historical physical figure.
And so Yancey kind of says that in his own experience,
he felt like he had
overdone the idea that Jesus was kind of like we are.
And as he dug in,
he was moved by
how helpful it was to understand who Jesus would have been in the world he lived,
the kind of things he said,
the very parables he told were things
of his own world.
And if we can understand
that, Yancey thinks that it gives us a better vision of who Jesus is and was on both sides of
that fence, the spiritual incarnate Christ and the living man they called Rabbi in first-century
Galilee.
And so I found it helpful.
It’s not life-changing.
It’s not controversial.
But I think it’s a way in which,
in my experience, the average American Presbyterian,
Iowan 21st-century Christian believer hasn’t been pushed to think about Jesus.
And I found it really
helpful in that regard.
Eye-opening, I think it could be to some.
I mean,
you and I have probably
had an opportunity to run into those ideas a little more outside of the church,
say, in the education process.
But inside the church,
I don’t know that this comes up a lot in people’s
experience.
And I think Yancey has done us a favor by holding the lens up to it and saying,
“Hey, let’s think about what that meant that Jesus lived at a particular time and place,
and what do we know about that time and place,
and how does it inform who we understand him to
have been and to be?”
You know, Clint, what’s really interesting about the New Testament is how many times we see Jesus
engaging with the people of his own culture.
We often call them the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
And if you read the Gospel accounts,
Jesus is fighting with them all the time.
So there’s a sense in which we get the impression,
thousands of years removed,
that Jesus was in some ways
railing against the culture that surrounded him.
What we forget is he was doing that on Sabbath.
He was doing it inside the sanctuary.
He was arguing not with people who he considered to be
different, but rather who he was part of.
He was being called rabbi teacher.
I think we do
maybe find a temptation of some years removed and certainly with vastly different cultural
experiences.
I think we maybe just make this assumption,
“Well, yeah, Jesus’ experience was something like mine.” But I think that’s an exactly helpful frame.
What’s interesting is
how you’ve described Yancey.
It sounds like he’s a very accessible
writer,
someone who maybe the vocabulary is readable.
The ideas are going to be something that you’ll feel
comfortable with.
But that doesn’t mean that you’ll always be comfortable with that content.
I mean, there may be moments where both with grace and the truth of who Jesus is,
it’s sounding to me like we might be challenged in both of those accounts.
Absolutely.
I think these aren’t seminary
textbooks.
These are very readable for lay
people, but they are challenging for everyone.
I think that we have tended to think of Jesus as the universal Christ,
and that’s great.
That’s correct.
But I think we have sometimes sacrificed
the idea of Jesus the particular man who says something like,
“Go show yourself to the priest,”
because that’s the law of his day and who makes the references that he does,
uses the idioms of
his world, the phrases of his world,
the language of his world.
And I think Yancey does a nice job.
If you’ve not ever thought about that,
this would be a great entrance into that conversation and into that theme.
And I think that it’s pretty helpful.
I don’t think this detracts.
I don’t think he’s arguing.
He’s not making a case that you should think about Jesus like this instead of
like that.
He’s simply saying, “Can we expand and can we include…” You know,
Michael, and I mean the classic example, not to be trite,
but when we look at our own depictions of Jesus,
the long hair, the lighter skin, the white robe, and just this pushes back on that idea a little bit and reminds
us that we would have seen Jesus as his peers did,
a Middle Eastern man of the first century,
dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin,
a man who lived outside,
a man who didn’t go home every night,
just a man who went from synagogue,
traveled from town to town, kind of nomadic.
I found it
helpful and I found that people who have,
again, maybe for whom that’s a kind of a new idea,
this is a real eye opening book.
And I don’t think offensive.
I don’t think troubling.
I think helpful.
You know, Clint, as the conversation continues here,
what strikes me is,
and we did try to sort of group our books in ways that seem that they made sense,
but maybe as we’ve
had this conversation, what strikes me is there is a nice synchronous idea of what we can do
between these.
The thing that they all share is they’re all going to be really accessible,
but they’re going to also encourage you to think and to grow in some thoughts and places where
maybe you haven’t put some thought,
whether that be on Christian here and you’re thinking about
what culture thinks of Christianity and what we do and say in a world that’s watching,
or whether you’re doing that with this deep,
rich heritage of the theology of grace,
or you’re doing this with the idea of who is Jesus and what impact does his culture and his
time have on our understanding of who the Savior is.
I mean,
I think,
would you say it’s fair,
Clint, that honestly, if any one of these books sort of resonates with,
“Oh, I’d be interested in
being challenged there,” or learning more about that thing,
or thinking a little more deeply about that area,
any one of these three would be a good choice.
Yeah, I think partly why we started with these,
Michael.
I think all three of these books
would be relatively easy to read.
They’re going to be engaging.
They’re going to be helpful.
Yeah, I think if you’re at a point where you’d like to start reading something that is
explicitly Christian or comes from a Christian vantage point,
I think these would all three
be good books to pick up and maybe spend a little time with.
I think you’d be glad you did.
So I want to make sure you all know, once again,
all three of these books will put links directly
to them in the description of the video and on the podcast.
That makes it easy for you to at
least see the cover and whether you buy it from there or not,
but that’s totally up to you.
But definitely, if you’re interested in these,
be sure to pick one up.
I know we’d both love to hear what you think,
so come back,
put it in the comments.
There’s a link there where you can actually send
us a direct message if that is more comfortable for you.
Of course, come on in.
If you’re in the
Spirit Lake area, come to the office,
give us a phone call.
We’d love to chat with you about
your experience of these books.
And then that said,
if these are not for you,
that’s fine.
In this series, we’re going to explore different genres of books that we think may be interesting.
So if one of these didn’t resonate,
come back next week because we’ll have a whole new selection
of books that may resonate.
Yeah. Yeah.
Again, just only to reinforce that.
If you pick one of
these up and read it,
you have some thoughts.
We’d love to continue the conversation.
Appreciate your time.
Thanks for listening, and we hope it’s helpful.