With that said Linchpin is a great motivator, its abstract enough to inspire you and specific enough to get you on the right path. His concepts around gifts and his words about self awareness are perfect. These are concepts that mentally i have known for a long time but only now am I ready to take some steps to make my ideas into beliefs by putting them into action.

Maybe its my current state of life, but i give this book a 5 out 5.

Some of you may or may not know but I am on a 6-month sabbatical from the open house and it began with a retreat called the Men’s Rite of Passage in Arizona that I recently returned from last week. This is a Richard Rohr inspired retreat that takes much of what is taught in theory here in this book, and practices it here. It has helped me become more present in many ways of life.

To move back toward the book, all I can say is that Richard Rohr does an amazing way of described what it means to be a non-dual thinking and how that might be practiced. It is basically the life lived in tension, being comfortable with ambiguity, without becoming laissez faire about truth seeking. It also opens the mind to see truth in places you may not have looked previously.

But what I think I gleaned most from this book was Richard Rohr’s way of getting my attention and pushing me to wake up in this life. It doesn’t mean something superficial or consumeristic but instead to be present in this life, and not to allow the emotional noise of this world to keep us from really seeing and taking all opportunities that come our way.

It’s at this point you might ask me if I have gone crazy; because there is so much more to this… incredible

This book was awesome. 4.5/5 on CP scale. Give it a read… slowly. And reflect.

What I appreciate most about this book is Nick’s honesty and authenticity when it comes to his journey as a Christian. His book definietly would resonate with a lot of the people that make up the open house here in Vancouver, BC. His book isn’t so much a story of something he did and learned from, but it is more of a commentary on the current culture and its spiritual journey.

I found Nick very generous in his description and not typically negative to other ideas, theologies or methods of christianity, but instead desiring a place to be “for something”, instead of “against something”. I know in my past I have felt the need to say or do something in contrast to the church culture to make a point, but now I am trying to find positives that our community can do together that might strengthen our community and bless our surroundings. Project51, which nick mentions in his book (pages 131-132), was birthed out of our conversation at Sourlaize and it was a spring board for our community to continue to look for things we can be for, instead of doing things against the traditional.

Just as the title suggests, this is a book about honesty and hopefulness; it gives us a breath of fresh air in a time where there seems to be this desire to avoid the big questions and stay safely in a shell. The skepticism is received well as Nick continues to point toward hope and never stays (safely) in the skeptical world many of us do too often.

I am not too sure what the church and Christianity will look like in the years to come, but I think Nick might begin a movement of authors and practitioners toward a truly authentic expression that embraces the questions and moves into hope.

My CP rating is 4/5 for you church planters out there.

I am about halfway through the book and really enjoying it. I totally recommend it as a helpful book if you are going through a time of questioning the church and your faith.

Rollins uses familiar bible stories in some cases and the twists the endings to bring about a point or something for us to think about, and still in other parables he makes up a fictional world describing a well known moral lesson that we might know from the bible or church and then spinning it on its head as well. Each parable made me think deeply and I am even going to gift this book to a number of friends as I think it really has helped me along in my own journey and could be very helpful with anyone else. I even used one of the parables in a recent church service we put on at the open house.

I am not sure if I would do the review justice by telling you some specific examples, but I will say that for those church planters out there that want to have their view of God stretched and encouraged, and also have a way to bridge some of the culture gaps of today’s society, I highly recommend this as a helpful text that will encourage conversation amongst all types and backgrounds of people. I give this book a 4.5/5 for my unqualified CP ranking.

This book has inspired me to work through some of my own parables that I have written but never completed and possibly using them in the future. Maybe even posting them here. We shall see…

Now after reading the book, I have a better understanding of how I inadvertently trigger something in my wife, leaving her feeling like I’m withdrawing my love. And she too, had begun to be more aware when she stumbles into language that disrespects me and sends me running. Knowledge of how each of us operates based on language of love and respect can easily turn arguments around making them shorter in duration and less intense than before.

A while back my wife and I also attended a conference called Love and Respect put on by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs and his wife and it has made this book come more alive than perhaps it may have by simply reading it. The stories were helpful in this book, but having a real person in front of you sharing a personal story, as opposed to the story about “Sarah” in the book, would make the experience and understanding of he topic more real. As it were, the books stories were helpful, but they were hard to totally identify with.

On the whole, I think my wife has benefited more from this book than I have. She is using words of respect that I really feel encouraged by. However, I’ve been left feeling still a little unclear of how to reframe my words of love towards her. Love is such an overly used word in our culture and it feels as if I’m left not knowing which words really hit home with her and which one’s sound like a cheesy soap opera. This is my homework I guess to ask her when my words connect with her and when they don’t.

NOTE:I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program.

Here is a better review than I could give by Bob Hyatt.

As a church planter I give it a CP rating of 2.5/5; not essential but helpful.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Would I rate this for church planting… I can’t sorry. If I did I would feel wrong. I am not sure why. No rating today.

I recommend this book, but not in the knowledge way. I recommend you buy it, read it, dream and then give it away. Of course someone might find you a little odd giving away a coffee table book… yes its that big. But its not a book I can keep around. Someone will get this book from me this holiday season. I hope they are as inspired as I was.

In Part 1 of the book he works out his theology and in essence the churches theology over the past centuries and presents some new ways of understanding God. In Part 2 he details 10 worship experiences in light of these theological ideas. I found my self drawn to the experiences more deeply than I have before, but I also realized during my reading that his context in Belfast makes much more sense for the types of services they plan. With that said, I think there is much to be learned from the thoughts in Part 1 and for them to be practiced in a creative way, similar, but more unique to the context one finds themselves in.

I am going to be leading a book study on How (not) to speak of God this September and I have an opening for 1 more person. Let me know if you are interested, as I think this book will be an important piece of material for my own development and for the the open house in 2010.

The premise of the book is there are a group of teenagers being teenagers and amongst all the hoopla one night one of their friends goes into a drug induced coma. It is then determined that this girl (named Karen) has been in someway interacting with some 4th dimension (my words not Coupland’s) and has seen things that she was or wasn’t supposed to see. Either way she goes into a coma for 17 years while her friends grow up in age (years), but really never in maturity. When she awakes the world appears bizarre to her with all the new technological developments yet no real positive progress and as she wrestles with being a 17 year old in 34 year old body (yet not actually being any less mature than her friends in many ways).

At this point I am not going to spoil the book (but I kind of do later), because the twists are well done and bizarre too, but personally I appreciate Coupland’s movement in this area (as I always have) and believe the jumps the book makes are not that bizarre. I digress, but should say that there are a lot of holistic items I gained from the book that as Christians we should read and find appreciation for. The later stages of the book begin to bring some of the 4th dimension to light and as the characters interact with this dimension you begin to see and feel the realization that narcissism really engulfs the entire culture.

I am not sure if Coupland was trying to reveal a sense of the narcissistic culture (based in Vancouver no less) through this book, but my greatest appreciation of the book was how after the [spoiler] “disaster,” the characters are now sent to re-enter the world with a sense of truth to the way they have acted (and how they have treated the world) and to bring about its best, and put others first in all that they do. They were given a glimpse into the truth and then sent back into their world to spread this truth throughout.

I feel that as a Christian, Jesus has given us a glimpse of how heaven is to be on earth and we can choose to sit idly by, or act on that truth that we know. Girlfriend in a Coma gives a glimpse of a present day idleness and then gives hope to the reader (through the characters) that we can choose to live (love) differently.

I wonder how aware we are of our own narcissistic behaviours and how much we sit idly by when we know there is more to life than this… specifically presently! Jesus prayer was “Your Kingdom (reality) come, on earth as it is in Heaven.” How much of my life is bringing Heaven to Earth.