After reading “How (not) to speak of God” I really wanted to dive into more of Rollins works and so I quickly grabbed this gem (thanks to my amazon wishlist from my mother in law) and I was not disappointed. This book is a collection of parables that Peter Rollins has written over the years and used with his ikon community that truly stretch your comfortable concepts of God and the church and the bible.

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…

This marriage book is aimed at helping couples break free from their dysfunctional patterns and communication breakdowns. The book calls it “the crazy cycle” when couples enter into a lose-lose argument with both parties left feeling confused and hurt. In order to breakout of this pattern, Eggerichs applies a biblical based framework for recognizing the needs of men and women. Man’s biggest need according to Eggerichs is his need for respect and a woman’s greatest need to be loved.

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.

I just completed this book, while on holiday here in Victoria. Basically this book is a commentary on an obscure Christian document called the Didache, with Tony utilizing a small community called the Cymbrogi as a real life example of people following this book along with the Bible. I found the book interesting and simple. I am not sure how important this book or the Didache are really, but I wasn’t struggling to finish the book.

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!

Once again Rob Bell leaves me inspired. I am really looking forward to seeing him live in February in Vancouver. There is something in the way he writes that names my experience. In this book I couldn’t help but find a huge connection between suffering and creativity. It may sound sad, but I am most creative when I am suffering.

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.

This is the most stimulating, exciting, and reflective book I have read on the church in a long time. Peter Rollins rocks my world, and in the words of Richard Rohr, Peter “names my experience.”

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 thing I love about Coupland’s books is that I I always feel they connect to all of the other things I am reading (yes all the spiritual christian stuff), because the way he writes integrates a lot of it. This book is no different.

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.

The most helpful thought (concept) that I received from the book was no matter how cool new technologies are, unless there is a conversation to be had the tools render themselves useless. I see this over and over as people come up with the next best video sharing application, or social network, but the truth is, unless there is a reason to use it or people are excited to use it, it won’t be used and will die in a month. I am guilty for doing this in our own church, where I introduce another cool way to connect to one another, when people are just getting used to connecting via the last 5 ideas I had .

The second cool thing I learned from this book (or maybe realized) was that the ultimate goal needs to be collaborative action. We can create discussions using all the information out in the world, but unless the tools on the web and the people collaborate to some sort of action it too will be rendered useless.

The most applicable thing I gleaned from this book as it relates to church planting (rated CP 4/5 if you are wondering) is the movement of user generated content versus corporate generated content. The filters are gone and now anyone can create content in basically any industry.

How this relates to church planting is this: Anyone can now plant a church. And anyone can do it any way they want. And they can have access to all the same tools as anyone else for starting it. And (whether we like it or not) nobody can stop them.

I think this is good and here is why:

In the past a church planter needed: 1) to be part of a denomination, 2) a large amount of funding, 3) to pass a strict application process in order to be sent as a church planter. This is no longer necessary. And not only that but this freedom will lead to more people trying things out. In the past only a small percentage of church planters would be funded after getting through the denominational filters. That means that the denominational gurus decided who can attempt to church plant, so if they had 5 applicants, maybe only two were sent out due to available money and skill set. But in this new wave of information, resources, etc. 100 church planters can go out into the world and do this. There still may end up only being 2 left at the end of it all, but I have a feeling they may not be the same 2 that had to go through the vigorous application process as in my previous example and perhaps even more successful… (without going further as I wish to write more about this in my next post, this success may not look anything like Sunday morning, FYI).

This book gave me hope. There are holes, as Clay explains, all this freedom also leads to messiness much like his example of the way a group of pro-anorexia girls formed their own meetups, and how there could be some cultish groups that are formed ahead of us, but the more we release control of others I think the more chance we have to see some truly innovative expressions of the church in North America.

After Anna recommended this book to me, I never really thought I was going to like it based on some of her thoughts about it. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least and am quite excited about the possibilities in this book.

If I was to connect this book to church planting for one second and to be honest it is hard to do so because of its emphasis on a remote lifestyle, I would say the author presses on something very important. He writes a lot about how we have this big desire to be efficient in our work when really we should first think about being effective. It is very easy to be efficient doing things we don’t need to do. In fact I am very good at this. But the first thing is to realize whether what you are doing is worth doing in the first place? I think of church planters specifically and in our desire to prove to others that we are actually doing something, we will try to add things to our plate that we really don’t even need to do (and are definitely NOT effective). We create busying structures to justify our work as church planters. This is incredibly non-effective, no matter how efficient you can be at it.

I understand that Tim Ferriss is trying to help you outsource your life and reduce your working time so you can take up other hobby’s and life goals, but the truth is still there, if you can do what your doing in 4 hours, it is really not worth spreading that task over 8 hours, just to make someone think you’re busy. And if you are doing a task ( a certain outreach or program) and it is really not that effective, you really might as well drop it and go golfing for the afternoon. From experience, your sanity as a church planter is probably more important than whether you can “say” you piled on the work this month.

There is a lot more to be said about efficiency versus effectiveness as a church planter, and as I have commented in the past I have found either lazy or overworked (a hamster running on a wheel) church planters. But wouldn’t it be great if we were more effective in the tasks that work, and spent less time doing the things that didn’t so we could really impact our neighbourhoods?

I think that on a foundational church planting scale (those who never plan on working and church planting at the same time) this book is probably not a priority, but as a quick side note, I will say that if you are a bi-vocational pastor/ church planter this book is a must read. I personally work a full time job and lead the open house, and this book was incredibly helpful in guiding me through the things i need to do and what I am just busying myself with. For the bi-vocational pastor, freeing your “working” time so you can have more time with people in your church is very effective. And to go further, being able to minimize the church activities so that you can be effective in your job is also critical. So if you are a church planter, and are or considering to be a bi-vocational church planter I would give this book a 4.5/5. However, if you never plan to work and church plant then maybe this book wouldn’t be too helpful for you, but its a fun read anyhow.

I really enjoyed this book by Gladwell. What might be the best part, which is expressed throughout the book, is the way he de-romanticizes the rags to riches stories our culture has come to love so much. Gladwell through telling excellent stories, reveals how so many of the successes in our cultures history are through what we like to call “happy accidents.” For example Gladwell shows how the majority of professional hockey players are born between January and May, showing how the development of skills depends on birth date. Those born earlier in the year have a head start on those born later in their development leading to making the better teams, getting better coaching and thus ending up with a better future.

He also shares stories of Bill Gates and how he happened accross being around computers by accident and ended up having so much experience with them before they ever became mainstream. This is also the case for Bill Joy and Steve Jobs.

This book helped me understand my own successes and failures in life and how they have shaped who I am today. I think it is an important read for those of us who are interested in understanding who we are today. Especially when many of us believe we have been handed the short end of the stick. Sometimes we have, but if we looked deep enough we may see some happy accidents that we may or may not have taken hold of.

So I give this book a 3.75/5 in the CP rating; it is a short read (stories tend to move me fast through a book), but it will get your mind going.

Okay, I have come to grips with the fact that I am not going to complete 48 books by the end of this year. (A baby can do that to you). But for the books i do complete I will at least post my thoughts.

Tribes was very inspirational for me. Sometimes I wonder what it is we have created with the open house, and Seth inspired me to keep going. He inspired me to push the envelope, keep trying things, and my favourite quote from the book:

Change is made by people, by leaders who are proud to be called heretics because their faith is never in question.

You have to read the book to get where he is coming from with the word heretic, but basically he inspires tribe leaders to always move forward, don’t stay safe and always re-evaluate what your doing. That has been the nature and culture of toh since the beginning.

And Seth also writes:

The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely to be worth the journey. Persist.

It was a book with nuggets of truth throughout. Seth has a great understanding of our generation and of leadership. I would recommend this book for any organic church planter looking for inspiration. My CP rating is 4/5 and is best utilized by the planter to be used as a motivator.

Here are some other quotes I wrote down from the book.