Meadowcroft PCA

The Life We’re Looking For - Andy Crouch

Crouch has long thought and written about how our technology shapes us. His strength is in going behind the presenting issue (in this case, our obsession with tech) and thinking about what drives this presenting issue.

In this book, Crouch begins by discussing babies and their quest to see and be recognized by another human face, just a few moments after they are born. The babies are looking for recognition and comfort. Crouch notes that this quest continues for us throughout our lives, but, sadly, we often settle for a screen rather than real fellowship with others who bear the image of God. This choice is making us less human and more lonely.

Crouch connects our tech obsession with one of our oldest and most formidable idols, the idol of Mammon. Mammon worship bears itself out in many ways - including how having money gives us “superpowers” which allow us to have just the right goods and services without the entanglements of relationship and friendship.

Crouch encourages us to peer behind the curtain of our most popular tech to see that, despite tech’s promise of superpowers, human suffering is often part of the chain that brings us the cheap delights of quick-delivered products and tailor-made social media. I was convicted by his discussion of the need for content moderators on social media sites:

…content moderators are exposed, every minute of their day, to assaults on the soul. They deal not with the inevitable by-products of life but the horrifying evidence of evil. They find companionship with one another in brief breaks, at the risk of defying the productivity monitoring system that tracks their workday. And they are pinioned in front of screens that ask nothing of their bodies while wreaking havoc on their hearts and minds.

One of Crouch’s strengths throughout his books is how he helps us ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves for our own good, and the good of those around us. This book won’t be a breezy read, but it will help and challenge you as you consider life in the modern world.

Quote: Our future depends on this: whether we decide that we want technology to enable us and our neighbors to be persons for one another.

Redeeming Power - Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church - Diane Langberg

The American Church continues to deal with a re-examination of some of the fruits of its ministry. While God continues to build, grow, and bless His church, and while there is much evidence of God’s grace among us, we have also understood more and more of the bad fruit we have often enabled and encouraged or, at the least, minimized and tolerated.

Multiple recent podcasts have helped in this re-examination - I can highly recommend The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church by Mike Cosper and Reconstructing Faith by Trevin Wax.

In this book, Diane Langberg (a local counselor who has presented to churches in our Presbytery) focuses on the overall issue of power - showing what it is, how it is abused, and, thankfully, how it can be redeemed.

Personally, this book helped me to consider and remember the role that power can play in relationships in the church. Langberg discuses power in human systems, power between men and women, and power as it relates to race, among other things.

While this book will be helpful for any Christian, I especially recommend it for those involved in or aspiring to Church leadership.

Quote: If we are truly like the person of Christ in the kingdoms of our hearts, then what flows out of us will resemble him. Where it does not, we need to ask him to do whatever is needed in us for change to occur. People will know our source of life by the outflowing waters they taste.

Reading the Times - A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News - Jeffrey Bilbro

As the market for 24/7, often partisan-based “news” continues to explode, Bilbro helps us to step back and consider our news consumption by asking three questions -

1) To what should we attend?

2) How should we imagine and experience time?

3) How should we belong to one another?

The second section may have been the most fascinating of these (your brain may hurt at some points), but I found the third part the most helpful. Bilbro says that it is usually not data or the best arguments that convince us, but, “Rather, we respond to events primarily based on prejudices and hunches - feelings formed in large part by the communities we imagine ourselves belonging to.” Given that our preferred news sources (for better or worse) often act as one of these communities that we belong to, it’s important for the community of the church to be a community shaped by the values of Jesus, so that we can be formed as people who, among other things, consume the news well in order to love God and neighbor.

One of the most challenging sections of this book came when Bilbro quoted a prayer of Thomas Merton regarding Adolf Hitler. In the prayer, Merton said:

When I pray for peace I pray for the following miracle. That God move all men to pray and do penance and recongize each one his own great guilt, because we are all guilty… We are a tree, of which [Hitler] is one of the fruits, and we all nourish him, and he thrives most of all on our hatred and condemnation of him, when that condemnation disregards our own guilt, and piles the responsibility for everything upon somebody else’s sins!

Bilbro notes - “instead of merely condemning this world, Merton’s bracing prayer reminds us that insofar as we are entertained by this game of peek-a-boo, we are guilty.”

Considering this challenge, we can then question our own relationship to the news - do we read/watch/listen to the news to better love our neighbor? Or is it mainly that spectacle (the “peek-a-boo”) is entertaining to us? Bilbro helps us to ask, and begin to answer, these questions.

Quote: In short, if we want to think well about the events of our day, we will first need to belong well to the body of Christ and to the neighbors with whom we share our places.

You’re Only Human - Kelly M. Kapic

One of the most enticing falsehoods of our era is that we were made to live without limits, and that any limitations are for us to overcome, not to accept and live graciously within them. Kapic writes this book to remind us that our limits are part of God’s good design.

Kapic begins by affirming the state of our embodied and human existence. He reminds us that God loves us AND likes us - and discusses how Jesus’ incarnation affirms the goodness of being made human.

I especially enjoyed when Kapic brought his theology of limitations to bear on the individual’s relationship to the church. If you’re like me, you may find it easy to get overwhelmed by all the needs of the world - caring for the poor and marginalized, standing up for truth, teaching and discipling others, and simply telling others about Jesus. These are good things to give our lives to, and indeed we all play our part! However, we can sometimes get discouraged by how much we are not doing. This is where it helps to remember our unity together as a church. Because this unity is real, we can truly say, with Kapic:

Today I am caring for prisoners in jail; I am evangelizing the disenfranchised in Nepal; I am praying over the sick child in the hospital; I am serving the recovering victims of sex trafficking; I am standing against racial injustice; and I am caring for widows. And I am doing so much more. How? I am doing all of this because I am part of the living body of Christ. God’s Spirit has united me to Christ and, because of that union, to my sisters and brothers of the faith.

We live in a hyperproductive era where we are often defined by how much we do (and don’t do). You’re Only Human helps us to embrace how God has wonderfully, fearfully and lovingly made us.

Quote: Western culture tends to define personal identity by isolating the person from all context. The Christian faith always understands the person as finite and necessarily in connection: with God, with other persons, with the creation at large, and within the person. Because sin distorts both our internal world and external relations, restoration requires that we understand our connectivity and view ourselves as objects of God’s love and delight.

The Contemporary Christian - John Stott

It’s good for us to find authors that speak outside of our immediate context, as they will often have insights that might not occur to us in the cultural air that we breathe. John Stott is one of my all-time favorite preachers and authors, and I’m going to try to read at least one book by him every year. Stott (a British pastor who died in 2011) took special care to bring God’s Word to bear on all listeners - be they rich or poor, male or female, conservative or liberal. His preaching and writing is a true treasure to the church.

Stott breaks this volume into five categories - the gospel, the disciple, the Bible, the church, and the world. Stott addresses these categories through the lens of what he calls “double listening” - which I have found to be one of the best ways to consider how the church is to relate to the world. I’ll let him speak for himself:

How can we relate the Word to the world, understanding the world in light of the Word, and even understanding the Word in light of the world? We have to begin with a double refusal. We refuse to become either so absorbed in the Word, that we escape into it and fail to let it confront the world, or so absorbed in the world, that we conform to it and fail to subject it to the judgment of the Word.

In place of this double refusal we are called to double listening, listening both to the Word and to the world.

This idea may take us aback - aren’t we supposed to listen only to God’s Word? Stott explains this paradox:

I am not suggesting that we should listen to God and to our fellow human beings in the same way or with the same degree of deference. We listen to the Word with humble relevance, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.

This idea of double listening can be so helpful as we consider our relationship to the world. Stott wrote this book 30 years ago, but you will find that, at many points, it feels like he is writing it in 2022.

Quote: ‘Mission’ arises, then, from the biblical doctrine of the church in the world. If we are not ‘the church’, the holy and distinct people of God, we have nothing to say because we are compromised. If, on the other hand, we are not ‘in the world’, deeply involved in its life and suffering, we have no-one to serve because we are insulated. Our calling is to be ‘holy’ and ‘worldly’ at the same time.

Ten Words to Live By - Jen Wilkin

I am cheating a little on this one because I haven’t read the whole thing. I picked this up when I was teaching the back half of an adult Sunday School class on the Ten Commandments. I need to go back and finish the beginning. Wilkin is an outstanding writer and teacher, and I was consistently helped by her exposition of the commandments, which brought out several modern-day applications while continually pointing the reader to Jesus.

I especially enjoyed how Wilkin showed consistent threads that run throughout the commandments.

Quote: The ninth word (on bearing false witness) builds on the fifth, for it is impossible to honor our elders if we speak falsely about them. The ninth word builds on the sixth, for many who would never contemplate murder commit character assassination without a thought. The ninth word builds on the seventh, for no one enters into adultery without first having lied about the worth of another. The ninth word builds on the eighth, presenting us with an additional angle on thievery, for certainly bearing false witness is identity theft.

Untrustworthy - Bonnie Kristian

As social media, partisan cable news, and more have exploded in recent years, so has, according to Kristian, a “knowledge crisis breaking our brains, polluting our politics, and corrupting Christian community.” In recommending this book, I recognize that this is a sensitive subject, and that yes, sometimes conspiracy theories prove to be true. As the foreword to the book states, “we live in an era of earned distrust.”

This is a truth that I’ve wrestled with as I have considered the pastoral implications of this knowledge crisis, and I was helped by the distinctions that Kristian makes. The knowledge (or epistemic) crisis “isn’t a constructive skepticism of concentrated power, which might be the healthiest habit of the American political mind. It’s darker, more destructive, scornful and suspicions yet also quite credulous; it’s always eager to believe the worst. It’s more interested in trolling and complaining than in the slow, mundane work of making things better.”

This is important for the church to consider as we seek to obey God and love our neighbor - this typically becomes harder to do when we become awash in political news and social media. According to research that Kristian cites, “… political media consumption and making political posts on social media are both correlated with greater misunderstanding.”

Kristian spends a large section of the book in detailing the problem, but helpfully begins to construct ways to help in the latter part of the book. She discusses building a humble and practical epistemology, considers how we might best use our technology, and even provides help for those who have lost loved ones to what she calls “conspiracism.”

Quote: So it’s not that I’m anti-Internet. Far from it! But do a thought experiment with me: suppose it’s 1995 and you’re sharing exactly as many news articles and opinion pieces and videos with friends and family as you do now. There’s no Facebook, of course, and most people don’t have email yet. You painstakingly clip the contentyou want to share out of the local newspaper and Newsweek..then you go to a print shop or Staples, some place with copy machines, and you make hundreds of copies of each article. Perhaps there’s a news segment you want to share, so you record it in your VCR and get it copied on hundreds of VHS cassettes. Then you package up all your “shares” and head to the post office, mailing your copies and tapes to the people presently on your Facebook friends list. “Please read!” you write in a note for each package, clipping it to a recent Polaroid photo of yourself. “This is so important to understanding what’s going on in our country right now.” The next day, a new newspaper arrives, another news segment airs, and you do it all over again. What would your friends think of you? What would you think of you?

A Non-Anxious Presence - Mark Sayers

This is another book geared especially for leaders, but will be helpful for anyone involved in a church. Sayers is a pastor in Melbourne, Australia who has hosted a couple of very helpful podcasts - This Cultural Moment and Rebuilders. In this book, Sayers describes our post-Covid time as a “gray zone” that can feel chaotic but which also holds a great opportunity for the church’s light to shine.

Sayers notes that “gray zone” times are times of high anxiety in organizations, including churches. During these times, it is incumbent upon leaders not to lead according to these anxieties, but to function as, yes, “a non-anxious presence” in the midst of these seasons. While I didn’t find every aspect of Sayers’ book to resonate, I have been very encouraged by his general concepts in thinking about what it looks like to lead, preach, teach, and, more generally, function as the church in this chaotic season.

Quote: The modern world promises progress and perfection without God. Leaders formed by the contemporary world can therefore presume that dependency on God is optional.

Talking About Race - Isaac Adams

This is a subject I continue to read and study, as the American church continues to struggle with division along racial/ethnic lines. Adams’ contribution is an important one - written from the standpoint of a conversation among members of the same church that are dealing with this difficult subject. Adams includes encouragements and challenges for everyone involved in the conversation.

I have to admit, this review would be a little more complete if the book hadn’t disappeared after Catherine borrowed it (she really enjoyed it too).

Quote (that I lifted from this article, since I can’t find the book!): To act as if your church is a-cultural is false advertising. Ethnic minorities in any church will be confronted with the fact that being in the ethnic minority means that being at the church will be harder for them than for those in the majority. And those in the ethnic majority must keep this difference in difficulty in mind. How much compassion could be built in churches if we simply remembered that those in the ethnic minority can easily have harder struggles than those in the majority?

Biblical Critical Theory - Christopher Watkin

This was the best book I read in 2022, and it really wasn’t close. It’s long (about 600 pages) but very accessible and, believe it or not, is a page-turner. Watkin’s goal is to show how the Biblical narrative helps us to understand, engage with and counteract various secular narratives. It was so refreshing to consider how Biblical truth comes to bear on every aspect of our cultural lives in a way that breaks free from the standard American categories of right/left or conservative/liberal (note - it helps that Watkin lives and teaches in Australia and isn’t as bound by these categories).

At various points, Watkin employs the method of “diagonilization” to show how the BIblical narrative transcends our standard narratives/choices and brings out the best/richest of all worlds:

There are 28 chapters, each of which take up a section of the Bible or a biblical theme - which is then set loose to engage with and adjust (and sometimes overturn) our typical cultural thinking. I’ll be thinking about this book, Lord willing, for a long time.

Quote: Given a choice between two camps or positions in our culture, the BIble frequently settles for neither and presents us with something richer than both, a subtler solution that neither position has the resources to imagine.