Book Review: This is Our Time

This book review was included in the August 2019 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.

The church needs clear voices that see the problems in our culture but also offer hope and strategy for engagement. Trevin Wax is one of the best voices in the church on this subject. His book This is Our Time will leave you challenged and hopeful.

Wax takes on specific idols in our culture, then shows how we can not only fight these idols, but subversively show the world how Jesus is better. Specifically, Wax tackles our phones (Your Phone is a Myth-Teller), pop culture (Hollywood is After Your Heart), politics, sexuality and other more subtle ways that we are shaped by our culture.

Wax says all this not to tell us to ditch our phones and completely refrain from pop culture. His goal is to show the way these things make promises to us that they aren't able to keep - promises that only God can keep. He says “evangelism is not just convincing people the gospel is true but also that it is better.”

One of the ways this book helped me was in his description of two common Christian approaches to culture. Read this paragraph and consider which camp you are more likely to fall into:

Some Christians focus most of their energy on exposing lies. We might call this group “Lie-detector Christians.” They can easily spot the falsehoods in our society’s myths, but they often miss the longing behind the myth. So they stand with arms crossed in a posture of constant condemnation. On the other hand, some Christians focus so much on the deeper longings behind our society’s myths that they never expose what is false.

The point of all this is that we need to recognize our proclivities and perhaps fight against them in order to achieve a more Biblical, well-rounded view. And the result is that we can go forth with a positive, focused mission in the world we live in. And this keeps us from adopting an "all is lost” view towards our culture. He says “In short, no Golden Age of Christianity exists... If we are nostalgic for an older era, it is usually because we've imagined that era as less sinful than it really was.”

This is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Highly recommend.