Mark Driscoll’s The Radical Reformission (which I read last month) served as a sort of manifesto of the mission he set out to follow in the planting of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  If it was the manifesto, then his Confessions of a Reformission Rev. is the story of how that manifesto was worked out culturally, theologically, and ecclesiologically to bring Mars Hill to where it is today.  Radical Reformission was the “why,” Confessions is the “how.”  While both were great reads and valuable tools for anyone who wants to reach their culture with the gospel, Confessions ups the ante in just about every way and is the best work of Driscoll’s I’ve read yet.

Driscoll tells Mars Hill’s story from its humble beginnings in a borrowed youth room to its current explosion in influence and ministry in America’s least-churched city.  Each chapter of the book details a chapter in the church’s history, marked off by the number of people who made it up at the time.  In each, Driscoll details the struggles that marked that particular stage of the planting process, both for he as a pastor and for the church as a whole.  This structure flows really well and does a fantastic job of communicating to the reader how the church got from A to B. 

Since it’s a history of the church, the book is largely a collection of stories, which causes Driscoll the author to shine like I’ve never seen him before.  His blunt honesty, clever wit, and theological fidelity make him perfectly suited for a book like this.  It’s engaging from cover to cover.  He also seems to have matured a bit since the writing of The Radical Reformission, with more humility and introspection coming through in his words.  While there’s not really much in the way of new content for Driscoll from a theological or ecclesiological perspective, the book’s real power lies in the content of the story itself.  As a pastor, and especially now as a prospective church planter, I’ve often looked at large churches and wondered how on earth they became what they are.  Imagining my little congregation becoming a church like that seemed incomprehensible from a practical perspective.  Seeing the story of Mars Hill’s growth – in spite of Driscoll’s freely-admitted errors – hammers home the point that it is truly only God who grows his church.  Driscoll highlights the decisions that were key moments along the way, dispensing valuable wisdom to those who follow in his footsteps, but not for one moment over the course of the book do we lose the unmistakable impression that he realizes he was just riding along on God’s ride.  This combination of practical advice and strong theological perspective makes for a powerful read.  Church planters, pastors, deacons, and anybody with a pulse for the gospel or their church will find this a great resource.  I commend it to you.

As I prepare to enter the world of church planting, I’m spending my time reading just about everything of use I can get my hands on.  After tackling Ed Stetzer and J.D. Payne at the end of last year, I’ve moved on to Mark Driscoll for the beginning of 2010.  Last week, I finished his book The Radical Reformission, with Confessions of a Reformission Rev. now on the slate.  If the latter is as good as the former, it’ll be a worthwhile read.

In The Radical Reformission, Driscoll seeks to lay out exactly what kind of challenge awaits the modern church.  The culture has moved on without us, seeing the church as an archaic dinosaur from decades gone by with little to no relevance for today’s world.  Much of that, Driscoll argues, is due to the standoffish way we’ve approached our culture over the years.  The temptation, then, is to plunge headfirst into cultural accommodation to try to win back the people we’ve alienated.  Driscoll, however, suggests that will be an empty pursuit, only resulting in winning people back to a worthless and powerless religion.  He argues that we must take the timeless gospel message and change the way we relate it to the world around us.  We must understand the culture in which we live – whether Seattle, Savannah, or Salt Lake City – and contextualize the message with our words and actions so that it can be best communicated to broken people where they’re at.  In his classic raw, witty style, Driscoll offers a way forward to help Christians do exactly that.

From a prospective church planter’s perspective, this was a fantastic “big picture” book.  Driscoll does a great job of spelling out with clarity and precision the cultural picture that we all have to deal with.  He clearly understands modern-day America and he’s got a heart for the people that inhabit it.  Viewing the book through that lens as a “Diagnosing and Reaching Culture 101” text, Driscoll could hardly have done much better.  Older, more tradition-bound Christians should read it as a wake-up call to the realities waiting just outside their church’s door, and younger, boundary-pushing Christians should read it as a strong reminder that the answer to our cultural disconnect isn’t hip ideas and catchy campaigns but rather the timeless message of the Gospel.  The book’s only real weakness stems from the fact that it’s now six years old.  While the culture hasn’t changed that much, Driscoll has, and there were moments in the book where I think 2010 Mark Driscoll might have said things a bit more carefully than 2004 Mark Driscoll.  Nothing glaring, but I can imagine some spots where perhaps someone unfamiliar with the topics could take things the wrong way, seeing Driscoll as more culturally (rather than theologically) driven than he actually is.  All-in-all, though, this is a fantastic read for church planters, pastors, and people who know other people who need Jesus.  Give it a shot.

With church planting looming large on the horizon, small groups have been on my mind a lot of late.  Heather and I have recently joined a community group at church, and it’s quickly becoming apparent just how vital strong community is to the development of a healthy church.  As I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of the small group structure at our plant, I noticed a book of Heather’s from back in college on the shelf that I hadn’t read – Julie Gorman’s Community that is Christian.  The book describes itself as a handbook on small groups, so I decided that it would be a good idea to pick it up and add it to my reading lineup.  Sadly, the end result was disappointing.

That’s not to say the book was entirely without value.  There were some good insights here and there, such as the quote I posted yesterday.  Gorman does a good job of emphasizing, as the title suggests, a type of small-group community that is distinctly Christian in it’s identity.  We aren’t simply a generic group or social club, we’re the church – the body of Christ formed by him for his purpose.  Unfortunately, the overall focus of the book betrayed that emphasis.  Community That is Christian could have been titled The Psychology of Small Groups and it likely would have better reflected its content.  The vast majority of the book deals with the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and how to harness them to achieve true community in small groups.  It reads like a dry psychology textbook and rarely made me step back and consider an idea that was captivating or new.  Gorman seems to be trying to be as broad as possible in an attempt to be applicable to a group with any conceivable purpose, but the net effect was a lot of information that lacked focus and seemed to run together.  Even the “firestarters” – the practical group exercises that closed most chapters – felt so generic that it was hard to imagine a group of actual people doing them.  In summary, the book felt very much like what it was for Heather – a textbook.  There’s a lot of information within that may appeal to the academic crowd, but there’s very little here to be gained by your average small group.  I’d recommend skipping it.

There are few preachers I’m as interested to listen to as Mark Driscoll.  Love him or hate him, the guy has a rare knack for taking classic Christian doctrine and thought and presenting it in a way that is relevant for a young, 21st-century audience – not by watering things down, but by having the guts to just tell it like it is.  I had my first encounter with Driscoll’s writing this past year as our men’s study group back at Hazelwood perused his A Book You’ll Actually Read on Church Leadership.  What he had to say was good and helpful, which I expected.  What I didn’t expect was how well the book communicated to not just the usual Driscoll audience (Gen-X’ers and below) but to older, more traditional Christians as well.  Buoyed on by that, I read through Driscoll’s Vintage Jesus over the holiday weekend, and while it probably doesn’t have quite the cross-generational appeal as On Church Leadership, it was a solid book for communicating the central truths of the gospel to emerging generations.

As the title suggests, Driscoll (and co-author Gerry Breshears) isn’t out to reinvent the wheel here.  His purpose is simple and straightforward – to take the timeless truths about Jesus Christ and apply them to the countless spiritual questions being asked by young postmoderns.  Who was Jesus?  Does it really matter if he was God, if his mom was a virgin, or if he came back from the dead?  Is he really the only way to know God, and isn’t that notion supremely arrogant and bigoted?  It’s questions like these that Driscoll seeks to answer by letting the Jesus of the Bible speak for himself as much as possible.  Through interesting quotes and cultural examples, Driscoll shows that people all around us are asking these questions.  He wants to let Jesus answer them.

I enjoyed Vintage Jesus, and there’s a lot of good stuff to be found.  Look, you either think that Driscoll’s blunt and sometimes crude way of speaking is either refreshing or revolting, and I fall into the former camp.  I’m not defending everything he’s ever said, but I think it’s sad that today we’re much more likely to try to soften the blows of some stark imagery in Scripture rather than letting the hard meaning shine through.  People of our generations can see right through it, and I think that’s why they’re flocking to Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church in droves.  They realize that this is a guy who tells things straight-up.  For the book, this is either a plus or a minus, depending on the reader.  For twenty and thirty-somethings, much of what Driscoll has to say will resonate, but I can’t shake the feeling that older believers will have trouble connecting to his style, even if they’re not offended by it.  The biggest negative I took from the book, though, has nothing to do with the book itself – it’s the fact that I read it just a few months after Tim Keller’s The Reason For God.  The two books share a lot in terms of scope and content (seeking to answer skeptical questions and present the case of the God of Scripture), and frankly, Keller does it better.  That’s not a knock on Driscoll at all, but rather a nod to the fact that I truly think Keller’s book is a once-in-a-generation masterpiece, like C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity was for our parents and grandparents.  However, there are some for whom Keller’s ultra-philosophical approach might not connect, and I think that Driscoll’s approach might succeed in some of those cases.  In the end, Vintage Jesus will be a good read for most people, and if you have friends or family who are more likely to listen to something by Eddie Vedder than read a New York Times op-ed, you’ll find it a great resource as you seek to think through spiritual issues through a postmodernist’s eyes and communicate the wonder of the unchanging Christ.

If you walk into your local Christian bookstore, I’d dare wager you’ll find no shortage of books on marriage.  With that being the case, a book on the subject really needs to do something really well in order to stand out from the crowd and justify its existence.  This year, John Piper added to the flood with his first ever book on the topic, This Momentary Marriage.  I’ve been reading through it chapter-by-chapter for the past couple weeks.  So, by the criteria I outlined above, is there any good reason for this book to have been written?  My answer – absolutely.

Whereas many books focus on the practical aspects of marriage – communication, finances, parenting and the like – Piper goes a different direction.  His point is not that practical matters are unworthy of discussion, but rather that another matter is much more worthy of our careful attention and understanding.  He focuses his book on the very nature of marriage itself as a picture of the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his church.  The only way we will truly know and enjoy marriage is to understand what marriage was designed by God to be.  After spending the opening chapters laying out the biblical and theological identity of marriage, Piper then spends several chapters submitting various aspects of marriage to this high view of its meaning and purpose.  Is marriage primarily about having kids?  Is sex for pleasure or procreation?  Is singleness a second-tier existence?  All these questions are examined carefully in light of the fact that our marriages aren’t primarily about us, but they’re about making a statement about who Jesus is and our identity in him.

This book would be immensely valuable to anyone seeking to improve their own marriage, engaged couples preparing for their wedding, or even single people seeking to better understand their place in what’s largely a married person’s world – and church.  I found it to be a tremendous challange as a husband to think more deeply and comprehensively about what it means to love my wife as Christ loves his church.  Piper’s dose of perspective is much needed.  So often, our attempts to fix problems in our marriages by simply fixing problems is like a repairman with bad eyesight trying to repair a computer without his glasses on.  What we need to do if we want strong and healthy marriages is to put our glasses on – to see marriage through the lens of Christ.  Then, we will see clearly the adjustments that need to be made and make them to the glory of Christ – the perfect husband who will never leave or forsake his bride.  In that effort, I commend Piper’s book to you.

Last spring during the transitional time at Hazelwood, our men’s study group was going through Mark Driscoll’s little book On Church Leadership (A Book You’ll Actually Read).  We were going through the book chapter-by-chapter as men and leaders in the congregation in an attempt to get a better grasp on what our roles were as leaders in the body of Christ.  The study went very well (who knew that 20-somethings and 70-somethings could come together over a Driscoll book?), but as things started getting busy and hectic with the calling of a new pastor it trailed off and we never actually finished the book.  Over the holiday weekend I finally picked it back up, re-read some early portions and finished it out, and I can safely say that I’d definitely recommend it as a resource for any church leadership team.

True to the title of his A Book You’ll Actually Read series, Driscoll has written a book that is obviously meant to be accessible to the layman.  It’s short (able to be read through in a couple hours), free of complex theological terminology (and when Driscoll does use a term some might find unfamiliar, he explains it), and it clearly and concisely presents Biblical teaching on subjects such as elders and deacons and the roles of women in church leadership.  Despite the book’s simplicity in presentation, its actual content is quite rich.  Driscoll has a gift for clearly presenting ideas that could be quite convoluted in the hands of another author – a skill he’s no doubt honed over years of preaching to Seattle’s largely unchurched population.  As such, the book is a useful tool for exploring ideas like plural eldership to people who have never heard of it outside a Presbyterian context. 

To a seminary grad or well-read pastor, Driscoll’s not providing any earth-shattering revelations, but he has provided  a great entry-level primer into some important aspects of leadership in the local church.  This little volume would be a great topic for a study among men’s groups or leadership teams.  Sure, you could always buy your deacons a big fancy tome with a fancy cover and more material, but why not buy them a book they’ll actually read.

Every year, I look forward to attending Alistair Begg’s Basics Conference in Cleveland, OH, and every year I make it a point to pick up a book by the speakers.  A few years back, British pastor Vaughan Roberts spoke, and I took home a copy of his book Distinctives with me.  It got lost in the shuffle when I returned from the conference, and I just picked it up and read it over the last couple weeks.  As much as I liked Roberts as a speaker, I can’t say I was thrilled with the book.  It’s not that it was bad – it wasn’t – but rather that, in a terrible twist of irony, there’s nothing that makes it particularly, well…distinct.

The book focuses on what character qualities and actions should set us apart as Christians in an unbelieving world.  Each chapter takes on a different quality, contrasts it to the philosophy and practice of the world in which we live, and examines how our faith should make us distinct from the world in a way that points to Christ.  Great concept, and Roberts has some good things to say in each chapter.  The book seems to be written, though, on an introductory level for those brand new (or even considering) the Christian faith.  This is great in such a context, but I’m afraid it will leave more mature Christians wanting a bit more.  As I read, I found pretty quickly that this wouldn’t be a book I’d find tremendously helpful (though that isn’t to say there was nothing gained along the way), though I thought it might be a good resource for friends who are trying to wrap their minds around Christian identity and living.

While I do think it would be helpful in that way, a couple things hold it back.  First, Roberts is British, and some of his cultural references and sayings would probably be lost on an American reader.  For someone new to Christianity, that could serve as another layer of confusion.  Roberts is a gifted communicator, and he writes in a way that is accessible to a broad audience, but I’m just not sure that there’s much to make this book stand out among similar offerings from other authors.  If I knew someone who wanted to understand how the Christian faith shapes our outlook on the world, I think I’d be more likely to recommend something by Piper or Keller.  I don’t want this review to seem too negative, because I really have no negative feelings about the book – I just don’t see it as standing out in a crowd of titles on Christian living.  Perhaps the best way to sum it up is this: if you are – or have a friend who is - a new believer from the U.K. and are struggling to know how your faith should shape your life, then this will probably be a helpful book.  If you don’t fit that profile, you’re probably better off spending your money on another title.

Last month, I read and reviewed Ed Stetzer’s Planting Missional Churches, the first book in my current foray into church planting resources.  This week, I just finished reading Discovering Church Planting by J.D. Payne, and it served as a perfect companion piece to Stetzer’s work.  Much like Stetzer, Payne - who is a Professor of Church Planting at Southern Seminary here in Louisville and an elder at Crossing Church - takes his theological and practical knowledge and looks at the task of church planting from just about every angle imaginable.  However, whereas Stetzer’s focus was much more deeply rooted in the nuts-and-bolts practical stuff (for example, including chapters on facility selection, financial setup, and church naming), Payne paints with a broader brush, spending more time on the theological and writing what could most accurately be described as a 400-page philosophy of church planting.  In short, if Stetzer tells you how, Payne tells you why.

Now admittedly, that’s an oversimplification.  Just as Stetzer spends time on the theological and biblical underpinnings of planting, so Payne talks through some practical considerations.  However, even these chapters are much more philosophically driven.  For example, his very helpful chapter “Tentmaking and Church Planting,” on bi-vocational planting, explores practical issues of financial support and its entailing stresses but also offers an overarching view on why self-supported planting is often a better way rather than a last resort.  He not only says, “Here are the practical outworkings of bi-vocational planting,” but also, “Here’s what kind of statement bi-vocational planting makes about the gospel.”  The way he applies this “big picture” mentality across the spectrum of the planting process was tremendously helpful and has given me a lot of food for thought. 

The book is stuffed full of good information.  Three historical chapters focusing on Moravian, Methodist, and Baptist planting movements were especially worthwhile reading, and the summary questions and extensive bibliography and notes will be a great resource for further discussion and study.  Though, at times that information, one of the book’s greatest assets, can be a liability.  While great quotes on planting and excerpts from other works litter the book, the way that these items are interspersed and arranged seems a bit disjointed and can often break the flow of the chapter, making the information difficult to process.   Payne’s writing style, much like Stetzer’s, is very simple and straightforward, which makes the book very accessible but not quite as engaging as it could have been.   Let me be clear, though – these are minor stylistic quibbles.  J.D. Payne has written a book that will be a blessing to church planters the world over and has earned a place in my library right next to Ed Stetzer.

Plainly put, I’m preparing to enter into a whole new world of ministry.  As I look towards church planting with some Godly friends and partners in ministry, my tremendous excitement has been coupled with an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy and ignorance about just how to proceed.  As we’ve begun the first steps of planning, my friend Scott loaned me Ed Stetzer’s book Planting Missional Churches.  I just finished reading it this afternoon, and I’ve found it to be a great primer to wrap my mind around the many and various factors that go into planting a new church.

Most people in SBC circles know Stetzer as Lifeway’s stats guru.  As the denomination’s director of research, Stetzer has compiled a lot of information and insight on the landscape of modern church life.  Prior to this work, Stetzer successfully planted multiple congregations in several different settings.  In Planting Missional Churches, he takes what he has learned through that experience and shares it with other planters who are heading out into the North American mission field.  The book is as close to comprehensive as any book I can imagine, exploring church planting from its theological and biblical foundations to the practical aspects of church government, financial matters, worship structure, and selecting a facility.

The book is definitely strongest when it is the most practical.  Not that Stetzer’s theological and biblical work isn’t good, it just isn’t as robust and detailed as the book’s more practical sections.  However, for me, this wasn’t necessarily a negative.  I’ve given a lot of thought to theology, ecclesiology, and my philosophy of church ministry.  What I haven’t given much thought to are the ABC’s of how a new congregation actually begins.  After reading Stetzer’s book, I feel like I at least have a basic grasp of what awaits us over the coming years.  This will definitely be a book that I’ll go buy a copy of and use as a reference resource as we continue in our church planting journey.  If you’ve got an interest in planting and are looking for a good introductory book on what’s involved, this is one you should definitely take a look at.

I just finished putting my little girl to bed.  One thing that Heather and I want for her is to grow up with her earliest memories being of us seeking God together as a family.  Every night, before we put her to bed, we read a passage from the Bible together.  Last month, on the recommendation of my uncle, we ordered a copy of The Big Picture Story Bible to use with Jordan.  I would definitely recommend it to any parents of young kids.  True to its title, the book eschews breaking the Bible down into moralistic stories and instead focuses on weaving together for kids God’s plan of redemption, tracing his promises and actions from Eden through the history of Israel and culminating with the arrival of Christ.  The story is well-communicated for a kid’s mind by David Helm (though Jordan’s still too young to understand at this point) with beautiful illustrations by Gail Schoonmaker.  In fact, while reading to her, I’ve found myself impacted with a reminder of just how amazing God’s sovereign weaving of history is.  This book takes that big truth and presents it in a simple way.  I see it being a great resource as Jordan grows older, and I hope you’ll check it out for your kids.

I’d also like to hear from other parents of young kids out there.  What do you do for family worship?  What advice would you give that you’ve learned along the way?  Let me know in the comments.