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Gospel Powered Parenting

by:
Clint Carter
March 26, 2012

Last week I finished reading Gospel Powered Parenting. It was hands down the best book I’ve read in the past year (and I’ve read some good ones). Obviously my stage of life plays a significant role in why I found this book so helpful. I suppose if you aren’t a parent you wouldn’t find it as compelling.

Rarely do non-fiction books get better and more interesting with each passing chapter. GPP accomplished that. It was so good that I started expecting a drop-off in quality but it never came. I could fill several blog posts with thought provoking quotes from Farley, but instead I want to share a couple of reasons why this book stands apart from other parenting books I’ve read.

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Book Review: Total Church

by:
Ben Janssen
August 19, 2010

There seems to be no end these days to the production of books attempting to help the church get back to what it is supposed to be. The title Total Church suggests (correctly) that this is another such book. But this one deserves special attention not because of the hype surrounding it but because the authors have done an excellent job of showing what the “bottom line” of “church” is and how that bottom line affects everything we associate with church life.

The book’s layout is simple. The first two chapters spell out the two principles around which every other chapter in the book is based. These two principles are gospel and community. In the rest of the book, the authors consider various aspects of church ministry—things like evangelism, world mission, discipleship, and ministry to children—and show how gospel and community impact and inform these ministries. The result is, as the subtitle explains, a “radical reshaping” of how to do church. The authors contend that  “whether we are thinking about evangelism, social involvement, pastoral care, apologetics, discipleship, or teaching, the content is consistently the Christian gospel, and the context is consistently the Christian community” (p. 16). But unless understands what the authors mean by gospel and community, this book will be just another “how to” manual for doing church.

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Book Review: Prodigal God

by:
Ben Janssen
August 19, 2010

The reason why this book is so effective is because its aim is so simple. Keller begins the book this way, “This short book is meant to lay out the essentials of the Christian message, the gospel” (p. xi). Christianity is certainly not lacking when it comes to the number of books written on a subject. So how can Keller be so successful while writing on something so, well, basic?

The answer is in that key word in the subtitle, recovering. Yes, the “heart of the Christian faith” has been lost like a prodigal son over the centuries. Not that Keller is the only one to attempt to recover it in recent days. But he works within the realm of an orthodox, conservative reading of the Bible and shows how many—both inside and outside the church—have failed to grasp the essence of Jesus’s message.

The first thing one will want to know about this book is why it is entitled The Prodigal God when it is based on Jesus’s parable traditionally known as “The Prodigal Son.” The answer is twofold. First, the traditional name of the parable does not do justice to the focus of the story. It is not a story about one son, a so-called prodigal, but rather a story about two sons (Luke 15:11). Second, the word prodigal does not simply mean “wayward” but rather “recklessly spendthrift.” And so, Keller argues, it is just as appropriate to use it to describe the father in the story (who obviously represents God) as the younger son (p. xv).

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Book Review: unChristian

by:
Ben Janssen
January 28, 2008

“Christianity has an image problem.” That’s how unChristian begins, and it is the problem it attempts to resolve, not by explaining the Christian faith to non-Christians, but by urging professing Christians to fix their image in 6 specific areas. According to the research done for this book (from the Barna Group), Christians are accused of being hypocritical, insincere in their efforts to convert people, antihomosexual, sheltered, too political, and judgmental. Because of these accusations, the writers contend, evangelical Christians, or those who are considered to be “born again,” have lost the respect of those outside the church. These non-Christians consider the Christian faith as it is practiced today to be unChristian, that is, “they think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it was meant to be” (p. 15). Are they right?



It is tough to argue with the data gathered from the research. The authors make a convincing case that even those inside the church—young Christians in particular—agree that something has gone terribly wrong with modern Christianity. I found myself nodding in agreement quite a bit as I read the accusations hurled at the faith I myself possess. If our faith has become “unChristian,” we must not delay in working to fix it. And even if we are tempted to think that it doesn’t really matter what non-Christians think about us since non-believers will always disapprove of what we believe (the authors field this charge and respond to it on pp. 36-39), we have to realize that perceptions, even wrong perceptions, still affect the way people respond to us. If as Christians we desire to be heard by non-Christians, then we would do well to listen first to them.

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