Book 13 of 2022 -- A New Kind of Church: Understanding Models of Ministry for the 21st Century

 

For some time now I have been becoming more and more aware that  the way we are doing/being church is not long term sustainable. But how is God calling us to be church differently? So I went shopping for books about ecclesiology. Actually I went looking for one that I had seen recommended and found this one along the way (I also found the one I was looking for and it is next in my reading queue). It looked interesting so I gave it a try.

To be honest I was a bit disappointed. Malphurs is so heavily embedded in an evangelical understanding of the church that much of the time he ends up denigrating other understandings of the church (I stopped counting how many times he described the "liberal" church as not really being true churches). So I spent a lot of the book trying to translate through that rhetoric.

There were some pieces about process that I think I might be able to make use of. However there are time I questioned if the author truly understands the wide variety of church structures and understandings that are out there. Certainly he shows little understanding of the how different church sizes actually operate (and tends to see a small church as a size that many places would consider large).

Doing it again, I may not buy this book. But I think that in the end I might get enough out of it to make it work.

Book 12 0f 2022 -- The Gospel According to Star Trek: The Original Crew

 This was a gift to me during Clergy Appreciation Month in October. Apparently over 12 years the congregation has gotten to know a bit about my tastes....

As a general rule I really enjoy these "Gospel According to..." style of books. If I recall correctly I have previously read them dealing with Peanuts (which was the first of the genre I believe), Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. I like how the authors engage simultaneously with the faith story and the contemporary text to find intersections.

Sometimes the connections are obvious. Sometimes the contemporary text is one that some/many people of faith have decried as being antagonistic to Christian faith (Harry Potter comes to mind), which often tells me that they have not really engaged those texts very well.

I have long found echoes of Christian values and questions in the world of Star Trek. At the same time I can see why some would see that world as being quite atheistic and devoid of much recognizable spirituality -- unless you look a bit deeper in some of the story lines. I think Neece has done a good job of pulling some of those threads out in this book. At the same time I think his desire to make Spock into a Christ figure, while having some merit, is a bit overdone. He stretches the metaphor a bit far for my taste.

Having never seen the Animated Series or the newer "Kelvin Timeline" movies I can not really speak to Neece's comments on those pieces of the canon. However his chapters on TOS and his explication of where he understands Roddenberry to be coming from are quite good. The chapters on the movies are uneven, as are the movies themselves. 

Al in all a good read, and one that has already influenced a couple of sermons this fall.