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The Meaning of Marriage

May 18, 2012 in Family, Reading with 2 Comments

My Life Group recently went through Tim Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage. The subtitle— “Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God” —really does sum it up well. Keller takes a look at the foundation of marriage and debunks much of the romantic and faulty ideas that our culture has readily adopted. At first, some of his ideas seem almost unromantic due to their focus on commitment. Yet it is this focus that makes this book so counter-intuitive and profound.

Here are some of my favorite passages that illustrate this:

Crowdsourcing the Message

April 25, 2012 in Church, Preaching, Reading with 4 Comments

It’s been a few weeks now since my book officially released and I wanted to take a moment and explain who it is written for and what it’s about. If you follow my blog you probably are aware of it—but you might not have an adequate understanding of the book itself.

I wrote the book with a healthy dose of humor—so hopefully it is an enjoyable read for just about anyone—but there are three groups of people in particular that I believe would benefit from it.

Preachers—it doesn’t just have to be senior pastors. Anybody who teaches regularly in the Church can benefit from a team approach like this book discusses. Student pastors or volunteer teachers can all benefit from the process.
Teaching-minded Church attendees—the collaborative preaching approach invites non-staff members of the Church into the preaching development process. If you have a love for what is said during the weekend messages, this could be you. Even if you aren’t a preacher or never plan to get on stage yourself. This is the group I hope gets the most out of the book.
Central attendees—even if you wouldn’t consider yourself in groups 1 or 2 you may be interested in this discussion if you have a love for what God is doing through Central. This book offers a unique, behind-the-scenes look at our process and much of it would be things that the typical person at Central is unaware of.

Tea With Hezbollah

April 4, 2012 in Church, Reading with 5 Comments

We are having Carl Meaderis come and speak at Central on April 21-22 so I wanted to familiarize myself a bit with him. To do that, I read through the book Tea With Hezbollah written by Ted Dekker along with Carl. Carl is a Christian committed to serving Muslims.

In the book they tell the story of visiting some of the world’s most influential Muslim leaders and getting to know them a bit. They frame the book in the context of Jesus’ teaching about the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). This is an interesting story to focus on given the specific encounters they write about.

There are many transcripts in the book of the actual questions and answers. They usually asked each leader what makes them laugh, and then asked them to tell a joke. This was in additional to a handful of other questions. But there was one question in particular that stood out to me:

“When was the last time you cried”?

Tribes

March 12, 2012 in Culture, Reading with 10 Comments

I recently read through Seth Godin’s book Tribes and absolutely loved it. Whenever I read his books or his blog I always feel energized to take on the world. One of his themes that stood out to me was his use of the word “faith.” While it is quite a bit different than what we are seeing in my series on faith—there is nonetheless intriguing overlap.