Chronological Guide Review.

Have you ever wanted to rip out all the commentary from your NIV Study Bible, combine those pages with the Message prefaces and staple them together so you'd have them all in one place? This book is that Pocket Guide of Commentaries. A canon of context, timelines, charts and maps all neatly fit in 200 colorful pages. Particularly refreshing is the tone. The book passes information as if a conversation not a lecture.

I love it for personal study but probably more so for leading. It's just enough to illuminate without suffocating participants.

Is it an exhaustive guide? I'm not going to answer that.

Should you own one for yourself, your group, your kids...? Yes. 

Deliberate Simplicity Review

Deliberate Simplicity is about being committed to the core expressions of the church and nothing else.  Dropping pretense, program and sometimes even pixels to maintain a purity in the mission of the Jesus.  Dave Browning is the pastor of Christ The King church, a community relentlessly focused on three things; Small Groups, Worship and Outreach.

All that stuff I love. The book?  Not so much.

The book pushes this idea of a "Deliberately Simple" church hard, too hard.  It felt more infomercial than inspiration.  And in the end an ill fated attempt at creating a new kind of church brand.  The heart was lost in the tone (or maybe the small font, was it just me?) 

Deliberate Simplicity opens with the telling of a story of a perfect utopian faith community.   A church that has it all.  Which church would this be?  The author's of course.  It's tough to get into a story that leads like that. 

DS oversold itself.

A few lines that drove the book for me...

(On the use of overhead projectors.) "We're not trying to dazzle people with Pixels." Not Shane Hipps fans I take it.

"This is not to say that Deliberately Simple church is the only church interested in reaching out to a lost world. But..."

"I have people tell me, 'Dave I don't go to church, but if I ever did, I would check out Christ The King.'"

"CTK was shaping up differently than any church church I'd seen before. I was moaning in my office about how I didn't have a mentor to show me the way."

CTK is "different than any church you've ever seen before".

Felt too self promoted.  DS also seemed to keep us at a distance from the author, leaving us with charts, church stories and lots of quotes from other people. 

Sounds like God's doing some cool stuff at CTK but as a reader/leader it didn't work for me.

Begs the question though, do we always need to try and brand the great things God is doing and attempt to sell them?  Can commercialization of even good stuff be harmful?

The Search For God and Guinness Review

The Search For God and Guinness - A Biography of The Beer That Changed The World by Stephen Mansfield. 

At first glance I suspected I was buying into some not-so-clever but effective marketing targeted at the liberated spiritualist.  Throw in a cool yellow cover, a frothy head and thick parchment pages and youʻve got a downright classic even before a page is read.  However upon reading I found myself seldom being able to put it down.  From red lights and lunch breaks I was along for the ride.

Opening in the 1700s and set in the history of the family known as Guinness. Mansfield delivers us a story worth knowing and more importantly worth telling.  He takes us through beer, culture, faith, business and social justice as the Guinness empire unfolds. This is not to say the book doesnʻt have some flat spots where I sensed some defensiveness as if Iʻm not already bought in.

I appreciate Mansfieldʻs honestly throughout the process, his insights and bold conclusions.  He didnʻt go in making a case for Guinness, God and culture but more as a journalist fascinated by these elements. Think the pub version of Case for Christ.

I like this book as a conversation starter, an easy share for those who appreciate beer and encouragement for the striving activist.

Thanks for writing this Stephen.

Cheers.

"Let The Great World Spin" a 15 second review.

"Let The Great World Spin" a novel by Colum McCann.

A story of streetside biography told over a century of faith, passion, war, art and one epic crime.

New York City.

A read that is not so much about where it's going but where it is.

A book that will leave your hands stained with honesty.

One of the best Iʻve read.

Book Review-What difference do it make?

You'll enjoy this book if; a. you read its predecessor (same kind of different as me) b. are from the south c. collect precious moments figurines.

Not having read the first book I was left 10min. late to the movie, picking up enough to understand, while assuming Iʻm missing something but wondering if it would even matter. The story flow is awkward and disjointed. Rhetoric not quite believable. It reads like writing.

The fill stories by people touched by the first book provide a silver lining and quite possibly may have made for a better book on their own.

The homeless activist in me cheered at times as insight was shared from beyond the cardboard sign but still it didn't quite pull off a very good read.