When you spend a long time writing a book, you’d hate to see people who are looking for a book like yours miss the opportunity to read it because they just didn’t know. There is so much in Living with Questions that covers a wide array of other books on the Christian book shelf. Give this one a look. You may find yourself getting a lot more than you paid for (and save yourself some money too!).

Living with Questions is not your typical apologetics book.

If you like Lee Strobel’s “The Case for…” books, you’ll like Living with Questions. Strobel’s books give you interviews on various topics on the book cover. Living with Questions gives you tools so you can be an apologist too and not just find yourself quoting other people. So if you’ve read Strobel, consider Living with Questions next. Plus you get more topics in less pages. Strobel is not the only Christian writer who was set against the church and found themselves landing squarely on Jesus. As someone who grew up in the church, I knew many reasons to reject Christianity and, if not for intellectually sane and emotionally healthy reasons to follow Jesus, I could have easily walked away. Living with Questions is born out of that kind of journey.

Living with Questions is not just for teens. The marketing is toward students. So are some of the interior graphics. But it was written for everyone, especially those who want to share their faith with smart people and find ‘apologetics’ just too ‘deep’ or ‘academic’ or ‘heady.’ Living with Questions is gentle entry point into the world of understanding your faith more deeply, how it stands up to reason, and how you can confidently share your faith with others. Though the book is built around student questions, we’d be dishonest to say those same questions are also not adult questions. The reviews on Amazon for Living with Questions are from college graduates. In fact, Living with Questions should be found in the youth section of the book store (because they have so few books that really address their earnest questions) as well as the adult section beside all the other popular apologetics books of the day. It has that kind of cuturally savvy insights you don’t find in many other apologetics books.

Living with Questions is doing what postmoderns say can’t be done: doing apologetics for a postmodern audience. Yes, contrary to emerging beliefs, postmoderns still value reason, many just don’t know it. They value truth, but not for its own sake, but for the sake Jesus gave us: to make us free. Today’s kids are a mix of modernism and postmodernism, and neither one is deeply helpful for having a rounded view of the world. C. S. Lewis showed us that. In an era where the most vocal forms of apologetics are more academic and heady, Living with Questions draws more on the imaginative tradition of C. S. Lewis while still using the academic in the background. Living with Questions takes not just the mind and emotions into account, but the whole person, validating every square inch of being human, the ways God equipped us to reach out to him and to each other. I would use any of the arguments in this book on a university campus. In fact, I have. These are test and helpful and not just more “Christianese.”

Living with Questions is reflective. It’s full of stories and perspectives to chew and mediate on. The last three chapters are my favorite, painting a picture of life, love, and goodness, of the restoring of beauty in the universe as God intended. Hint: it’s not what you typically hear in church but is deeply Biblical.

Living with Questions helps students own their faith so they are ready for college and the challenges ahead. It works great for the student who is seeking as well as the student who doesn’t realize he/she should be seeking (because they don’t quite know they are alive, human, and purposed in this world yet). Many have already used Living with Questions and found it effective. (See study guide drawn up by a youth leader along the right side of my blog.)

Living with Questions helps the reader get out of ‘religious’ talk and into real life, a need many express when it comes to “Christian” literature.

Living with Questions answers a lot more questions than the chapters indicate. Inside every chapter are aspects of every question like “Why does a good God send people to hell?” and “Can I be a Christian and an evolutionist?” and “Am I loved?” and “How do I know I can trust the Bible?” and “How do I know which religion is right?” and “CAN religion be ‘right or wrong’?” and “What is faith?” The book also mentions diversions and addictions many face, including busyness, music, and cutting. Not only are interesting questions embedded in each chapter, but each chapter gives you tools on how to think about questions. So you don’t just get my explanation. You get to go exploring and come up with your own. This is very important if we are to OWN our faith.

The only way to adequately OWN our faith is to have the freedom to DISOWN our faith. Living with Questions gives that freedom.

Living with Questions is also for those who are not Christians. I get emails from secular college students who say they’ve really enjoyed the book and gave them good things to think about. Many “Christian” books are not written for the non-Christians. If you’ve been looking for a book to give to a non-believing friend, Living with Questions is also for them.

Living with Questions is not a dogmatic, in your face approach to truth-telling. The title of the book says it all. We live with questions so we can live into answers. Many questions and answers are understood a little now and understood more later. Some questions just need perspective. Some questions need encouragement. Some questions need information. Some questions need to be reframed. Living with Questions offers all of these.

So if you’re looking for a book to discuss in your youth group, a book to hand out to college students, a book to assign to your classroom, a book to read on the airplane, a book to understand our world a little better and how today’s generation approaches life, if you’re looking for tools to navigate life better rather than having to quote someone else, then Living with Questions is the book you’re looking for.

Soon available on audio too.

The illustration is humorously eye-catching, a retired-aged, clean-cut person being shamed by a finger pointing through heavenly clouds.

The opening story highlights a pastor from a Baptist church who phoned 911 on Sunday morning.

“Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10% of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff’s office. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs.

“The charge was trespassing, but Mrs. Caskey’s real offense, in her pastor’s view, was spiritual. Several months earlier, when she had questioned his authority, he’d charged her with spreading ‘a spirit of cancer and discord’ and expelled her from the congregation. ‘I’ve been shunned,’ she says.”

Her strict offense was urging the new pastor to abide by the bylaws of the church, which including assigning deacons. He refused deacons for his reasons. She insisted on the bylaws. For this she was shunned.

His justification for shunnnig her? He says in the article that “a strict reading of the Bible requires pastors to punish disobedient members. ‘A lot of times, flocks aren’t willing to submit or be obedient to God,’ he said in an interview.”

I’d love to know that verse in the Bible that says it is a pastors job. Matthew 18 says it is the congregations job, not the pastors. In that passage, not even elders are mentioned to do it by proxy. And that makes everything a little trickier.

This continues some thinking I’ve done regarding authority in the church and the model most evangelical churches follow… a senior pastor who is in charge of just about everyone and everything else.

I’ve got questions:

1. Has the idea of “this is the way we’ve always done it” blinded us from reviewing whether our method is what God intended? Are we guilty of not studying the issue and demand we stick to what has been taught us or accepted as the norm?
2. If Jesus is the head and the church is the Body, what is a pastor or elder? Another head? A representative head?
3. Is there a senior pastor position in the scripture? If so, is he given authority to judge, shun, excommunicate… what are his limits?
4. Is the pastor or elder accountable to anyone?
5. Is leadership in the early church singular or plural?
6. If a pastor’s or elder’s job is to safeguard doctrine, is that necessary now that we have the Scriptures spelling it out for everyone to read?
7. If a pastor’s or elder’s job is to organize services or to help teach Scripture to the congregation, does that include taking authority and discipline unto ones own hands?
8. What qualifies someone to take such a position? A seminary degree? The gifts of the Spirit? Mature character? Who decides this? Ordination? Ordination in denomination?
9. If members in the church find the pastor unbiblical or spiritually abusive, what do they do about it?
10. Does Jesus through Holy Spirit lead the people of God or does he only lead the ‘one in charge’?

Please share some thoughts.

While you gather your thoughts, feel free to prime the idea pump with this thread at the Christian Classics Etherial Library. Maybe this will prime the idea pump.

Some Christian Pastors Embrace Scientology

Just like my post about the statues of St Joseph, modern man is growing more comfortable with having foreign gods in his house. The sheer incoherence about religion in the ’scientific’ age is no surprise with the so-called death of God. “Simply enjoy your flavor of religion. I’ll enjoy mine,” so it goes.

Yet let’s have some perspective on a slice of this. If Scientology has discovered some things that are true about the world, then does that make that truth false? If your enemy invented a better way to garden with the introduction of the shovel, does that mean you should shun all shovels?

The longstanding tradition of Natural Law is something friendly and even developed by Christianity centuries ago. The book of nature is a book laid open for all humans to read. It isn’t as though the only truths we can find in the world are found in Holy Books. “The Bible may teach us to feed the poor,” quipped C. S. Lewis, “but it doesn’t teach us how to cook!” And the church father said it rightly when he noted, “Wherever truth is, it is the Lord’s.” And it is a good reminder for us to tread humbly.

The article isn’t particular regarding which practices of Scientology are being taught. They could very well be a common-sense approach toward recovery. I don’t know. What I do know is that it isn’t automatically bad because Scientology wrote it down.

What troubles me is that these Christian pastors think they need to keep the Scientology label, pretending Scientology is the creator of those truths (if they are true afterall). This kind of labeling is the deception. And inviting people into the Scientology community (one that is no friend to Jesus and his Way) is irresponsible.

That is like inviting your enemy to be your roommate just because you bought his shovel.