Book Reviews

Details: Written by: Justin Denholm; Created: 25 September 2013

Edited by Michael Bird and Gordon Preece
Anglican Press Australia 2012
ISBN 9781922000491

Justin Denholm assesses an evangelical response to ‘Five Uneasy Pieces’.

Questions relating to sexuality are fiercely contested and deeply felt. In Australia’s current political and social climate issues of sexuality are frequently encountered. Should the definition of marriage be expanded to include same-sex relationships? Should churches and individual ministers be free to decide conscientiously if they will conduct such weddings? What voice in the public space do Christians deserve on this matter? More fundamental conflicts exist. If Christians oppose homosexual activity, on what basis do they do so? Because God prohibits it, or because it leads to personal or social problems, or because children should live with their biological parents? Even Christians who agree about an issue like same-sex marriage may have very different reasons for doing so and might choose to speak about it differently.
With so many questions like these being asked, it is essential that Christians be equipped to respond and engage in a faithful and respectful fashion. We need to be well prepared both to speak clearly and carefully into the world outside the church, while also ensuring that discussions and decisions with our brothers and sisters inside the church are faithful to the message that we have been given. Critically, we need a robust and intelligent understanding of what the Bible has say to say about sexuality and homosexuality in order to engage with these questions in a faithful way.

Read more: The PEACE Plan

Details: Written by: Lisa Brown; Created: 30 March 2012

According to Mark DeVries, to build a lively youth ministry you first have to get the boring stuff right.

Sustainable Youth Ministry: Why Most Youth Ministry Doesn’t Last and What Your Church Can Do About It
Mark DeVries
InterVarsity Press 2008
ISBN 9780830833610

If a strong, healthy, sustainable youth ministry was a product you could buy at a Christian bookshop it would be in the ‘most popular’ section. Most churches would love to have one but the sad reality is that there are many youth ministries that are unsustainable in the long term.
While this may be attributed to the person in charge of the youth ministry, Mark DeVries points out that the longevity of a youth ministry has a lot more to do with the church as a whole. A common misconception is that if you want young people in your church then the first step is to employ a good youth minister. Unfortunately this quick fix solution can be just that, a quick fix without lasting impact or results.
DeVries’ accurate diagnosis is that the strength of a youth ministry has a lot more to do with overall leadership and structures within the church rather than just the youth minister. He points out that growing a sustainable youth ministry and discipling the next generation of young people is the responsibility of the entire church.
DeVries does not offer any quick ‘fix it’ solutions but his years of church consulting experience says that ‘building a sustainable, thriving youth ministry is not only possible, it’s actually predictable’ (page 11). He highlights key structures and patterns for success in youth ministry; noting two key components of systems thinking:

Architecture: the structure of sustainability; and

Atmosphere: the culture, climate and ethos that sustain the health of an organisation or ministry.

Most youth ministers will not be too excited to hear that creating a strong foundation for a sustainable youth ministry comes through establishing sustainable systems: i.e. by doing a lot of administration! This book is an encouragement to work ‘on’ the youth ministry to make sure the foundation is healthy, rather than putting out fires ‘in’ the youth ministry. A great tip for producing a strong foundation is to ensure that clear vision documents have been developed for the youth ministry; a mission statement, measurable goals, statement of values. This will produce a purposeful structure and clear direction to start building upon.
DeVries likens the foundation of the ministry to a dance floor. If it is repaired and maintained then the talented, trained dancer will be able to succeed. Often churches blame the lack of success in youth ministry on the ‘dancer’ or youth minister rather than looking at the dance floor which is often in disrepair. DeVries points out the reasons why many dance floors in are in disrepair and gives practical steps to help the foundation become strong. A great place to start is by making sure that the youth minister has a clear job description and by ensuring that there is a documented process for recruiting volunteer leaders.
An excellent read for anyone who is interested in seeing their church’s youth ministry flourish over the long haul.

Lisa Brown is a faculty member of Ridley Melbourne, where she trains youth ministers. Lisa is married to Phil, lives in Maribyrnong and has recently discovered the joy of growing things in her garden.

Details: Written by: Wayne Schuller; Created: 30 March 2012

Peter Hitchens, brother of the famous anti-theist, Christopher Hitchens, describes how atheism led him to faith.

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith
Peter Hitchens
Harper Collins 2010
ISBN 9780310320319

Peter and Christopher Hitchens have a shared heritage of British nominal Christianity and the embracing of atheism as a form of intellectual emancipation. ‘I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967. I was 15 years old’ (page 7).
Peter has since returned to an active Christian faith after decades of leftist-atheism, whilst his brother Christopher has become a great preacher of the new atheism. This book is a banquet of biography, a prophetic evaluation of 20th Century Western Christian culture, a defence of common objections to the
Christian faith, and an undressing of self-assured anti-theism.
Peter has written this book as a record of his own journey, and also to help those who might be potentially ‘enchanted by the arguments of the anti-religious intellects of our age’ (page 2). Having been on the inside, he is able to shine a light on the motives and arrogance that makes up much of popular atheism.
Peter argues that the biggest weakness of his brother’s ‘faith’ is that ‘he often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributes purpose to the universe and swerves dangerously round the problem of conscience—which surely cannot be conscience if he is right—he is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so this makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it’ (page 3). This inability is revealed with insufferable repetition in the 2009 documentary Collision—which narrates a string of public debates Christopher Hitchens held with the American Christian pastor and writer, Douglas Wilson. This DVD is highly recommended as both entertaining and thought-provoking viewing (see www.collisionmovie.com).
Peter puts forward a cogent case that the decay of 21st Century Western societies is due to the 20th Century decay of credal Christianity. He is scathing of Church of England nominalism in the last 100 years, especially in relation to English patriotism and the two World Wars. His reflections on the ‘national cult’ of British patriotism also critique our own Anzac traditions and loyalties.
As a professional journalist, Peter’s observations of the 20th Century have a breadth of wisdom and evidence, not least his insights comparing five years of living in Russia and his return to London at the turn of the century. As part of his spiritual journey he observes what effect predominant belief systems have on the virtue of any society: ‘I also concluded that a high moral standard cannot be reached or maintained unless it is generally accepted and understood by an overwhelming number of people. I have since concluded that a hitherto Christian society which was de-Christianised would also face such problems, because I have seen public discourtesy and incivility spreading rapidly in my own country as Christianity is forgotten’ (page 66).
Peter knows 20th century history exceedingly well. He was thoroughly versed in and supportive of leftist atheistic regimes, and of the excuses required to maintain this ideology in the face of repeated atrocity after atrocity. He is now ‘baffled and frustrated by the strange insistence of my anti-theist brother that the cruelty of Communist anti-theist regimes does not reflect badly on his case and his cause. It unquestionably does. Soviet Communism is organically linked to atheism, materialist rationalism and most of the other causes the new atheists support. It used the same language, treasured the same hopes and appealed to the same constituency as atheism today’ (page 100).
The biographical elements are sparse but riveting. The poetic majesty of the KJV and traditional Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer liturgy connected and awakened suppressed beliefs for Hitchens. In fact his journey back to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ came in part through his wife and children’s baptism in a traditional Church of England parish. As Anglican Evangelicals, what does it say of us that should we be surprised by this? There is more than one way to skin a secularist cat—of his brother he suggests that ‘it is my belief that passions as strong as his are more likely to be countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time’ (page 3).
At 160 pages this is a concise book, eminently readable and well worth giving to our atheist friends. It represents a challenge to evangelicals who, being weak on history and aesthetics, are often left to debate on the narrow turf of Enlightenment categories. It highlights Christian failures but it also offers philosophical and historical ways forward from our Anglican heritage.
As a weakness, presentation of the person and work of Jesus Christ is significantly absent in this book. But it is a penetrating critique of the spirit of our age and I pray it opens eyes for many to consider the ascended Saviour-King.

Wayne Schuller is Vicar of Berwick Anglican Church in Melbourne’s booming south-eastern growth corridor.

Details: Written by: Rhys Bezzant; Created: 23 March 2012

Rhys Bezzant reviews Eric Metaxas’s biography of one of the twentieth century’s leading lights.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, martyr, prophet, spy
Eric Metaxas
Thomas Nelson 2010
ISBN 9781595551382

Sooner or later every Christian needs to read a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Even better, a couple of them. Pastors, no less, need to interact with his example and his ideas because he has become one of the most celebrated Christian leaders of the twentieth century. His image is engraved above the door of Westminster Abbey and in the stonework surrounding the altar of St John’s Cathedral in New York City. A recent documentary, produced by Martin Doblmeier and available on DVD, is a remarkable compilation of scenes from the Third Reich, a reconstruction of the events of Bonhoeffer’s dramatic life and interviews with surviving friends and family. Eric Metaxas’s biography of Bonhoeffer, published in 2010, is the latest English book to trace his story and summarise his ideas. It has been received with great fanfare, perhaps not least because it contains an introduction by Tim Keller, and reached number twenty-three on the New York Times Bestseller list. It appears that I am not the only person to be intrigued by Bonhoeffer’s life and untimely death.
His story may not be familiar to all. Growing up in a family of academics, diplomats, Prussian military elite, clergy and scientists, Bonhoeffer was destined for greatness. He was born in 1906 and was shaped by the tumultuous events of WWI, the humiliation of Germany and the collapse of the German monarchy, democratic instability in the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazis. Theologically, he was greatly influenced by Karl Barth, with whom he had a long correspondence, and by the ecumenical movement of the early twentieth century. His own doctorate was on the theology of the church.
Having spent time in pastoral work in London and Barcelona, and further study in New York at Union Seminary, he decided that his place during WWII was not to be found in the safety of America, but amidst the dangers and risks of ministry in Germany, resisting the anti-Semitism of the regime and training a new generation of pastors for service in a threatening world. He was later employed as an intelligence officer in the military secret service, and, despite his pacifism, was prepared to involve himself in plots to overthrow the government, in particular to assassinate Hitler. A remarkable step to take for a Lutheran pastor. For his connections to the conspirators, he was killed in the last few weeks of the war in a concentration camp in Bavaria. Some of his last words to a fellow inmate were: ‘This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.’
Metaxas’s biography traces this story with extraordinary pathos and is written in a most readable style. He does well to include material published for the first time in the 1990s, namely letters between Bonhoeffer and his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, and recognises that the resistance to Hitler, once thought to include just a few lone military officers, was actually a broader movement. The biography is long (542 pages), but often includes substantial quotations from letters, sermons, speeches and treatises, which is a useful gift to those who have not met Bonhoeffer before. This is a great place to start to understand the Nazi dictatorship and Bonhoeffer’s Christian discipleship.
The twentieth century has so many examples of Christians living through great evil. I find it purging to read accounts of Christians who persevered in their faith under totalitarian regimes, whether that was in Germany, the Soviet Union, Rumania, or China. There is something bracing about peeling back the layers to get to the core of obedience: listening to the voice of Christ alone and blocking out the screeches of propaganda officers or the seductive words of collaborators, who pervert what is true and real and lasting. I read a biography like this one and ask myself if I would have found it within my power to stand up against horrific crimes, and I pray again that God would spare me from the time of trial.
Unfortunately, after reading this biography, I still have to say that I am waiting for a modern biography of Bonhoeffer that is really fair and doesn’t try to force him into an evangelical box. I fear this is what this book has attempted to do, wittingly or not. It appears to me to be written to make Bonhoeffer appear to be a conservative evangelical, who read his Bible every day, who hated preaching which was divorced from the Scriptural text, and who had a conversion experience in a Baptist Church in Harlem. Actually, he confessed to his closest friend that there were times when he found it too difficult to read the Bible and pray, he was no inerrantist, and had multiple turning-points on an erratic pathway to sanctification.
This book contains almost no interaction with the treatises of Bonhoeffer, the philosophical reasons for his high regard for Gandhi, nor theological reasons for his involvement in the ecumenical movement. I was left wondering if this was a Bonhoeffer deliberately shaped for right-wing Christian conservatives in the US, who would value the Bible-reading Bonhoeffer, but may be less appreciative of the Bonhoeffer who criticises Christians too closely aligned with power. There appears to be no interaction with recent scholarly debate, either in America or in the German-speaking world. Apart from these substantial concerns, my confidence was undermined through dozens of careless mistakes in the spelling of German words, the assertion that a text from Matthew 10 is part of the Sermon on the Mount (page 536), and turns of phrase which were glib and jocular at moments in the story where nothing but searing honesty and sober writing was called for. It was surely an error to have Barth say that the theological community led by Bonhoeffer on the Baltic Coast had a ‘monastic eros and pathos’ (page 269). Certainly ‘ethos’ was Barth’s phrasing!
We need more Bonhoeffer. The tragedy of his life, and of German history in the first half of the twentieth century, needs frequent retelling, to set before us the example of a man who was not scared to confess Christ before human opposition, and to warn us of the base potential of human evil. On a recent visit to Berlin, I was most moved when I sat in the chair at his writing desk from which he was led away by the Gestapo for his two years in jail. The great and the grotesque met there on that day in April 1943. Read this book by Metaxas by all means and give it to others to read too. But find other books on Bonhoeffer to read to fill out the story. We must be generous to recognise that he was indeed a hero of the faith, even when he doesn’t share all the assumptions and priorities of evangelical conviction.

Rhys Bezzant is Dean of Missional Leadership and a lecturer in Christian Thought at Ridley Melbourne.

Page 30 of 34

Book Reviews

Sexegesis

The PEACE Plan

Youth ministry that lasts

They don’t get along

Why we need more Bonhoeffer