Books-- read and unread

I’m not usually a “meme” guy-- some blogs I’ve read do a meme or two a week, and I know it can get old for some readers. But this one was appealing, at least because I’m a reader.

The top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users:

Bold the ones you’ve read
star the ones you read for school
italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish
@ the ones you want to read
otherwise comment as desired

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment@
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose@
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses* (I’m not sure if this is the Joyce version-- if so, then I did NOT read it)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities*
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (@?)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner@
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius@
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales*
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World@
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo* (2x)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel@
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno@
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles*
Oliver Twist*
Gulliver’s Travels*
Les Misérables (@?)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury*
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners*
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five@
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*@
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid*
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island* (3x-- plus it makes it into a favorite quote about reading...)
David Copperfield*
The Three Musketeers (2x)

Sermon texts for January 2009

Here are the sermon texts for January.

Hickory Withe PC members: if you aren’t doing so already, may I encourage you to read each week’s text (and all the other months as well!) before you come to church on Sunday? Perhaps you could close out the day on Saturday with them, or read them with your family after supper on Saturday.

January 4 Luke 11:1-13 -- Learning to Pray, part 2
January 11 Luke 10:1-24 -- The work of the disciples
January 18 Luke 10:25-37 -- Won’t you be my neighbor?
January 25 Luke 10:38-42 -- Two choices

Books for December / Year-end

I only finished two books in December, and one of them was one I read to the kids...

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (re-read). I read this one out loud to Jack and Molly-- Molly wasn’t quite with us the whole time, but she seemed to like it anyway. Jack loved it, and we’re already working on Prince Caspian now. It’s easy to love these books, especially as they were written to be presented: read aloud to children. (9)
• The Heart of Prayer by Jerram Barrs. This was a great book that looks at a few of Jesus’ teachings and examples of prayer, considering what we might learn about our prayers from them. Jerram is going to be coming to HWPC later in 2009, and speaking on this topic-- so it’s great to hear from him again on the subject. (I also took a class from Jerram on the Theology of Prayer at Covenant Seminary.) If you’re not familiar with Jerram, think of the most gentle, kind, and gracious person you can imagine, and then think of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and wise person you know-- then put them together, and that’s Jerram. He is beloved as much for his pastoral spirit as anything else, and that spirit comes through clearly in this book. I’d stop short of calling this a “must-read” but if you want a good book on prayer, this is as good a place to look as any. (9+)

Also, I thought I would offer a one-post summary of my reading for the year. (The links in the month names will take you to the original posts, where there is a mini-review about each book.) I ended up with 42 books, which isn’t a clean average of “4 per month” or whatever, but some readers will affirm that 42 is a good literary number anyway. Here’s my reading list for 2008:

January:

• None

February:

• How Your Church Family Works by Peter L. Steinke (9)
• The Challenge of Jesus by N. T. Wright (skim) (A qualified 7+/8)
• Benedictions by Robert Vasholz (9)
• The Shadow of the Cross by Walter Chantry (re-read) (9+/10)

March:

• The Importance of the Local Church by Daniel Wray (re-read) (9+)
• When Bad Christians Happen to Good People by Dave Burchett (8)
• On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness by Andrew Peterson (8)
• Proper Confidence by Lesslie Newbigin (9+)

April:

• Surviving Your First Year as Pastor by Angie Best-Boss (5)
• If It Could Happen Here... by Jeff Patton (8+)
• The House that Jesus Built by Dale Ralph Davis (10)
• Eucharistic Bread-Baking as Ministry by Tony Begonja (8+)

May:

• The Work of the Pastor by William Still (re-read) (10)
• Wiring a House by Rex Cauldwell (9)
• With Reverence and Awe by D.G. Hart and John R. Muether (5)
• Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero (re-read) (8+)
• Ruling Elder by Leonard Van Horn (8)
• Framing Floors, Walls, and Ceilings by the editors of Fine Homebuilding(4)

June:

• Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-First Century by Carl S. Dudley (8+)
• “The Vision Thing” by Don K. Clements (8)

July:

• None

August:

• Evangelism in the Small Membership Church by Royal Speidel (3)
• Waterbrook Press Children’s Extravaganza (children’s books)-- God Gave Us Heaven by Lisa Tawn Bergren, When God Created My Toes and God Loves Me More Than That by Dandi Daley Mackall
• Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the theology of the Lord’s Supper by Ben Witherington, III (7)
• How to Pick a Peach: the search for flavor from farm to table by Russ Parsons (10)
• The Lord’s Supper: Eternal Word in broken bread by Robert Letham (re-read) (9)
• A Handful of Pebbles: theological liberalism and the church by Peter Barnes (7+)
• The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield (8+)
• Serving in Church Visitation by Jerry M. Stubblefield (9+)

September:

• Beyond Bells and Smells by Mark Galli (8)
• The Power of Speaking God’s Word: How to Preach Memorable Sermons by Wilbur Ellsworth (re-read) (8+)
• A Mile in My Shoes: Cultivating Compassion by Trevor Hudson (8)
• Calls to Worship: a pocket resource by Robert Vasholz (9+)
• The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do by Mark Sanborn (6-)

October:

• Churched by Matthew Paul Turner (9+)
• Preaching to a Post-Everything World by Zack Eswine (10)
• How Would Jesus Vote? by D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe (5)

November:

• Living Streams: Journeys of a Life Well-Lived by Stuart Briscoe (9+)
• The Crucifixion of Ministry by Andrew Purves (8+)

December:

• See above.

Christmas greetings

Blogs I read (and blogs I don't)

I read a lot of blogs. Some of you know this, and have asked about it-- specifically, why do I read so many blogs, and what sort of blogs do I read?

First, the “why”-- I consider most of my blog-reading to fit into the category of “personal development,” in the same way that someone might read a newspaper or a trade journal. Maybe a dozen of the blogs I read are written by friends and strictly for the purpose of keeping me informed of their lives. The rest are related to something I am or that I do: ministry, writing, technology, productivity... plus a small handful of news blogs and feeds. This post is a perfect example of why I read blogs.

Now, a few more words about what sort of blogs I read. Here are some key factors for deciding whether I’ll continue to read a blog or feed:

• Teach me something frequently. A lot of the blogs that have earned a longstanding, permanent place in my feed reader* are there because they regularly give me something to chew on-- even if it’s “just” a quote or a short snippet of an idea. If you want me to look forward to seeing a new post from you, give me something to think about.
• Write with humility. Help me see that you don’t think you have the final word on a topic, unless it is your own opinion-- and in that case, help me see that you don’t think that yours is the only opinion that matters.

As importantly, here are some things that almost guarantee that I’ll drop your blog from my reader:

• Spending all of your energy selling me something. I won’t deny any blogger the right to make some money from their blogs, but don’t make it all about that. Just yesterday, I removed a feed because every post was centered around a book that was linked to (through an Amazon affiliate link) and the gist of each post was, “to REALLY learn about this, buy this book...”
• Toot your own horn often. It’s great to hear about something you’ve done that is praiseworthy. If more than half of the posts in a given week or month are all about your accomplishments (especially if they read like, “let me tell you about the great thing I just did...”), you can bet I’ll stop reading soon.
• Focus often on a topic that isn’t germane to your blog. It’s one thing to offer an occasional comment or idea about something that is apparently outside your normal field of topics; it’s another to spend a lot of time (yours and mine) on it, especially with a tone or voice that suggests that I should take your word as more than just another opinion. During election season, I dropped a couple of blogs from my feed-- one from a popular Reformed writer, and another that is supposed to be a news source for our denomination-- because both spent at least every other post hawking the editors’ personal political views.
• Put yourself forward as the watchdog for a particular group or cause. Someone recently said, “commentary is, sadly, always a few notches below creativity.” One thing I’ve come to despise is the set of blogs from folks who spend most of their time pointing out where everyone else is wrong. I tried reading some of the blogs that offer frequent discussion about matters in the PCA, but I just couldn’t stomach it.
• Write with no concern whatsoever for grammar or style. There are a few blogs that I would read regularly, if only the writers would use decent punctuation, capitalize properly, and break their text up in to paragraphs. As much time as I spend staring at a computer screen, if my browser is suddenly full of text that looks like an unbroken string of characters from top to bottom, my eyes glass over and everything goes fuzzy.

So, for whatever it’s worth, thats a quick summary of why I read blogs, and what sorts of blogs I read (and what sorts I don’t).



*I use a piece of software called a “newsfeed reader” that handles all of my blogs and other feeds. The one I use is called NetNewsWire. I only read blogs that offer an RSS feed (or something like it, that my reader can use)-- these notify me of new content and automatically summarize it for me. If a blog doesn’t offer a feed, I won’t read it with any regularity.

Church marketing

(HT: Russell)

Manliness for sale

A friend of mine posted this on her blog, which was e-mailed to her: a CraigsList ad for a FSBO Nissan XTerra. All I can say? Hilarious.

NINJA HAULER: 2005 Nissan Xterra - $12900 (Ronan / Lake County)

Reply to: sale-941704797@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-12-02, 7:25AM MST

OK, let me start off by saying this Xterra is only available for purchase by the manliest of men (or women). My friend, if it was possible for a vehicle to sprout chest hair and a five o'clock shadow, this Nissan would look like Tom Selleck. It is just that manly.

It was never intended to drive to the mall so you can pick up that adorable shirt at Abercrombie & Fitch that you had your eye on. It wasn't meant to transport you to yoga class or Linens & Things. No, that's what your Prius is for. If that's the kind of car you're looking for, then just do us all a favor and stop reading right now. I mean it. Just stop.


This car was engineered by 3rd degree ninja super-warriors in the highest mountains of Japan to serve the needs of the man that cheats death on a daily basis. They didn't even consider superfluous nancy boy amenities like navigation systems (real men don't get lost), heated leather seats (a real man doesn't let anything warm his butt), or On Star (real men don't even know what the hell On Star is).

No, this brute comes with the things us testosterone-fueled super action junkies need. It has a 265 HP engine to outrun the cops. It's got special blood/gore resistant upholstery. It even has a first-aid kit in the back. You know what the first aid kit has in it? A pint of whiskey, a stitch-your-own-wound kit and a hunk of leather to bite down on when you're operating on yourself. The Xterra also has an automatic transmission so if you're being chased by Libyan terrorists, you'll still be able to shoot your machine gun out the window and drive at the same time. It's saved my bacon more than once.

It has room for you and the four hotties you picked up on the way to the gym to blast your pecs and hammer your glutes. There's a tow hitch to pull your 50 caliber anti-Taliban, self cooling machine gun. I also just put in a new windshield to replace the one that got shot out by The Man. My price on this bad boy is an incredibly low $12,900, but I'll entertain reasonable offers. And by reasonable, I mean don't walk up and tell me you'll give me $5,000 for it. That's liable to earn you a Burmese-roundhouse-sphincter-kick with a follow up three fingered eye-jab. Would it hurt? Hell yeah. Let's just say you won't be the prettiest guy at the Coldplay concert anymore.

There's only 69,000 miles on this four-wheeled hellcat from Planet Kickass. Trust me, it will outlive you and the offspring that will carry your name. It will live on as a monument to your machismo.
Now, go look in the mirror and tell me what you see. If it's a rugged, no holds barred, super brute he-man macho Chuck Norris stunt double, then contact me. I might be out hang-gliding or BASE jumping or just chilling with my ladies, but I'll get back to you. And when I do, we'll talk about a price over a nice glass of Schmidt while we listen to Johnny Cash.

To sweeten the deal a little, I'm throwing in this pair of MC Hammer pants for the man with rippling quads that can't fit into regular pants. Yeah, you heard me. FREE MC Hammer pants.

Rock on.

"Filling the gap the government left"

The title came from a description that a pastor gave about what his church was doing by offering refuge to folks fleeing the path of Hurricane Gustav. This ironic statement echoes exactly what my friend Craig and I recently dialogued about on his blog. What’s wrong with this picture?

This quote demonstrates how thoroughly the ideas of “postmodernism” have influenced even the church. Without getting deeply into all of the aspects of postmodern philosophy, one thing that is notable is how the shifts in philosophy have led to consequent shifts in the seat of authority-- when, by “authority,” I mean the arbiter of truth, stability, and purpose. Follow with me:

Whether he realizes it or not, this pastor (quoted above) has clearly become convinced of the Post-Modern position, at least as far as whose role and duty it is to care for those in need. Historically, the Church has been the default institution that would be assumed to be charged with caring for the needy. In that sense, it would be just the opposite: the governmental services would be filling the gap the Church left.

How is that our mindset? Do we recognize that the Church’s job-- not the government’s-- is to attend to the needs of those in need? Do we understand the implications of this for the way that we vote or take up political activity? When we believe that the fundamental and primary solutions to our social and community problems is to vote the “right” person into office, have we sold out our biblical view of the church for a Postmodern illusion of solutions?

Advent reflection 4: teaching ourselves the season

My fellow pastor Jeff Myers of Providence Reformed PCA in St. Louis recently offered this catechism, introducing the basics of what the season of Advent means:

The Church Year

Q 1. Why do we have different seasons of the year?
A. God created the seasons for man’s use and enjoyment.

Q 2. What do Fall and Winter remind us of?
A. Fall and Winter remind us of sin and death because it is dark and cold.

Q 3. What do Spring and Summer teach us?
A. Spring teaches us that God brings light and life to the world through Jesus Christ.

Q 4. What does the church calendar chiefly celebrate?
A. The church calendar celebrates the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Q 5. Why does the church have her own seasons?
A. The church has her own seasons to teach the world that true life is found in Jesus Christ and to resist reducing life to politics and economics.

Q 6. How are we to sanctify the seasons that God created for our benefit?
A. According to 1 Timothy 4:5, we are to set apart the seasons with the Word of God and prayer.

Q 7. How has the church set apart the seasons with the Word of God and prayer?
A. The church has chosen readings from the Old and New Testaments for each season and has ordered the prayer life of the church to match the life of Jesus.

Advent & Christmas

Q 8. What does the word “Advent” mean?
A. The word “advent” means “to come” and has to do with the coming of Jesus.

Q 9. What portion of the life of Jesus does Advent celebrate?
A. Advent celebrates the times leading up to the birth of Jesus as well as his coming again at the last day.

Q 10. How many Sundays are there in Advent?
A. There are four Sundays in Advent.

Q 11. What are the colors for Advent and what do they mean?
A. The colors for Advent are purple and royal blue. They remind us that Jesus is a glorious King.

Q 12. What do we pray for during Advent season?
A. During Advent we pray that Jesus our King would continue to come to us and serve us as he has promised.

Q 13. In our Advent prayers are we pretending that Jesus has not yet been born?
A. No. During Advent we are praying for him to come to us again and again as he has promised.

Q. 14. How did God fulfill his promises to his people in the Hebrew Scriptures?
A. God fulfilled his promises by uniting himself to our human nature in his Son, who faithfully lived a perfect life of service, died the death we deserve, and was raised to life again as the new man, and all this for our salvation.

Q 15. How has Jesus promised to come to us today?
A. In many different ways—to be with us on Sunday for worship, to help us daily when we are in trouble, and at the end of the world to establish the new heavens and earth.

Thanks Jeff! Also, be sure to check out Jeff’s collection of posts defining and defending Advent and Christmas.

Why churches are big or small, part two

Not long ago, I discussed a key psychological and social factor that often keeps churches smaller. Today, let’s talk about what it takes for a church to become bigger.

If the factors I mentioned are at play, it is easy to see why churches remain small. To refresh, there appears to be an inherent limit to the number of relationships we can actively “manage” in our heads, and that number is somewhere around 150. Many more than that, and evidence shows that people naturally begin to break into smaller groups. This built-in limit, I suggested, is the reason why churches often seem to hit a wall around the 150-200 size and cannot easily grow larger than that.

Back in the 1970s, some smart men began to study the idea of church growth, and their studies realized about the same thing: without (apparently) applying the sociology and psychology that I mentioned in the last post on this topic, they nevertheless arrived at 200 as a cap for what they called “small churches.”

[An aside: why 200, instead of the sociologically-proven number of 150? Here’s my reasoning: in a church with 200 members, it’s easy to imagine that 50 or so are not actually a part of the regular social and relational life of the congregation. There will always be home-bound and shut-in folks who are elderly, sick, or otherwise unable to regularly attend worship and other activities. There will inevitably be a few households where part of the family-- maybe the wife and children, but not the husband-- are more active than the rest. And there will be others who are considered members of the congregation-- and even consider themselves as members-- but are either in the process of switching to a different congregation or their commitment to participation in church has ebbed. So a congregation with a membership of 200 probably has 150 or less people in active participation.]

This study eventually became known as the Church Growth Movement, led by Dr. Donald McGavran. Now, this movement has its fair share of critics, and in many cases the critics make important points. Let me be clear about this: I’m not promoting the Church Growth Movement, or suggesting that I accept and promote all of the theories, principles, or methods of that movement. I do believe, however, that there is much to learn about the life of the church from them.

One of the men who has written more recently as a part of that movement is Gary McIntosh, a professor at Talbot School of Theology, which is the seminary of Biola University in California. McIntosh is a prolific writer, but the work of his that I want to focus on here is called One Size Doesn’t Fit All, and details the differences between the different-sized churches.

McIntosh breaks all churches down into three categories by size:

• Small churches-- 15-200 worshipers
• Medium churches-- 200-400 worshipers
• Large churches-- more than 400 worshipers

Now, it’s worth mentioning here that 80% of all churches in the U.S. are smaller than 100 in membership (which means they are even fewer than that in worship attendance), while more than 90% of the churches in the U.S. are 200 or less. So the second and third categories that McIntosh describes represent less than 10% of all churches in the U.S.

Still, these are helpful categories because of what McIntosh goes on to develop in terms of how each category differs in how it must be led. For example, McIntosh says that the structure of a small church is as a “single cell” while a large church is a “multiple cell” structure. The leadership in a small church resides essentially in key families, while in medium churches it resides in committees, and in large churches it resides in select leaders. Decisions in a large church are made by staff and leaders and are driven by vision, whereas in a medium church they are made by committees and driven by changing needs, and in a small church they are made by the whole congregation and driven by history.

I won’t get into details about any of these; I won’t even try to present the whole paradigm to you about how the sizes differ. But I want to draw out a key, crucial point about this that McIntosh develops: the “medium church” size is almost always a transitional stage. In other words, small churches that are growing and reach that size will typically either continue to grow and eventually hit “large church” size, or they will reach the struggles of the “medium church” for a season and that will push them back to a small size.

What are the struggles of the “medium church” that either force continued growth or natural reduction? Here are some of the things that McIntosh points out: since decisions are driven by changing needs, things always seem to be changing which brings a sense of instability. The obstacles to growth for a medium church are inadequate facilities, inadequate staff, inadequate finances, poor administration, and increasing complexity-- all of which demand a change in status quo. Consequently, the strategies for growth in a medium church are: develop a distinct identity, add additional staff, use facilities multiple times or expand facilities, offer multiple worship services, write a long-range plan, and improve the quality of ministry.

You can see how implementing these growth strategies could result in the congregation soon becoming a “large church”. On the other hand, failure to address the growth obstacles and other difficulties that a “medium church” faces will bring a natural reduction in their numbers-- which, by returning them to “small church” size will bring the stability that the members and leadership craved during the struggles of medium church status.

This is why, historically, churches are usually big or small. However, some churches and other ministries have tried to find another way-- and I’ll discuss that in a future post.