Elliot Ritzema

Blog

  • You Can Be Free: A Review

    Mark and Lisa Scandrette have completely paid off their house. That in itself is impressive, but two other facts made me want to listen to what they have to say about finances in their book Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most. First, they live in San Francisco, which is consistently listed as one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. Second, they have never made more than an average teacher’s salary.

    In this book, they set forth seven steps toward aligning our money and time with what we value most. Those seven steps are:

    1. Name what matters most to you. Ask, “Who am I and what do I want to be about?”

    2. Value and align your time. Time is not an infinite resource; be deliberate about how you are going to spend it.

    3. Practice gratitude and trust. Be grateful for what you have, and believe that God is able and willing to give you what you need.

    4. Believe you have enough. Be content, in spite of the many messages you receive every day telling you not to be.

    5. Create a spending plan. Like time, money is not an infinite resource. Decide in advance how you are going to spend it, and don’t spend more than you have.

    6. Maximize your resources. Reduce costs wherever you can. Practice frugality. Ask, “Do I really need this?”

    7. Live generously and spend wisely. If you live out the first six steps, chances are that at some point in your life you will have more money than you need, and you will have freedom to choose how to spend your time. Be generous with both.

    Throughout the book, they include exercises and questions to help readers implement this process in their own lives. There is even an eight-session group learning guide in the back for those who go through this process together.

    There is no shortage of books on the market that purport to give financial advice. There is even no shortage of books on the market that purport to give financial advice from a Christian perspective. What sets Free apart is the Scandrettes’ holistic vision. What you do with your money is related to everything else you do, and everything you do is in turn related to everyone around you. Freedom is not individualistic; it is not the ability to do whatever you want without other people interfering. No, freedom is the ability to live out of who God made you to be, and to help others live out of who God made them to be.

    The Scandrettes write near the beginning of the book, “We hope to offer a resource that connects personal economic practice with spiritual values, questions of meaning, global justice and ecological sustainability” (16). I believe they have done just that.

    Note: Thanks to InterVarsity Press for a (free!) copy of this book in exchange for my review.

  • The All-of-Life God: A Review

    If you’re not too busy in our sped-up world, you’re probably dead. It seems like nearly everyone has more demands on their time than they have time to fulfill those demands. Christians, whose relationship with Christ is more important than anything else, still struggle to devote time to the spiritual side of life.

    With God in my Everything: How an Ancient Rhythm Helps Busy People Enjoy God, Ken Shigematsu has written a book for all those Christians who feel, as Bilbo Baggins said in The Lord of the Rings, “like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”  I first heard of Shigematsu when I was attending Regent College several years ago. He was, and is, pastor of a church that was very popular among Regent students, Tenth Avenue Alliance Church (or as it is usually called, Tenth Church). I never attended a service at Tenth, but he did come to speak at Regent in my Introduction to Preaching class once. I could see why his preaching spoke to so many people: he has a great sense of humor, but he also gives the sense of having a deep, relaxed, and authentic friendship with Christ.

    In this book, Shigematsu attempts to convince stressed-out people that the solution to their harried existence lies in monasticism—not by giving up everything and joining a monastery, but by living according to a rule of life. In a rule of life, instead of letting life happen to us and rushing from one emergency to another, we prioritize the things we regard as important and make time to do them. Throughout the book, Shigematsu uses the image of a trellis: something you construct deliberately, on which the rest of life can grow and be supported. 

    The book comes in five parts. Like a good preacher, Shigematsu has made sure their titles all begin with the same letter. The first, “Rules,” explains the concept of a rule of life. In the second, called “Roots,” Shigematsu introduces readers to three foundational aspects of a rule of life: sabbath, prayer, and sacred Bible reading. The third, “Relate,” shows how a rule of life can be crafted in our friendships, sexual lives, and family. The fourth, “Restore,” looks at the rule of life in the areas of exercise, play, and money. Finally, “Reach Out” looks at the rule of life with respect to work, service, and sharing Christ with others.

    Throughout, Shigematsu masterfully moves the reader along by using stories from his life and others to illustrate various points. He also stresses application of the lessons of the book in readers’ lives. Each chapter ends with discussion/reflection questions, and there are also spaces for the reader to craft his or her own rule of life. One very helpful aspect of the book was the inclusion at the end of example rules of life from people who are in various stages of life. While the idea of a rule of life was not new to me, I very much appreciate the way Shigematsu was able to make it relevant to a wide variety of people. I highly recommend this book, especially to busy people. And who, besides dead people, isn’t busy these days? 

     

    Note: Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

  • What the Kingdom Is and Isn’t: A Review

    Everyone who has read the Gospels knows that Jesus talks a lot about the kingdom of God (“kingdom of heaven” in Matthew). What kind of kingdom was this? Was it something to be looked for in the future? Was it something to be looked for in the present? And why don’t Christians tend to talk about the kingdom as much as Jesus did?

    Rick McKinley, pastor of Imago Dei Community in Portland, answers all these questions and more in his book This Beautiful Mess: Practicing the Presence of the Kingdom of God. The first edition of this book was released in 2006, and a revised and updated version was published in July 2013.

    The book comes in three parts: “Discovering the Kingdom,” in which McKinley describes what the kingdom of God is; “Re-Visioning Life in the Kingdom,” in which he describes where to look for it; and “Practicing the Presence of the Kingdom,” in which he describes some ways in which Christians can live out the kingdom today. Imago Dei Community embraces the arts, and most chapters end with a brief poem or creative bit of prose from a member of the community.

    This book is short (less than 200 pages) and readable. McKinley writes in a conversational and accessible tone, using no footnotes. McKinley’s description of the kingdom of God as “already and not yet” will not come as news to people who have read New Testament scholars such as N. T. Wright, Scot McKnight (who are not mentioned in the book), or George Eldon Ladd (who is)—or, indeed, the New Testament itself. His emphasis on discipleship carries echoes of Dallas Willard. This book will be most valuable to those who are looking for an accessible introduction to what the kingdom is, and how to live out its beauty today—in the midst of the mess.

    ★ ★ ★ ★

    Note: Thanks to Waterbrook Multnomah for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Where the Reformation Came From: A Review

    This history book has a history.
    The first edition of Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence, and Rupture was published in the spring of 2012. In May of that year, historian Carl R. Trueman wrote a review of the book that pointed out several factual errors in the portion of the book that covers the Reformation. The following month (as pointed out by Trueman), the publisher, InterVarsity Press, acknowledged the errors and pulled the first edition (you can see here that Amazon no longer sells it).

    In September 2012, IVP Academic issued a second, corrected edition. Books and Culture ran a review of the second edition in early 2013, in which the reviewer wrote:

    To its credit, IVP ceased publication of the first edition of this volume shortly after its release when it was brought to the company’s attention through scholarly reviews (especially the online review of Professor Carl Trueman) that it contained an embarrassingly high number of inconsistencies, mostly inaccuracies of names and dates. In response, a press release was issued stating that the “text did not represent the academic standards we as a publisher hold ourselves to, and we decided to take full responsibility for them.” Well done, IVP! As a result, the following review is far more positive than the original version.

    But a bad reputation is hard to shake. There are two comments on this Books and Culture review. The first is someone, clearly lacking in reading comprehension, who says that the book has “been pulled from the shelf due to many factual and historical errors.” The second is me pointing out to this commenter that even a cursory reading of the review would show him that it is of the second edition. Seriously. Some people can’t wait to spread negativity.

    Considering this backstory, the main question to address is, “Are the errors corrected?” The answer is yes, as far as I can tell. It was difficult to find all of Trueman’s references, since the new edition has different page numbers, but the ones I was able to find were indeed corrected. I was able to find a few typos, but that is not terribly unusual for a book of this length (480 pages, including indices). The most egregious one was on page 351, where there is an italicized heading, The Bishops’ Bible and the Authorized Version, followed by a space and a different heading. I imagine that, in light of Trueman’s criticism that so much space was devoted to the King James [Authorized] Version, this section was excised, but the heading was mistakenly left.

    The further question is, “Is this book worth reading?” The answer is a more confident yes. Evans is a medieval historian, and so is on solid footing when she is dealing with the period leading up to the Reformation. The book comes in three parts: the first is organized largely topically, and deals with the germination of several areas of questioning during the first centuries of the Christian era. The second deals with medieval developments, such as universities, the growth of monasticism, and the stirrings of reform. The third deals with the Reformation and its aftermath. The Lutherans and the Reformed, not surprisingly, get the most scrutiny, but space is also given to the Anabaptists, the English Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. Evans closes the book with a reconsideration of some of the questions dealt with in the first part, showing how those questions were answered (or explored in different ways) in the Reformation and post-Reformation. In all, this is a good read for someone (especially a Protestant) who is interested in the connection between the Middle Ages and the Reformation.

    ★ ★ ★ ★

    Note: Thanks to InterVarsity Press for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • The Liturgy of Young Life Camp

    My wife and I returned yesterday from a week as adult guests at Malibu, a Young Life camp on the coast of British Columbia. We were there while high school campers were there, and so we were able to experience camp from two angles: we did the same things that the campers did, but we were also able to look behind the scenes a bit to see why a week at camp is organized the way it is.

    Malibu in the morning
    Malibu in the morning
    That was one of the more fascinating and eye-opening parts of camp for me. It is obvious that the camp speaker walks through a progression of topics throughout the week, from the character of God to the cross and resurrection. But less obvious was the fact that various activities were planned to happen on specific days so they would have a particular impact. The ultimate goal was that by the end of the week, each camper would be confronted with who Jesus is and challenged to personally respond to him.

    I began to see the week as a liturgy of sorts. Some people, even many Christians, don’t like the word “liturgy” because it reminds them of ritualism, of dead religion, of going through the motions. But James K.A. Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, defines liturgies as “rituals of ultimate concern: rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations.” He goes on to say:

    Square dancin'
    Square dancin’

    Liturgies are the most loaded forms of ritual practice because they are after nothing less than our hearts. They want to determine what we love ultimately. By ultimately I mean what we love “above all,” that to which we pledge allegiance, that to which we are devoted in a way that overrules other concerns and interests. Our ultimate love is what defines us, what makes us the kind of people we are. In short, it is what we worship.

    Liturgies are not just what you experience at church. They are everywhere: Smith gives the examples of the shopping mall, freshman orientation at a university, and football games. They all communicate a message—not just by using words, but by fostering practices, creating rhythms, and feeding desires—about what is ultimately important. They all serve a particular vision of human flourishing, and they all lead to a form of worship. Too often, their version of worship and human flourishing is destructive.

    In this way, a week at a Young Life camp is liturgical counter-formation. Through a series of rituals—music, singing, games, organized activities, even blowing horns before meals—it teaches campers to love something, and to worship someone, other than what they are taught to love and worship every other day of their lives when they go to school, the mall, sporting events, and the movies. Bob Dylan wrote a song called “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” With apologies to him, I’d also say “you gotta be shaped by somethin’.” You’re always being shaped, consciously or not, by a set of cultural forces and practices. It’s the genius of a Young Life camp to put that shaping power in the service of the good news of Jesus.

  • My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter: A Review

    Since 1989, Tim Keller has been pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Many people in his congregation have questions about how their faith and work can coexist. This book, co-written with Katherine Leary Alsdorf, the head of Redeemer’s Center for Faith and Work, is his response to their questions.

    The book comes in three parts: in the first, he writes about how God intended work to be from the beginning. In the second, he deals with the problems we have with work in a fallen world. In the third, he lays out the different effects the gospel has on work: it fits work into a different story, it gives us a new understanding of what we are doing when we work, it gives us a different set of ethics to apply at work, and it gives us new energy for work.

    As is typical with Keller, he draws on a wide variety of sources to make his arguments and illustrate his points, like jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, theologians John Calvin and Martin Luther, and philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre, Luc Ferry, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Some of Keller’s favorites are early 20th century British writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, and they make several appearances as well.

    When many people think about work, they think about the business world. I know my thoughts tend to move in that direction, since that is the world I live in now. But this book is about work in general, and does not focus explicitly on business. However, Keller does give several business-related examples and illustrations. He gives a sketch of a few ways the gospel might influence business in the chapter “A New Story for Work,” which I think is worth quoting in part:

    While from the outside there might not be immediately noticeable differences between a well-run company reflecting a gospel worldview and one reflecting primarily the world-story of the marketplace, inside the differences could be very noticeable. The gospel-centered business would have a discernible vision for serving the customer in some unique way, a lack of adversarial relationships and exploitation, an extremely strong emphasis on excellence and product quality, and an ethical environment that goes ‘all the way down’ to the bottom of the organizational chart and to the realities of daily behavior, even when high ethics mean a loss of margin. In the business animated by the gospel worldview, profit is simply one of many important bottom lines (167–68).

    Every Good Endeavor is a theologically robust reflection on the nature and purpose of work from someone who has spent a lot of time reflecting on it. It corrects many misunderstandings about work and gives a positive vision for what it can be. I recommend it highly.

  • Eleven Rings to Rule Them All: A Review

    Phil Jackson won 11 championship rings as coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers between 1991 and 2010. Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success is an autobiography of sorts, focused on those 11 championship seasons (plus the two he won as a player with the New York Knicks in 1970 and 1973). In it, Jackson recounts the lessons he learned in his attempts to turn teams from a bunch of “lone warriors” into a cohesive unit. In professional basketball, where players are encouraged by their friends, handlers, and the media to think of themselves as individuals and even brands, the greatest competitive advantage of Jackson’s teams at their best was their ability to set aside egos and put the team first.

    This book is filled with interesting stories about Jackson’s life and the colorful personalities he worked with, and is an entertaining and quick read. Jackson’s stories about how he dealt with difficult characters like Dennis Rodman and, later, Kobe Bryant were particularly interesting, and I found some of Jackson’s coaching practices, like giving a specific book to each of his players every year, fascinating. However, I found by the end that I didn’t have a lot of admiration for Jackson as a person. It wasn’t that I disliked him, but I felt that the aura of imperturbability that he projected on the sidelines was tarnished by hearing him talk about what happened behind the scenes. He rarely if ever seemed to tell stories that reflected badly on himself—a classic sign of someone who lacks humility. Also, he still complained about the officiating in some games even though they happened years ago.

    What I found most interesting about the book was Jackson’s account of his spiritual journey. He was born into a fundamentalist Pentecostal family where both of his parents were ministers, and decided in his early adulthood that the Christianity he grew up with wasn’t for him. Over the years he created his own eclectic spirituality, including elements of Native American religion, Zen Buddhism, and Christian mysticism, and incorporated several of the practices he found helpful into his coaching. As a Christian, I wished that he had been able to find that Christ was big and deep enough to meet all of his needs, but perhaps Jackson was presented in his youth with a Christ that was narrower than he is in reality. That, in my opinion, was the saddest part about this book.

  • You’ve Got to Draw the Line Somewhere: A Review

    Henry Cloud is the coauthor of the perennial psychology bestseller Boundaries, which has spawned a series of other books (Boundaries in Dating, Boundaries with Kids, Beyond Boundaries… I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get Boundaries for Grandparents, Boundaries with Siblings, The Return of Boundaries, Boundaries Strike Back, Boundaries: First Blood, Part 2, etc.). The latest in this series is Boundaries for Leaders.

    In his solo books, Cloud tends to focus on the psychology of business and leadership, drawing on his experiences as a consultant. This book is Cloud’s plea for leaders to foster the kind of culture that enables their people’s brains to work optimally, using the three “executive functions” of the brain: attention to what is relevant, inhibition of what is distracting, and the working memory to always stay aware of relevant information.

    The boundaries Cloud writes about for the bulk of the book have to do with setting the right emotional tone, staying connected, reducing negativity, focusing on things that can be controlled, creating the right values, and fostering an environment of trust. At the end, he writes about the leader creating boundaries for him- or herself.

    For the most part, these boundaries seemed obvious. Of course people need to be in a good place emotionally if they are going to be a positive contributor. Of course people need to focus on what they can control rather than wring their hands over what they can’t. Of course people need to stay connected if they want to accomplish anything. Of course nothing good is going to happen in a culture of mistrust. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I subscribe to Samuel Johnson’s dictum that “people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

    But this book isn’t just a restatement of the obvious. Cloud’s major contributions are that he roots his insights in neuroscience, and he makes creating the right kind of culture the responsibility of the leader. That’s the “ridiculously in charge” of the subtitle. Leaders, Cloud says many places throughout the book, get what they create and what they allow. It’s a heavy responsibility, but one that leaders everywhere need to be reminded of.

    Note: Thanks to HarperBusiness for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • The Universe Isn’t Trying to Tell You Anything

    One of my biggest pet peeves is people attributing agency to the universe. That may seem a little abstract, so let me illustrate using this bit of dialogue from “The Return,” a 2007 episode of The Office:

    Jim is annoyed by his new co-worker Andy, who seems even more annoying than his old co-worker Dwight. So he says, “Congratulations universe, you win,” as if the universe has somehow gotten back at him for antagonizing Dwight.

    If you start to notice this practice of talking about the universe as if it is a person, you’ll see it everywhere: TV, social media, conversations with friends. But the universe isn’t a person. It doesn’t have a mind. It doesn’t punish you or get back at you. It can’t find you a new apartment. It doesn’t tell anyone anything. Saying it does is like saying the ocean talks to you, or your car. And unless you’re David Hasselhoff, that’s crazy.

    My Dad wrote a blog post recently presenting the idea that belief in conspiracy theories acts as a substitute for belief in God. People begin by deciding not to believe in God, or at least in any God who is capable of acting in the universe today. But human beings hate to believe that life is random and purposeless. We hate it so much that after we decide we are not going to believe in God or anything we regard as “supernatural,” we will actively seek out and believe conspiracy theories, just so we won’t have to feel that the universe doesn’t have a purpose. Believing in a sinister, cleverly orchestrated plot is preferable to believing in purposelessness.

    I think the same thing is happening here. People decide not to believe in God—or at least in any God who is capable of acting in the universe today—but they hate to think that everything is random, so they attribute agency to the universe. They say that it is trying to tell them something, or they ask it to do something else. But it can’t. It isn’t a person. It doesn’t “tell,” and it doesn’t “do.” It is a space in which agents act; that’s all.

  • We’ve Got a Job to Do: A Review

    There have been several recent books arguing that Christianity is not just about believing the right things; instead, Christianity is a total commitment to following Jesus in all of life, and following Jesus together with his other followers.

    This genre has become popular, I think, because it is scratching an itch that many Christians have. The bar for being a Christian, at least in recent years in the US and Canada, has been set rather lower than it is set in the Bible. This low bar is defined as follows: believe Jesus died for your sins and you will go to heaven when you die. That’s it. Whatever small amount of guidance there is in this truncated gospel for how to live life now is limited to individualistic platitudes about being a nice person. So there have been books that argue for an expansion of the definition of “gospel,” like Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel, and there have been books that argue for a more radical lifestyle on the part of Christians, like David Platt’s Radical (I’ve read both and recommend them both).

    Now Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision US, has entered this genre with his latest book, Unfinished: Believing Is Only the Beginning (ebook here). His first book, The Hole in Our Gospel, was released in 2011. I read it then, and this year my church went through the video curriculum associated with it during Lent. That book had a similar argument—that Christians were meant to do something with their lives besides just believing—but it focused particularly on the obligation Christians have to serve the poor. This book is broader in scope; it is about nothing less than finding our purpose in life by continuing Jesus’ mission of advancing the kingdom of God. Stearns writes in the introduction:

    I believe there is a direct connection between the unfinished work of God’s kingdom and our sense of feeling incomplete in our Christian faith because there is a connection between our story and God’s story. If we are not personally engaged in God’s great mission in the world, then we have missed the very thing he created us to do.

    Stearns begins the book by talking broadly about the meaning of life, about God’s story, and the reason why Jesus left. This is all important stuff, and I understand his desire to begin by grabbing the attention of the largest possible audience, but I thought his discussion was so broad that it was not likely to convince the unconvinced. He really hits his stride in chapter 4, “Magic Kingdom, Tragic Kingdom, and the Kingdom of God.” From here on, he argues that God has put us on this earth to advance his kingdom, and we will never really be satisfied with our lives unless we commit to following wherever he leads and obeying whatever he commands.

    I agree wholeheartedly with Stearns’s argument, and recommend this book. I found myself encouraged at some points and challenged at others. I can also think of several people I know who would benefit from reading it. But the big question is, “Is this book enough to convince the unconvinced?” In other words, is the argument that Stearns lays out in this book enough to convince people that they have believed an incomplete gospel and cause more people to enlist as foot soldiers for the kingdom? I read James K. A. Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom a few months ago, and I am still haunted by his argument that we are shaped more by our liturgies than by our principles. In other words, assenting to rational arguments doesn’t shape people so much as their habits. In light of that, I was glad to see at the end of this book that Stearns included a “What Are You Going to Do about It?” section. Only time will tell, but this book has the potential to get more people off their butts and enlisted in God’s kingdom. I think it will speak particularly to those who already feel their lives are incomplete in some way.