Elliot Ritzema

Tag: church

  • Book Review: Going Deep

    We all know people who could best be described as “deep.” They know who they are; they live their lives with wisdom; they give good advice; they respond to life’s difficult situations in a way that most of us could only dream of.

    How do you become a deep person? If you’re a pastor, how do you cultivate deep people in your church? Gordon MacDonald sets out to answer these questions in the book Going Deep: Becoming a Person of Influence. He does not answer the questions directly, but instead explores them in a fictionalized format. He tells the story of himself and his wife Gail (the only real-life characters in the book) as they attempt to grow deep people in their church. Over the course of the book, they explore what it means to be deep, look at models of how to cultivate deep people, come up with a plan to cultivate depth in a small group in their church over the course of a year, and execute that plan, dealing with bumps and challenges along the way.

    I enjoyed the fictionalized format of the book (which MacDonald tried earlier in his book Who Stole My Church?), and I appreciate that MacDonald decided to explore the concept of cultivating depth this way. It made the book easy to read, and I think it gives readers a tangible idea of what cultivating depth might look like and how long it might take that would be harder to pull off in a non-fiction format. My only criticism is that the story started off slowly. I was not really hooked until probably a third of the way through, which, in a 383-page book, is a long time. Early in the book, there was no conflict that I wanted to see resolved, and no mystery that I wanted to see solved. I think that MacDonald could have done a better job of hooking readers early by cutting down on introductory matters and getting into the action more quickly.

    In spite of the slow start, I’d recommend this book, especially to those pastors who are interested in growing deep people in their churches.

    Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Review of Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

    Radical by David Platt (who is pastor of a large church in Birmingham, AL and has a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) is a book which, unfortunately, is needed. I say “unfortunately” because Radical is a call to American Christians to follow Jesus with their whole lives, and not to confuse pursuit of the American Dream of wealth, comfort and self-sufficiency with Christian discipleship. If American Christians were radical disciples of Jesus, this book would not be necessary. But there is a widespread collusion among Christians in this country that being a follower of Christ need not be radical. As Platt puts it, “[W]e look around, and everyone else has nice cars, nice homes, and lifestyles characterized by luxuries, so we accept that this must be the norm for Christians. We may get convicted about our way of living when we look at the Bible, but then when we look at one another, we assume it must be okay because everyone else lives this way” (205-6).

    There has been such a need for books like this for such a long time that you could almost say there is a genre of “costly discipleship” books: books that insist that following Christ is more of a life-changing commitment than is commonly thought. Platt makes reference to one of the most famous books in this genre, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, in the opening pages of this book.

    These books are valuable, but there is a danger in reading them. The danger is that in reading them we are convicted by how far away from a truly sacrificial life of discipleship we are, and we become paralyzed either by guilt or by not knowing where to begin. Platt is not interested in paralyzing people, and the last chapter of this book is where he really shows a pastoral heart. He urges readers to begin their journey toward radical discipleship by undertaking a one-year experiment involving five components: pray for the entire world; read through the entire Word; sacrifice your money for a specific purpose; spend your time in another context; commit your life to a multiplying community. Honestly, these steps, by themselves, are not all that radical. The point, I think, is to get people to start somewhere. He even says that beginning by spending 2 percent of our time in a different context could lead to giving 98 percent of our time in a different context (203). Platt wants to get Christians on the road to understanding the radical demands – and radical rewards – of following Jesus. I am thankful for this book, and will seek to follow through on some of the commitments that Platt suggests.