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When Bad Christians
Happen to Good People When Bad Christians Happen to Good People. How can you not like a title like that? When I first heard about the book, I immediately wanted to read it. Here's a guy who understands my frustration with those annoying Christians, the bad ones, the ones who make being a follower of Christ embarrassing. So I dove into When Bad Christians Happen to Good People, looking for a good laugh at the fundamentalists. Thankfully Dave Burchett had a much wider view, and I quickly realized that at times we're all guilty of being bad Christians. Burchett is the perfect author for this book, with his own horror stories of run-ins with "bad Christians" that rival any other. But Burchett brings plenty of humility and grace to the table, refusing to take the low road. He often uses himself as a bad example, and mixes in plenty of humor, including chapter titles like "CSL: Christian as a Second Language" and "Godly or Gaudy?" The miserable failure of the modern church is apparent as you read. But Burchett doesn't just point out the bad. He also offers suggestions and ideas to help Christians live up to the name. He encourages churches to be "sinner-sensitive." He questions whether campaigning for a secular prayer before football games is worth our time. He challenges the concept of fear-evangelism and instead encourages Christians to actually hang out with heathens--just like Jesus did. He points out our complete lack of theological grounding (less than 1% of Christian adults have a grasp of basic theological concepts like whether or not Jesus sinned, or if Satan is real or just a symbol), and urges us to stop memorizing the sports page and crack open our Bibles. When Bad Christians Happen to Good People revisits the oddly revolutionary ideas about Christianity that have been explored in books like Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace and The Jesus I Never Knew, and applies those ideas to the real-world Christian life. This is a book for the modern believer who loves Jesus, but doesn't always love his followers. |
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