We go to church, pray, read our
bibles and proclaim ourselves as Christians, but sometimes it seems like there
is something missing. We say that we follow Jesus, and that’s a good thing, but
sometimes the problem isn’t that we’re not following Him, it’s that the way we act
when we think we’re following Him, isn’t quite the way He does things, in fact,
sometimes we’re 180˚ degrees off.
And so,
Chad Bird leads us on a quest for answers to the questions “Does it matter what
one believes?” and then, “Or is anything okay, just as long as you feel good
about it?” For some things it probably doesn’t matter what you believe: some
people ‘believe’ that bacon is only for breakfast, while others ‘believe’ that
bacon is one of the basic food groups, and as such can, and should, be eaten at
any time of the day. But perhaps when it comes to Jesus, we should be a little
more particular in making sure that our beliefs are correct.
And so,
we look at Upside-Down Spirituality: the
9 Essential Failures of a Faithful Life (Baker Books, 2019). A problem with Christianity in the West today
is that numbers are declining, a lot of people are just giving up on organized religion
because it really doesn’t seem to meet their needs. We have gotten to the point
where Church is so easy that it’s hard to keep people engaged, they get bored
and leave. But Christianity and Church was never meant to be merely a spectator
sport. There’s more to it than whispering a prayer and then showing up to
church once in a while, and at the end of the month if there’s any money left, putting
a dollar or two in the collection place.
Church is meant to be an action verb.
So,
Bird leads us through a series of things that well-meaning Christians do on a
regular basis, which have no basis in what spirituality should look like. The introduction
is appropriately titled Turning Our World
Upside Down. I say appropriately because that’s what happened in the first
centuries after the resurrection; somehow though we’ve lost that momentum and need
to regain it.
There are
3 sections in the book, several chapters each on areas of our lives, where many
of us make mistakes. When Bird talks about ‘ourselves’ in section one, he
highlights several things that people fail to do: 1) they fail to believe in
themselves, 2) they fail to make (or even try to make) a name for themselves, and
3) they fail to follow their hearts—their passions.
When it
comes to our lives, we make some mistakes too. We beat ourselves up because we’re not perfect at parenting, we don’t
take time to search out our calling so our careers and vocations aren’t as satisfying
as we might like, and lastly, when our marriages hit a rocky patch we know it’s
because we didn’t find our soulmate, we should have tried harder
And it’s at church also where we
sometimes get things backwards. For example, we forget that as a body, as the
bride of Christ, we have been set apart, set aside for God's purposes. Instead
of trying to change the world, we embrace it, hoping that eventually they will
be so enamored with us, that they’ll change on their own to become like us—but why
would they? We’ve already changed to be like them. And of course, we have our own private and
personal relationship with Jesus. That’s okay, until it becomes so private, so
personal that we refuse to tell anybody about it. Remember the end of each of
the Gospel accounts includes a sending, a commissioning: the disciples were
sent to the world to proclaim the good news. And go they went-it wasn’t enough
to just send a check and hope that someone else would carry the message. And
then we forget that there is a place in the world for small churches; as long
as they are healthy and doing kingdom work, there’s a need for them, yet we
often fall into the trap of bigger is better. And in our search for bigger, we
get caught up in all that church has to offer me, and we forget about offering
of ourselves to help the church.
I received a copy of this book from
the publisher as part of their Bloggers’ program. I was not required to write a
positive review. But I did. 5/5
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