Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor - Robert Lupton
Robert Lupton has been living and working in inner-city Atlanta for 34 years. This book reads like a journal of hard lessons learned. He takes us on the journey that he himself traveled. He began by simply doing good through clothes closets and food pantries. Then he realized it was better to help people help themselves, and finally he recognized the need for develop the whole community: ‘Christian Community Development’. We love our neighbors most comprehensively by loving the whole neighborhood. Simply to multiply social services in the troubled neighborhoods of our cities will only attract more socially dependent people and addict the neighborhood to handouts. Lupton offers an interesting apologetic at the end of the book for the “Christian Gentrification” of our inner-cities, that is, that we learn how to build a just and compassionate community when we flow back into our inner cities. His writing reflects a lifestyle that has had to budget everything very carefully. He is not a poet; I don’t have a lot of phrases highlited. His chapters are brief, straight-to-the-point bullet points that fortify his argument. But if you’re looking for a coach who has his clipboard in his right hand with a playbook that has been carefully assembled over three decades, this might be the book for you. It certainly was one of the most helpful books I have read about ministry to the poor.
The Bishop of Rwanda: Finding Forgiveness Amidst A Pile Of Bones - John Rucyahana
My daughter, Sarah, helped Bishop Rucyahana do a book signing up in Washington, D.C. and passed along his book to me when she finished it. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 killed over a million people in the space of a few months. Bishop Rucyahana was called by God to return to Rwanda and be part of the national healing process. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. In order to appreciate the power of forgiveness, he wants us to understand the atrocities of neighbors literally butchering families that they had lived beside for years and years. But the book is about forgiveness, not genocide, and the ‘take away’ for me was the continual emphasis of Biship John’s argument: if I am not able to forgive others, then I still don’t undertstand the gospel in my heart. I always love books that teach me the gospel over and over again.
Dangerous Wonder - Mike Yaconelli
I loved this book! It is subtitled The Adventure of Childlike Faith. Yaconelli’s writings have always reminded me both of the power of the gospel and the power of the imagination. I feel like he takes all the hot air and posturing right out of me - and out of ‘ministry’ - just by reading a couple of chapters. It’s like holding an over-inflated balloon between your thumb and forefinger, lifting it up over your head and then letting go. And it makes me want to risk again. The book inspires me, for the sake of the gospel, to take great big, God-sized risks for Jesus, with passion and playfulness and “dangerous wonder”.
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
A wise man once told me that I should be spending more time rereading, than reading for the first time. This is one of our family’s most beloved books. I read it aloud to each of my children. But why should I never read it again, just because my children have left home? So I put it on my bedside table recently and for a week or two, I rekindled my joy in this story. Our dependence on image technology to entertain and occupy us for hours of every day has thinned reality down for us and stunted our christian imaginations. To Kill A Mockingbird is the kind of book that reminds us of the power of a great story to take our atrophied imaginations by the hand, give them a vigorous workout and get them back in shape so that we can live a life of faith, that is, a life that bridges the gap between the visible and the invisible realms of reality. Read it. Better yet, read it out loud with someone!
The Provocative Church - Graham Tomlin
I heard Tomlin present this material at a workshop last January and it was excellent. Here is a first class theologian who has moved from Wycliffe Hall, Oxford to a local parish in order to incarnate the principles of this book into its life and ministry. I especially appreciate his material on “transforming communities”! Peter tells us (I Pet. 3:15) to be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give a reason for the hope that is within us. This book is written to help us become the kind of faith community that lives so “provocatively” that someone looking on might actually come up to us and ask us!
The Great Good Place - Ray Oldenburg
Ray Olderburg puts his finger on the ache that Suburbia creates in all of us: that hunger for informal public gathering places and makes a compelling argument that these settings (coffee shops, hair salons, book stores, bars and bistros) are essential to the life and health of a community and that most of our city and county planning is structurally set against them!
TwentySomething: Surviving And Thriving In The Real World - Margaret Feinberg
This is a great handbook to give to this age group - and read it first ourselves! Feinberg thoughtfully engages the issues and concerns of this age group and, along the way, probably speaks to most of us living in the 21st century.
