Growing in Grace: Resources, Spring 2024, Vol. 7
Quarterly mini-book reviews for Christian leaders
Spring into reading! Listen to audiobooks as you walk outside!
Personal Discipleship
John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did. (Waterbrook, 2024).
Comer is known for lifestyle-challenging books like The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. In this newest book, Comer focuses on discipleship, or, as he frames it, allowing Jesus to be our rabbi. The book’s subtitle presents its outline, with the final section advocating the development of a rule of life. Comer argues that we are formed by whomever we follow, and Jesus is the only person worthy of our emulation.
Understanding the Times
Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic 2022).
Watkin, a Senior Lecturer at Monash U. in Melbourne (Aus.), could not find a text that spoke to the great social and cultural issues of the day. So, he wrote his own. Both Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition named this volume a best book of the year. Even with its length, Watkin’s book is worth the read or listen.
Education
Donna-Jean A. Breckenridge, et.al. Six Voices, One Story: The Heart of AmblesideOnline (BOCKTJLPRY, 2023).
This is the story of six homeschooling moms who, while living in different states and different countries, created a superb website of Charlotte Mason resources and curriculum — and how they, for over 30 years, have offered it all free. Even if homeschooling and CM are irrelevant to you, the book speaks of entrepreneurship, friendship, parenting, teamwork, and love for Jesus. Two of these moms have now died, but the work that the six created lives on.
Christian Leadership
Bryan C. Loritts, The Offensive Church: Breaking the Cycle of Ethnic Disunity (IVP, 2023).
When Loritts speaks about an “offensive” church, he refers, not to something nasty or unpleasant, but instead to a church on the offense, attacking our world with the transforming love of Christ — and particularly in the area of racial disunity. Loritts offers a vulnerable, challenging, and wise way forward. Christian leaders need to stand against hate and division with the weapons of biblical truth and Spirit-led humility. As a black person, Loritts recounts from experience the challenges of creating and growing a truly “redemptive” and multiethnic church. His book is at once convicting and encouraging, honest and hopeful.
