This book by the brilliantly irreverent Reverend Dave Tomlinson is as it says on the tin. As per its opening quote - "a Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and has at least some dim, half-baked idea of whom to thank" - this is a deep dive, though written with excellent simplicity and accessibility, into what it actually means to be a Christian - with a no-holds-barred-approach to calling out the bullshittery that we so often allow to proliferate in Church communities, setting up expectations or dogmatic stringencies that either aren't there or shouldn't be held as the defining elements of Christianity that they are - because Christianity is, and only ever has been, all about Christ - and that's it. And that facilitates an outrageously generous worldview that is, as Tomlinson found in his own ministry and I have experienced in my own sojourn, just sometimes sadly absent in its full realisation among the very people purporting to practice it.
This book is an incredible gift to the Church's missional momentum: stop taking ourself so damn seriously, take Christ seriously and take him out there into the world with us. I've been doing a lot of reading & thinking about this over the past year and what it might look like in ways I've never quite dared to let myself imagine, because of the evangelical ideological constraints that are part of the particular Christianity I've grown up in; can we really be saying we're trying to imitate Christ if we're not willing to call out the religious authorities and blind-spots of our own age, as he did? can we really consider ourselves to be servants of the King if every invocation of Christ's Kingship leads back into the same old circular argument about "the now and the not yet" instead of leading us to joyously and daringly insist on trying to make it the now? why should we expect people who have never had reason to find sacredness in the material trappings of our own faith to do so, if we have barely even started to put in the time required to listeningly look at places in which they may be seeking the sacred, wondering why, and responding discerningly with love and hope? and how can we be seriously expecting people to get excited about, or even remotely curious about in positive ways, models of Church community life that do very little to meet people where they're at and facilitate inclusive creativity, or that re-tread the same ground every Sunday talking about the divine peace of knowing God which is celebrated by the sabbath but the very weekly maintenance of such an ongoing rotational responsibility for both preacher and preached-at seems to bestow little if any meaningful restfulness amid the busy noise of our culture, or which seems to be bogged down in almost obsessive managerial planning of discipleship courses or theology lectures or etcetera because the lived, real relationship with Jesus is so seemingly stultified that such options are the only real route the church leaders look to be able to manifest when it comes to thinking about their future?
These aren't necessarily questions that Dave asks or answers in the book - he covers a lot of ground and I would rather give you a feel for its gist than attempt a summary. But if any of what I've said here resonates with your own experience of the Christian faith, whether you think of yourself as an adherent of it [regardless how "good!"] or not - then I reckon you'll find much of comfort and affirmation in this book. Though if I'm honest, the people who'd really benefit most from reading it are exactly the kind of Christians who probably wouldn't anyway because the title pissed them off... which is kind of Dave's point.
