Enjoying God

This book is another straight-up easy-to-read edifying banger from Tim Chester, who has made a habit of writing that kind of book. I've just binged it in more or less one sitting, which is particularly impressive at it's Christmas Day so to find such an uninterrupted run of free time is frankly shocking* - I'm staying back at my family's house for the holidays and this book was on the shelves of the absent lodger whose room (which is technically my old room anyway) I am temporarily occupying, so I decided to borrow** it as it's been a while since I read a theology book by myself.

   The book is organised in an extremely straightforward and helpful way. The first couple of chapters are largely introductory, initially opening a broad discussion of what we mean when we say or feel that we want more of God, before conducting a brief examination of what we mean when we say or feel that we're experiencing joy. Then the meat of the book is arranged into nine chapters, three for each Person of the Trinity, walking attentively through ways in which God breaks into our lives in the everyday and thus can be enjoyably related to therein. We enjoy the Father's generosity in every pleasure, His formation in every hardship, His welcome in every prayer; we enjoy Christ's grace in every failure, his presence in every pain, his touch in every supper; we enjoy the Holy Spirit's life in every temptation, her hope in every groan, her voice in every word. Following this, before a perfunctory concluding chapter, are a final pair discussing how we can enjoy God's love through one another and enjoy God's freedom through daily repentance and faith.

   As is his wont in his depth of distilled wisdom and insight, Chester has stuffed every one of these chapters chock-full of dense complex theological ideas - communicated helpfully in language that a twelve-year old could engage with without difficulty. I always recommend Tim Chester's books and this is no different - if your walk with God has started to feel a bit too austere, too ordinary, too rote, this book could be a great resource to kickstart your heart a bit in the direction of attentively and gratefully enjoying God for who He is more. Highly recommended reading for all Christians but especially if you're going through a bit of a slump.

* To be fair Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was on in the background.

** Cheers Bethan - though you'll likely never know.

You Can Change

This book by Tim Chester (available as a free digibook from that link) is one I'd read once before as a confused fifteen-year-old struggling to properly engage with or enjoy life as a Christian, which in fairness continued to broadly define my habitual over-intellectualized theological education masquerading as a genuine spiritual life until relatively recently, or arguably is ongoing and will only be peeled back layer-by-layer of exactly the same basic lessons and then attempting, failing, againing, to put them into practice... It's a book about sin, redemption, hope, and has an incredibly challenging but helpful focus on observable patterns of behaviour as well as emphasising trying to listen to and respond with abundance of truth-reminders to our own thoughts and feelings. Having re-read it, personally I think it may be one of the most potent, emotionally and psychologically realistic, sinners'-life-affirming yet wholly-holiness-concerned Christian books I've read; and it is thoroughly and delightfully biblical. Anyone, pretty much, struggling with anything, I would recommend read this, as it takes you through a rigorous but generous questioning discernment process that unavoidably leads to practical considerations and may well spark the renewals in feeling, thinking, doing or being that you perhaps are held back from living life in fullness and joy by. This book is hard-hitting but sensitive, honest, and fundamentally rooted in the grace of a good & glorious God.

Total Church

This book by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis was one I've been meaning to read for years while somehow simultaneously feeling like doing so would be largely redundant, as its two authors were the founding elders of the church I grew up in, and therefore its theology had already broadly been thoroughly absorbed by my adolescent self in the form of a life's worth of sermons, pastoral care & conversation, and even hymns (written by Tim).
   Glad to say - reading it was a highly rewarding experience even if not particularly insightful in the sense of exposing me to new forms of presentation or argument about what the gospel is and how it does, or should, work - the premise is simple: if churches are intentional communities centred around the gospel, then that gospel is manifest in both the content (words of truth around which those church communities are unified) and the mission (actions & life-patterns within this community springing from those truths, which are to be shared in the wider world and affect every element of life). According to the blurb comments, this book was apparently considered 'provocative' when it came out - but reading it over a decade down the road it's a wonderful testament to the robustness of post-Christendom evangelical missiology that it basically echoes (or rather pre-echoes) mostly the same kind of ground that I would consider hegemonic in the field, albeit without becoming academic or wishy-washily impractical (as some texts can, maybe, be criticized of doing). The book itself is extremely readable, and draws helpfully on both biblical underpinnings to their ideas and experiential examples of things working out in contemporary efforts. After an introductory pair of chapters exploring what 'gospel' and 'community' mean in this context and the particular challenges of pursuing the fullest overlap of the two (which is what a church, in the total sense, is meant to be), Tim and Steve then apply this robustly simple framework to various areas of Christian living - including evangelism, social involvement, church planting and world mission, discipleship and training, pastoral care, spirituality, theology and apologetics, children and young people, and how we conceptualize success.
   There could be much more to unpack from the ideas presented in this book - but since this is not presented as a manifesto, rather an ascertainment of the way church already is (or at least is meant to be), the parameters discussed in here may be flexible enough to be readily applied to anything not covered here. Overall I think most Christian readers would find helpful food for thought in here, in terms of approaches to missional living and community particularly, and would recommend this book to believers looking for workable roadmaps to keep their witness relevant while rooted together in the gospel.

The World We All Want

This book, a short introduction to Christianity written by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, is a great resource for doing its job, something it does with aplomb and regularity in church circles I'm used to. (It probably helps that both of its authors are both of the founding leaders of my church but it's caught on elsewhere too.) 'TWWAW' (pronounced 'idk') for short, rather than the kind of book you can give to a non-christian and expect them to engage well with it (they might, but only if they've already got a vague familiarity with what Christian-ness: a better resource for letting someone read as an introduction would be 3-2-1), it's designed as seven studies, observing a passage of scripture and running some investigative questions, best worked through in small group discussions. I've just finished going through it with a handful of seekers, as I was one of the supporting facilitators in the studies - not that it needed much, as if led by someone who knows Christianity well, TWWAW pretty much drives all the sessions itself. It's structured around the whole biblical narrative, from creation to fall to redemption to new creation, tracing how Jesus succeeded the various transitional steps required to complete this progress that Israel failed at. It's well biblically grounded but doesn't go into a huge amount of theological depth, which makes it very accessible, but it does have the potential for the sheer massiveness of the story presented and the well-poised questions invoking responses from seeker readers to prompt questions that do go into considerable depth (which is why it's probably advisable to have a pretty experienced Christian leading this study, rather than just giving the books out). Anyway - as a resource that I've seen many a time over the last decade prove its effectiveness in communicating the gospel and linking it well to individual concerns about God and sin and such, I wholeheartedly recommend TWWAW for any Christians to use in study groups with friends who are seeking, and pray that in any such efforts God uses these well-structured little studies to bring people closer to the truth.

Unreached

This book, another from the helpful and prolific Tim Chester, is an excellent compilation of practical insights into planting and growing church communities in deprived working-class parts of the United Kingdom. I got the book in response to a UCCF mission trip to Grimsby last year, where several of us students stayed with a local church in the East Marsh area and helped run missional outreach events, youth clubs and community development programmes in the midst of what is a thoroughly impoverished town. We've revisited Grimsby as a team a few times since, and the most recent visit prompted me to consider possibilities for my future involvement with church plants, given the immense need of deprived areas. So to a book I turned, seeking not direction but guidance.

   The book's a product of Reaching the Unreached, a working group of christians involved in mission to Britain's poor, with anecdotes and advice distilled into a rough guide on how to do church in working-class communities. It skips the "why" other than a short but hard-hittingly truthful indictment of current church culture being predominantly, arguably damagingly, middle-class. So then we go straight into the "how" of engaging with and properly integrating with different class cultures in deprived areas, and finding within them new workable methods of gospel witness, in word and in deed, for both evangelism and discipleship. There's a consistent emphasis on social action's importance in terms of showing Christlike love by meeting needs, but more fundamental is the emphasis on the gospel message of humanity's need for repentance and salvation by the grace of Jesus Christ. I summarise here, of course - the book goes into many applications of how these messages can be put across effectively therein - but I would do no justice in attempting to list key points or topics, hence my vagueness in discussing the content. The book's theological aspects are well-grounded, the pointers on working-class mission are from reliable long-term experienced workers, the cultural examinations are empirical and reasonable. The only gripe I might have with it is that the model of "working-class culture" related to is somewhat stereotyped; but generalisations of subjects are helpful to make if you're giving generalised advice, and besides it comes with plenty of caveats as to use individual judgement in dealing with specific groups, areas, minorities, persons, etc.

   Basically the advice is trustworthy and good, and if you're seriously considering getting (or already are) involved with church activity in working-class or deprived areas, this would be a great source of both encouragement and aided understanding. And if you're not (non-christian readers, you're off the hook for this bit), why not? There's huge need in Britain's poorer parts, and if God would give his Son to die for a sinner like you or me, what right would we have to deny the Word from other humans in an attempt for us to cling onto several middle-class comforts? Thinking about this has struck me harder than the book itself - the book's more of just a guide than a direction, as I said. The direction is a calling to do what's right, and bringing betterment to areas which are materially deprived and worse, spiritually dry, seems like an important choice.

You Can Pray

This book from Tim Chester (one of the founders and elders of The Crowded House church community in Sheffield which I've been part of for about half my life), was the first I've finished in ages - for which I apologise if anyone avidly follows this blog (whoever you are find something else to do). I went hitchhiking round Europe for charity and didn't get as much reading done during the adventure as I thought I would. Anyway, as far as books on christian life go, this does what it says on the tin - makes a clear and compelling exhortation for us to use prayer as a more habitual part of our lives.

   It does this in three sections - firstly, explaining the theology behind prayer to show us how significant and appealing it is, because God the Father loves to hear his children call upon him, Jesus the Son presents our prayers before him as he intercedes for us in grace, and the Holy Spirit works in us to reform our hearts (and thus our prayers) to please and glorify God by reflecting his will. This gives a brilliant picture of prayer as our current earthly means of making use of our relationship with the Trinity by talking to God, and given how good God is that makes it something truly special - we can literally present our daily thanks, requests, fears, concerns and repentances to the creator of the universe! What a privilege!

   The third part of the book builds on this by showing us how we should approach and use prayer given what it is: with a mixture of awed reverence and a familiar closeness; God is our God and our Father. In prayer our first thoughts should be of him, and our prayers should reflect this - by knowing why we're praying for what we're praying for. A child treating God as a genie praying for a bike evidently doesn't have the rightness of approach, but a diligent churchgoer may pray something wholesome-sounding simply because they feel it's a "holier" thing to pray, and that's not quite right either. Making prayer God-centred means examining our motivations for each prayer and ensuring that we can argue those requests through to something that exults God, by faith in his promises and his Word, by glorifying him and hoping for the spread of his glory, by rejoicing in his mercy and thankfully imploring him to extend it. Any good prayer should be able to be worked into one of these moulds - Tim helpfully walks through modern applications of the Lord's Prayer (the guideline to ideal prayer given by none other than Mr Messiah Jesus) to demonstrate how we can bring forth petitions for the advance of God's kingdom and for our needs while still trustingly prioritising the glorious sovereignty of our Father.

   The second part of the book tackles a much more reluctant issue: times when we don't pray. Maybe other things are more enjoyable, or seem more urgent, or we've prayed unanswered prayer too many times. Here we're shown from the arguments of the rest of the book how ludicrous such complaints are, but above just theological nudges to get our prayer life going again Tim offers a few strong practical pushes too. Chiefly among these is praying is groups (note how it's rare to look forward to a prayer meeting but even rarer to regret going to one, such is the encouragement of corporate worship in prayer) and praying over the Bible. Prayer is only one side of our relationship with God - us doing the talking, and we're much more unreliable than him, so it makes sense to not only talk but to listen, to spend time in his Word meditating over the gospel truth and how it speaks into every aspect of our lives. If we feel far from God, it's not because he's holding us at arms' length - it's because we've broken off the conversation with our heavenly Father. Bible reading and prayer as regular intertwined activities are essential to a healthy relationship with God.

   So as always with Tim's books, this is extremely easy to read, rigorously grounded in biblical truth, with theology made accessible by examples applying it to normal life. Definitely worth a read if you're keen to know the glory of God more in your prayers. However if you're considering reading this as a kick-up-the-backside to spurt you into praying more (I was), don't bother - read the Bible instead and just pray; have the confidence that God is good and glorious and true and just pray. For rejuvenating our appreciation of our heavenly citizenship, no book can possible be a substitute for God's word itself, hearing it, thinking on it, and responding to it in worshipful prayer.