The church

Review: Kingdom Racial Change

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Cover image of "Kingdom Racial Change" by Michael A. Evans, David L. McFadden, and Michael O. Emerson

Kingdom Racial Change

Kingdom Racial Change, Michael A. Evans, David L. McFadden, and Michael O. Emerson. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing (ISBN: 9780802883728) 2025.

Summary: Three men tell their stories, analyze them using sociology, and propose strategies for Christians pursuing justice.

Michael A. Evans and David L. McFadden are Black and grew up in the same neighborhood and are friends from childhood. Michael is a pastor and director of the Developing Communities Project. David is a nephrologist serving Black community with a disproportionate level of kidney disease. Both men faced significant barriers in pursuing their call. For economic reasons Michael had to drop out of college to work, supporting his family. Despite being a gifted leader, he watched others promoted and paid better than he was. David struggled first to get accepted in a medical school, and then to convince those who supervised him of his ability, and later to obtain loans as he began his career.

Meanwhile, Michael O. Emerson grew up in a nearby, predominantly White community. It was expected that he would go to college, and when financial challenges arose, a mentor made it possible to complete an accelerated doctoral program. His life took a sharp turn at a Promise Keeper’s event that focused on racial reconciliation. He came to the unmistakable conclusion that his family was to live in a neighborhood where they were a racial minority, a commitment he and his family have kept over several decades in several academic appointments. When he came to Chicago, he joined Michael and David in the Unity Men’s Group of Chicago (appearing online as UnityInTheChurch.Org).

The first half of the book consists of the personal stories of the three men. They bring sociological analysis to bear, identifying systemic instances of racial power, the social location of each that played such an important part in their stories, Black advantages and other sociological factors illustrated by their lives.

The second part of the book reflects their thinking about pursuing kingdom racial change. Successive chapters consider this at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. At the macro level, they address changing systemic systems, overcoming the link between race and class, and any factors creating inequality between God’s people. They explore the systemic issues around housing and education, proposing alternative loan systems and everything from pre-K to access to post secondary education for all, crucial for today’s workplace.

However, without repentance and repairing of wrongs, this fails to racism as a historic systemic reality. They even broach the explosive issue of reparations. The authors propose limits on the wealth that can be passed from one generation to the next that could easily meet the estimated cost of reparations (estimated at $14.3 trillion). They estimate that the current generation will pass along nearly $70 trillion to the next. A portion could cover that while still passing along ample wealth by limits to exemptions to estate taxes.

However churches, local schools and workplaces operate at the meso level. Thus the authors identify appropriate “building blocks” for change at this level. For example, they advocate leveraging Black advantages as well as White advantages, while rooting out the religion of whiteness. Then Christians can leverage their common faith to build networks across racial lines to help others thrive. They also address leveraging work in community organizations to achieve kingdom racial change. They illustrate this through the work of Unity in the Church.

Finally, they address the micro level. Paradoxically it is not about me and God’s will for my life but rather God’s will for the world, in which we are invited to participate. This calls for a renewal of the mind that begins with identifying deformed thinking centered around personal autonomy and that it’s all about us. Rather, the call is to loving obedience to Jesus.

The book at various points identifies Building Blocks of Racial Change but only lists all of these at the end of the book. A graphic employed in each chapter could have helped embed the building blocks more clearly in the reader’s mind. Also, the chapter on macro level change is honest about how hard this is and suggests focusing on one issue. But models of how meso level movements have networked to pursue macro level change, if such exist, would be helpful.

The strength of the book is the work of Unity in the Church and the examples of how it is working to pursue kingdom racial change in Chicago. They’ve helped renew minds, and leveraged community assets to promote flourishing. And while the three authors won’t directly admit it, they’ve modeled a ‘long obedience” and resilience in their own pursuit of the just and peaceable kingdom. While there are questions unanswered and much work to be done, the authors model the possible. And that is no small thing.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Jesus Changes Everything

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Cover image of "Jesus Changes Everything" by Stanley Hauerwas

Jesus Changes Everything (Plough Spiritual Guides), Stanley Hauerwas, edited by Charles E. Moore with an Introduction by Tish Harrison Warren. Plough Publishing House (ISBN: 9781636081571) 2025.

Summary: The radical implications of Jesus’ call to follow him for every area of life from personal to societal.

Did answering the call of Jesus to follow him turn your life upside down (or rather right side up)? Stanley Hauerwas has maintained through all of his writing that Jesus changes everything. Following him isn’t about inspiring messages followed by polite chit-chat in the church lobby that has little effect on life Monday through Saturday. Rather, this collection of readings from his works demonstrates how Jesus indeed changes everything from our life orientation to our identification with God’s people to our money, our pursuit of peace, and even our politics.

The book is organized in six sections. What follows is a brief summary to highlight what you will find:

Part I: Following Jesus. Jesus call is a call to follow him, giving him our ultimate allegiance, even unto death, to get out of the boat far from shore and come to him. It’s not a call to an abstract kingdom but into relationship with the living, breathing king. But to follow this king is not a modification of the existing social order, but to become part of a new social order. While love is central to that life, it is love defined by the cross, where Jesus fully identifies with sin and suffering to raise us to new life.

Part II: Good News. The good news is that in Christ the impossible of the sermon on the mount becomes possible. There is really more to life than living for ourselves. Jesus means it when he calls us to be perfect because that perfection is already in effect in him, and may be in us as we look at and follow him. This way of living subverts the existing social order as it embraces a community of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Part III: God’s Alternative Society. At Pentecost, God created something new out of people from every language group. Specifically he created the alternative society called church. It is a society characterized by truth and charity. It is our first family through baptism. For Hauerwas, this has radical implications for marriage, which is supported and derived from our other commitments. Hauerwas contends, “You do not fall in love and then get married. You get married and then learn what real love requires.’

Part IV: Kingdom Economics. Hauerwas is blunt. We have a problem with wealth and we try to soften the radical teaching of Jesus. The issue is whether we see our goods voluntarily at the disposal of others and are able to say “enough” to ourselves. To not offer help we are able to give is theft. Even the prayer for daily bread is for our bread. He asks whether we are closer to the extravagant Mary or the grifting Judas.

Part V: Sowing Seeds of Peace. The way of Jesus is the way of peace. He made peace with God and with one another possible at the cross. He challenges Christians to practice this when we have grievances and he speaks a challenging word to divisive political partisanship. Any identification of Christianity with party or nation is idolatrous. Rather Christians are to “help the world find habits of peace.” He unflinchingly calls Christians to non-violence which may mean “that we and those we love cannot be spared death.” This is dangerous business, only to be contemplated with the hope of the resurrection. He makes the modest proposal that Christians begin by at least agreeing that they will not kill each other.

Part VI: The Politics of Witness. The question is not which party or policies ought the church support. Instead, Hauerwas argues,

“Put starkly, the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such, the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.”

Jesus alone is king. Rather than killing for freedom, we are called to faithfulness, even unto death. Instead of seeking social status through political alliances, we pursue our freedom to be the church apart from any social order. Rather than the polite society of Sunday mornings being the church could actually get us in trouble, Hauerwas concludes; “By God, sisters and brothers, being Christian could turn out to be more interesting than we had imagined.”

More interesting indeed. This is an uncomfortable book. But it has the ring of truth as being faithful to the one who went to the cross and bids us die. Charles E. Moore captures the message of Hauerwas across the years, and articulates an alternate path to quiet discouragement or political captivity. He skillfully edits the readings to make this a seamless composition. He also offers a brief biography of Hauerwas complemented by an Introduction by former Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren.

I love these Plough Spiritual Guides. Each one I’ve read calls me into both an encounter with Christ, and to the life of following him. This one is no exception. If you are discouraged with the state of the contemporary church, pick this up. It will both challenge your heart and capture your imagination.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Bonhoeffer for the Church

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Cover image for "Bonhoeffer for the Church" by Matthew D. Kirkpatrick.

Bonhoeffer for the Church, Matthew D. Kirkpatrick. Fortress Press (ISBN: 9781506497822) 2024.

Summary: A study of what Bonhoeffer wrote about the church’s identity, purpose, practices, and life together.

When the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes up, one might ask, “which Dietrich Bonhoeffer?” At present, their are different “camps” trying to claim Bonhoeffer for their own. While his widest readership has always been among those who identify with one or another church, his works do not offer a systematic theology of the church. What Matthew D. Kirkpatrick does, with the aid of the now-completed set of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, published by Fortress Press, is organize this material into an extended statement of Bonhoeffer’s message for the church. While reflecting extensive scholarship, Kirkpatrick writes for the church, making this a text for pastors, leaders, and lay people to explore together.

After a brief biographical sketch emphasizing Bonhoeffer’s pastoral work, Kirkpatrick begins by discussing foundations of the church’s identity. He begins with creation and fall, emphasizing the tragedy of wanting to be like God when we already were. Instead, the first couple turned in on themselves, and we re-enact this in our lives in a shared predicament. But God breaks in through Christ’s work on the cross, God’s living Word. God breaks in, often mediated through others, enabling us to have faith in Christ. Such faith calls us into community with love as faith’s expression. Christ makes our community possible through that love and we meet each other through Christ. Thus our own “visions” of and attempts to build community die. Instead we receive community as a gift through Christ.

Crucial to our community is Bonhoeffer’s idea of vicarious representation. Christ served and redeemed as a vicarious representative, and while the church cannot do what Christ did in redemption, it vicariously represents Christ in service to one another and the world. For Bonhoeffer, this is the basis of pastoral care. This further works itself out in intercessory prayer and the confession of and forgiveness of sin. Intercession is not just praying for others, but praying as the other in and through Christ and is a profound expression of community. In confession of sin, we take on the sins of others, recognizing our own sin, and pronouncing Christ’s forgiveness of the other. A concluding chapter in this section discusses ecumenism, the true and empirical church, and why we go to church as a counter to our individualism. Christ meets us in others.

Part Two turns from our identity to our inner life. Firstly, Bonhoeffer addresses authority, leadership and the priesthood of all believers. The focus is on the priority of the God’s word over human words and structures as the source of authority. This is followed by a chapter on preaching, theology, and the word of God. Preaching is central to the inner life of the church. For Bonhoeffer, this means submission to the word of God, by both those who preach and the congregation. The church comes together to be addressed not by a person but by the living God. Kirkpatrick follows this with a chapter on the reading of scripture, music, and sacraments.

For Bonhoeffer, evangelism is not winning people to Christ but rather a means by which God, mediated through Christ, calls people to faith. Evangelism meant listening before speaking, both to God and the person, seeking to discern God’s word in that situation. For this reason, he opposed programmatic approaches. for him, faith in Christ and his word was sufficient. Likewise, in his teaching on time alone, the focus is on listening to God, both in prayer and in scripture. Each nurtures the other.

Part Three engages the church in the world. Kirkpatrick emphasizes that Bonhoeffer did not focus on rules or laws. Rather, the focus was on God to discern what one must do to follow Christ. This may explain as well as anything Bonhoeffer’s decision to plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer on the state followed Luther’s two kingdoms. However, in the context of Nazism, he also believed the church must address the state with the Word of God. Thus he refused to incorporate the Aryan paragraph as a violation of the Word of God. The final chapter covers his letters and papers from prison. This includes Bonhoeffer’s idea of a “religionless Christianity.”

Few agree with Bonhoeffer at all points. But the delight of this book is in how it underscores the centrality of Christ. Salvation comes through him. Community is possible only in him. Our preaching is for hearing Christ’s word together. Our witness is predicated on Christ’s work of calling others to himself. Ethics is obedience to Christ. Amid the contentions around Bonhoeffer, Kirkpatrick has given us a book at once profound and useful for our life together.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Meaning of Singleness

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The Meaning of Singleness, Danielle Treweek, foreword by Kutter Callaway. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: A theology of singleness, rooted in a vision of the future, offering meaning, significance, and dignity in living as a single person within the Christian community and in the world.

Singleness. The very word carries for many a negative connotation. A single person is not married. Especially within the church. In the culture, it may mean “anything goes” and “utter freedom”, both in terms of sexuality and more generally in how one lives one’s life. For the church, singleness is often problematized. One’s sexual longings were considered so powerful that self-control and a chaste life is not thought possible for any length of time, and therefore, singles better get married. Along with this, marriage is treated as this relationship where one is “completed” in a combination of romance and sexuality, and all licitly with regard to Christian morality. Singles are just in a holding pattern, waiting for “the one.” Choosing to remain single is even perceived as an attack on marriage.

Danielle Treweek believes both marriage and singleness express important truths that anticipates the union of Christ and his church. Marriage offers a picture of that union and when the reality comes about, marriage will be no more. Likewise, singleness anticipates this future in which we all will be the bride of Christ, forgoing marriage now to live chastely and missionally, and to proclaim the future community where none of us are married but all loved by Christ.

Treweek first analyzes the contemporary context of both society and its expressive individualism of “anything goes” and the church’s context that problematizes singleness. She then proceeds to what she calls a “retrieval of singleness.” She does this by looking at singleness throughout church history, in biblical exegesis of Jesus’s interaction with the Pharisees on the resurrection and no giving in marriage in heaven, and Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians about singleness, and in Christian theology through the ages. Among many other things:

  • We discover that in the church, virginity was thought possible for both men and women, and an honorable state, and that also spoke to the married to living continently.
  • Marriage is not the remedy to burn with lust! That is not the “burn” Paul had in mind.
  • The “gift of singleness” is not some spiritual booster that means the single no longer wants sex or has supernatural self-control. Rather, whatever state you are in is God’s gift and if you are single, you have that gift and are called to live godly in our sexuality and other aspects of life.
  • Theologically, we set singleness and marriage within the movement from creation to new creation, the already and not yet in which we live our lives.

In the concluding section, Treweek works out the implications of what was retrieved. She envisions the church as a “teleosocial” movement” in which both singles (both never and formerly married) and the married recognize that Christ has formed a new society, living into its destiny, its end. It means we think of growth not only through procreation but also though discipleship of new believers in which singles (and married) can be spiritual parents. Singles also attest to our sexuality being about far more than genital experience, over and against the culture and the church’s capitulation to it.

All of this is good for the meaning of marriage as well, freeing Christian marriage from the culture’s romantic-sexual fantasy to be seen as portraying Christ’s and the church’s love and union, something far richer than what the culture has on offer. It also means re-thinking a church not formed around nuclear families, but functioning as a larger, more diverse family of singles, marrieds, widows, and children.

This is a scholarly rather than inspirational treatment of singleness, an adaptation of Treweek’s doctoral dissertation. That means working through some dense material at points. Rather than offering comfort while one “waits,” exhorts to marriage, or simply says “suck it up,” Treweek takes us on a deep dive of thinking critically about both contemporary and church culture, explores historical, biblical, and theological resources through history to retrieve riches suggesting a much richer set of resources than our culture offers. She offers a vision of singleness as whole persons with a purpose within God’s story and among God’s people.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Becoming the Church

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Becoming the Church, Claude R. Alexander Jr. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022.

Summary: Studies of the first six chapters of Acts revealing the purposes, practices, and principles that led to the transformation of a loose group of individuals into the church.

Bishop Claude Alexander loves the church. This doesn’t mean he is blind to the ways its people and institutions fall short of its purpose to be Christ’s visible body in the world. Rather, it is that he realizes that God has decided to reveal his purposes and power through the church. In this book, he takes us through the last chapters of the gospels and the first six chapters of Acts, speaking sometimes in the voice of Thomas, Matthew, Peter, or Luke, and other times in his own voice.

Through Thomas, we learn that it is through the church that Jesus confronts and convicts us–if we get Jesus, we get the church. Through Peter, we hear Jesus as the Lord of the second chance to put love for Jesus at the heart of his life, expressed in sacrificial care. Matthew speaks of the mission of the church as making disciples with one who assures of his everlasting presence. Luke reveals to us a people “steadied by the purposes and promises of God.”

All this sets up the study of Acts, which begins with the divine assignment of witness in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, empowered by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and repentance, baptism, and belief in his name. The conversion of three thousand form a community of commitments to the Word of God, fellowship, the Lord’s Supper and the cross, prayer, and joy.

In Acts 3, Alexander once more narrates in the voice of the lame man in the temple, transformed by the power of Jesus and welcomed into fellowship by Peter and John. This leads to proclamation. Alexander emphasizes that this is a word for others, one that brings glory to God, that explains the working of God, and invites people into relationship with God and his people. As Peter and John are called on the carpet in Acts 4, their boldness, wisdom, and knowledge is evidence that they have been with Jesus. This is also evident in determination to persist in our testimony in the face of persecution. Alexander observes that the tension doesn’t come because of good works, but rather the Name in which they are done, the Name they are proclaiming. It comes down to asserting the integrity of our experience–it is Jesus that has worked transformation in lives, not our social or self-help programs.

In the latter part of Acts 4 we see the church at prayer. It is a church that understands the God to whom we pray, that takes seriously what God has said and promised, and seeks to exalt the name of Jesus. We see the church at its best and worst–sharing possessions out of the understanding that we are conduits of God’s blessing, and turning this into deception and people pleasing, in the case of Ananias and Sapphira. We see God nipping this in the bud, revealing how deadly this is to the genuine love and unity of the church.

And so we come to Acts 6, a church facing growth pains from its exponential expansion. Conflict arising from growth leads to prayerful discernment, changes in structure, and the entrusting of power to a wider circle. And when the church faces the worst about itself honestly and makes discerning structural changes, sharing power, it presses beyond the worst into new growth.

The chapters have the feel to me of pulpit messages. They ring the changes on the centrality of Jesus, transformation in his name, and baptism into a people called into prayer, sacrificial and joyful love for each other, bold witness before the world, and integrity, even when the church acts at its worst. We see a church “doing the stuff” of Jesus and how dynamic that can be, instead of a church that has lost its way in success schemes, struggles for power, and sex scandals. Alexander offers hope for the church rooted in God’s purpose for and continued work in her.

[This review is time to coincide with InterVarsity’s Urbana 22, at which Bishop Claude Alexander will give four messages from the book of Acts beginning on December 28 through December 31, 2022. The messages will be livestreamed from urbana.org each evening at 7:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (US).]

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Holiness

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Holiness

Holiness, J.C. Ryle. Chios Classics (electronic text), 2015 (originally published 1877).

Summary: The classic collection by nineteenth century evangelical Anglican J.C. Ryle emphasizing that growth in Christ-like character (holiness) involves not only faith in Christ’s empowering work but effort in laying hold of that work and that this basic matter is far too often neglected in the church.

J. C. Ryle was an Anglican rector, and eventually bishop of the then-new Diocese of Liverpool. He lived from 1816-1900. Much of his work was among working class people, and it is evident in reading this collection of sermons why he was so popular. Unlike others who cultivated a dense eloquence, Ryle spoke plainly and clearly outlined his points such that anyone giving him their attention could follow. Even his titles were straightforward, the longest of which is only five words (“A Woman to be Remembered”, on Lot’s wife!).

Ryle’s main concern was for the decline in practical holiness in his day. Against the Keswick movement and others who took a type of “let go and let God” approach, Ryle argued that holy character was something assiduously fought for (one of the sermons in this collection is titled “The Fight!”), and that while faith in Christ’s working in one’s life was necessary, so also was effort and exertion.

The title sermon of this collection, “Holiness”, begins with an exposition of the nature of true holiness in one’s life, why such holiness ought to be pursued, and finally how such holiness may be attained, through striving and through dependence upon Christ. In the concluding section he writes:

That great divine, John Owen, the Dean of Christ Church, used to say, more than two hundred years ago, that there were people whose whole religion seemed to consist in going about complaining and telling everyone that they could do nothing of themselves. I am afraid that after two centuries, the same thing might be said with truth of some of Christ’s professing people in this day. I know there are texts in scripture which warrant such complaints. I do not object to them, when they come from men who walk in the steps of the apostle Paul and fight a good fight, as he did, against sin, the devil and the world. But I never like such complaints when I see ground for suspecting, as I often do — that they are only a cloak to cover spiritual laziness, and an excuse for spiritual sloth. If we say with Paul, “O wretched man that I am!” let us also be able to say with him, “I press toward the mark!”

The collection begins with a sermon on the nature of sin (“Sin”) and is followed by one on “Sanctification”, including the diligent use of means, and then the title sermon of “Holiness”.  He then follows up on the theme of the struggle in the Christian life with chapters on “The Fight” and “The Cost”. He writes of the marks of “Growth in Grace” being a deepening sense of sin coupled with stronger faith, brighter hope, and growing love and spiritual-mindedness. The sermon on “Assurance” both holds out the reality of confidence in the work of Christ, coupled with the knowledge that one may not experience this and yet belong to Christ.

Then come four sermons around figures in scripture. He looks at Moses as an example of living by faith, Lot as a “beacon” warning us of the example of less than full-hearted obedience and Lot’s wife as “A Woman to be Remembered” because of the privileges she enjoyed, the repudiation of it all in the backward look, and the judgment she experienced. Finally, “Christ’s Greatest Trophy!” concerns the thief on the cross who believed–one of the rare instances I’ve come across of a sermon on this episode.

The next sermons concern the Lordship of Jesus in adversity, (“Ruler of the Waves”), and over the church (“The Church Which Christ Builds” and “Visible Churches Warned”). Sermons fifteen to eighteen focus around our call to love the Lord (“Do You Love Me?”), the sobering reality of life “Without Christ”, how Christ addresses our deepest thirst, and through us addresses the thirst of others (“Thirst Relieved!”). He explores the “Unsearchable Riches” of life in Christ.

His concluding sermons in this collection focus first on the “Needs of the Times”, including the authority of scripture, a clear grasp of Christian doctrine, a pursuit of holiness, and perseverance in private devotion. This sermon does have some sharp words against the Catholicism of his day. The collection concludes on a high note as Ryle explores all the ways “Christ is All”, a wonderful resource for nurturing one’s worship!

Ryle’s frank and straightforward preaching is a breath of fresh air. Read Ryle if you want to learn how to preach plainly. Read him to understand how good shepherds of God’s people afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Read him to examine your own life and to stir you from indifference. Read him to appreciate the marvelous riches one has in Christ. And read him for the practical help he gives in pursuing a “practical” holiness.

A note on editions: All of the most inexpensive editions of Holiness are in electronic form, including that linked to in this post. As a public domain work, it may be found for free or very cheaply online in various e-formats. Amazon also sells print-on-demand editions. Crossway has a more expensive paperback that includes a biography of Ryle by J.I. Packer under the title Faithfulness and Holiness. One should check to see if the edition you are buying has all twenty sermons–some are abridged–and it is worth getting them all!