Published by Moody Publishers on June 4, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
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We need Jesus. The whole Jesus.
The American church is in decline. Secularism is fast gaining traction in culture. Ministry leaders and Christians who love the church are rightly concerned about this momentum. We’re scrambling to find solutions.
Longtime Christian journalist, researcher, and ministry leader Rick Lawrence believes that the driving force propelling the church into irrelevance is its propensity reduce Jesus. Deeply researched and comprehensively sourced, Editing Jesus, explores the 8 ways the Jesus of the contemporary church has been edited to fit the spirit of the age. Lawrence writes on:
The Co-Mingling of Kingdoms
The Marginalization of the Poor
The Golden-Calfing of Materialism
The Dismissing of the Supernatural
The Siren-Song of Platforming
The De-Prioritizing of Justice . . . and more
This book is for every person who loves Jesus and His church—who longs to see the real Jesus worshiped and exalted. And it’s for every person who wonders how the wheels came off Western Christianity and harbors a hunger that goes unmet in the church. When we discover and return to the unedited Jesus, it’s impossible to remain unchanged.
The church begins and ends with Jesus. The whole Jesus.
In this book, Rick Lawrence reflects on ways that the American church has “edited” Jesus to fit with contemporary cultural sensibilities. He notes that lots of people are leaving the church or feel bored with faith because they haven’t even met the real Jesus of Scripture, and are rejecting a distorted version of Jesus that people have softened or altered to fit with their preferences. This book focuses on the topic in a holistic way, rather than singling out particular sides of the political divide, and steps on toes from many angles.
Lawrence writes about ways that Christians have tried to combine the kingdom of God with their political and governmental goals, and he writes about issues like the marginalization of the poor, the softening of Jesus’s difficult teachings and exclusive truth statements, and the tendency to reduce a relationship with Jesus to following Scripture-based life management principles. These and other chapters explore common issues in a thought-provoking way, contrast contemporary assumptions with explicit teachings in Scripture, and then list some key ways that people can follow “the unedited Jesus.” There are also discussion questions at the end of each chapter for individuals or groups.
I had a few critiques here and there, and sometimes felt that when the author shared quotes from other people to illustrate something bad or negative, he didn’t choose examples that were strong enough on their own to support his arguments. I thought that when he unpacked some of these quotes, he sometimes read additional problems into them in order to make his point. Maybe the original speaker or writer really meant all of these problematic ideas and implications, but I could also see different ways to interpret the same quotes. Without more context, I couldn’t tell if Lawrence was exactly right, or if he was making someone else’s position sound worse than it really was.
Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church is a thoughtful guide to an important subject. This book can be helpful for Christians in many different stages of life, and can be a great book for discipleship groups to read together. This book covers important biblical teaching that often gets lost in churches that lean towards what’s popular and culturally comfortable, and this book can help people see beyond their blind spots to better understand and follow Jesus.