Published by IVP on October 29, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
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Surrounded by a Cloud of Witnesses
Do you ever feel like you're alone in your struggles to live out the Christian faith? Do you ever read the Bible yet still wonder what it looks like to follow Jesus in the complexity and difficulty of our time?
The stories of great men and women throughout the history of the church can help us form a bridge between the teaching of Scripture and our embodied lives. This illustrated devotional vividly depicts the lives and words of great women and men of faith. Artist Ben Lansing and Anglican priest D. J. Marotta offer fifty-two profound images and reflections on Christians, from Polycarp in the first century to the martyrs of Sudan in the twenty-first century. These saints, from every continent and century of church history, demonstrate the historic church's relevance for Christians today and reveals God's faithfulness in all times and circumstances.
The artwork, biographies, devotionals, and prayers in this book are meant to spark our imaginations, helping us to be faithful here and now, in our own age.
Ben Lansing and D. J. Marotta run a popular social media account that celebrates faithful Christians from throughout global church history. Each post includes an illustration of someone along with a notable quote from them, and then there is a short biographical sketch and a reflective prayer. This devotional book collects fifty-two of these different profiles, and adds brief Scripture reading and longer devotional reflections.
The authors encourage people to honor and admire saints over celebrities, and to get to know their global family of other Christians throughout history. The selections in the book are very diverse, and in addition to including obvious choices of official church saints and well-known, much-admired Christians, they include obscure people who most readers will never hear of apart from this book. I appreciate the broad range of selections, although there are not actually saints from “every era” here, since this book does not include any Christians from biblical times.
I enjoyed the illustrations, quotes, and short biographical sketches the most. The devotional reflections vary in quality. Some of them are very insightful and truly focus on that historical figure’s legacy and the lessons we can learn from their lives, while others only seem tangentially related, and read more like a soap box for the author’s opinions about the Christian life.
I appreciate how non-denominational this book is. It represents Christians from a variety of different backgrounds, and the presentation style and writing can appeal to Christians from both high church and low church traditions. Also, People who are new to learning about church history can benefit from the appendix in the back that summarizes various key developments. However, on that note, I did find it strange that Martin Luther was not one of the historical figures profiled, even though the church history summary mentions him, and even though other profiles reference The Reformation.
Our Church Speaks: An Illustrated Devotional of Saints from Every Era and Place is a unique devotional book with a lot of depth. This will appeal greatly to fans of the Our Church Speaks social media account, and it is taking the author and illustrator’s message to a much broader audience, encouraging others to learn about these figures from church history. The book is also nice quality as a physical object, since it is a sturdy hardcover with thick, glossy pages. This would make a great gift, and it is the kind of book that someone can read straight through, use as a devotional, or dip into when they are looking for encouragement.