A Bibliographic Essay, Part I

One thing I do is listen to those I know when they tell me that a book is life-changing. Or when they tell me of the seismic tremors a particular volume will send through my assumptions about the life and ministry of the local church. That always helps me sort through what seems like the never-ending number of books vying for my attention.

I presume you’re reading BreakPoint Worldview Church because you’ve sensed the importance of worldview thinking for worldview living and are looking for resources that will help you equip God’s people for worldview ministry in our culture. That means you’ve got to do your homework. But what’s going to help? What books are life-changing, church-transforming, and ministry-revolutionizing?

A FEW OBVIOUS CHOICES
There are many excellent volumes that I could recommend. I think of James Sire’s almost indispensable The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalogue, Walsh and Middleton’s The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview, or Al Wolters’ Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview.

These volumes barely begin to point you to the many books available that address the issue of worldview Christianity. And it seems the number is growing every month. But in this essay (and the one to follow), I don’t want to look at the obvious choices. Rather, I’d like to recommend some titles that could easily slip past your reading radar but have been for me literally paradigm-shifting in their effect. And so it is “A Rather Idiosyncratic Worldview Reading List” because it is a very personal list. But my hope is that some of these books will become part of your own idiosyncratic list of life-changing world view reading.

I love history. One of the reasons that I love it is because it is a story full of stories. Stories have a power to reach us that is very different than other types of literature. Romans and the Gospel of John, to take two examples, reach us with the Gospel in very different ways. The soaring rhetoric and the rigorous argument of Romans are nothing short of thrilling. But the power of John’s unique telling of the story of God among us can’t be estimated. The books I’ll briefly discuss in this essay have a common denominator. They are gripping stories that give us insight to the nature of worldview faith and how it is lived in the world.

WILBERFORCE ET AL
Recently the movie Amazing Grace opened in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire telling the story of William Wilberforce’s courageous leadership in that historic battle. So let me add my two cents as we remember that remarkable occasion by mentioning Ernest Marshall Howse’s Saints in Politics: The Clapham Sect and the Growth of Freedom. Unhappily, it is out of print. Happily, there are a multitude of used book sellers on the Internet. I have two copies and have given two others away.

It is understandable that we celebrate Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery. And yet Wilberforce and his Clapham friends sought not only the abolition of slavery but the reformation of English society (or, to put it in Wilberforce’s words, “to make goodness fashionable”). Poverty, industrial reform, child labor, animal cruelty, and literacy were among their concerns.

This book tells their story. It is a story of such power that I found myself in tears at one point despite the book reading like the reworked doctoral thesis that it is. This is a worldview book of the highest order because by it we see the world through the eyes of the Clapham sect in order to see everything in a new way.

If you can’t find Saints in Politics (or aren’t able to pay a premium price for a scarce book), you might try The Wilberforce Connection by Clifford Hill, which covers much of the same ground as Howse in a more popular form with a view to applying the Clapham vision to the church’s life today (something that Howse does not do).

Perhaps the perfect follow-up to Howse is Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. I don’t know if Dr. Farmer is a believer or not. The book doesn’t address it directly other than to say that he is haunted by the parable of the sheep and the goats and Jesus’ commentary on the parable that “whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).

But if any modern man reminds me of William Wilberforce, it is Paul Farmer. Here is a man who has had global impact by dedicating his life to the service of the last and least. When Paul Farmer calls, the World Health Organization picks up the phone. Intellectually brilliant and a Harvard faculty member, Farmer has settled for nothing less than worldwide influence through the field of public health. Here is a man who, by the world’s standards, has got it all upside down. He seeks to make the world a different place not by courting power but by serving the weak in places like Haiti.

I live in a town with a world-class research university where the graduate students in my church are being groomed in their doctoral programs for leadership in business, government, academia, the sciences, and other fields. But unless they learn that in the kingdom the way up is down, they will never make a kingdom mark no matter how successful they may be. Farmer can shape their view of the world as Christians. If you are a leader in a local church, you’re called to be a worldview shaper. This book can help shape your flock to dream kingdom-sized dreams as Wilberforce did. Paul Farmer won’t let you merely settle for what you think is possible in the kingdom of God.

GRAND SWEEP, GLORIOUS STRUGGLE
Another book rocked my world a couple years ago—The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. It’s a book I’ve found myself referring to again and again as well as quoting in sermons, classes, and seminars. Stark is a sociologist, so be prepared—the story isn’t told in heart-stirring narrative fashion, and it can be a bit dry in patches and sometimes technical. But like Howse’s book, the form in which the story is told cannot eclipse the grandeur and force of the tale.

Stark’s work revolves around a solitary question, “How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization?” As he does some sociological number crunching, Stark asserts that the Jesus movement accomplished this goal by sustaining a 40 percent growth rate over 300 years! But to stop there would do the book a terrible injustice. The question, of course, is why—why did it sustain such a phenomenal growth rate over so many years in a hostile cultural context? The answer is nothing short of amazing as he studies the socio-cultural impact of the world-changing Gospel the church preached and lived in Greco-Roman society.

He recounts, among other things, the church’s response to epidemics, the way the Gospel changed social relationships, and it’s responses to urban chaos and crisis. Stark reminds us that in response to the dislocations, cruelties, and problems of the Roman Empire, the church didn’t merely bring a new religious message but a new culture complete with a new conception of humanity. This is a great book for asking the right questions about church and ministry post-Christendom as our cultural setting bears more and more similarities to that of the early church. If you can make the necessary connection between Stark’s answer to his own question and the ministry of your local church, your congregation’s life will never be the same again.

I read Charles Marsh’s God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights almost 10 years ago, and it continues to haunt me. One of the things that makes the book so compelling is the manner in which Marsh examines profound theological questions by telling the stories of men and women who invoked the name of God on both sides of the battle for civil rights. He takes us back to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, when three civil rights workers were murdered and the turmoil of the civil rights movement was reaching its peak.

Marsh forces us to face some difficult questions. Why were pastors so often cheerleaders for the status quo rather than prophetic voices who are agents of change? Why did so many pastors turn a blind eye to the suffering of blacks and to the presence in their own congregations of those who enforced racial orthodoxy with repressive tactics, violence, and even murder? Why did so many churches equate the Gospel with “the Southern way of life” (or in our contexts, the American way of life)? What did churches find so attractive about a “gospel” which, by their own assertion, had nothing to do with realities outside the church?

Such a gospel would have been intolerable to Wilberforce, but it continues to hold sway in our churches, leaving the truth Gospel culturally marginalized and hamstrung. By looking through the lens of racial justice in the summer of 1964, Marsh forces us to look in a mirror to discover some very uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

AGAINST THE DARKNESS
Last but certainly not least on the list is In Darkest England and the Way Out, penned by William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army (established in 1878 in England). Booth was an evangelist, but one formed in the unique mold of John Wesley, who would preach to miners as they entered the mines in the darkness of early morning and then turn his attention to such concerns as schooling for poor children or free medical dispensaries.

The larger context of Booth’s ministry was the age of African exploration and colonization. In 1890, Henry Stanley wrote his famous book, In Darkest Africa, chronicling his exploration of central Africa. Of course, the title assumed what everyone believed—darkest Africa. Why? Because it was outside the bounds of the West, the Christian West, and therefore it was by definition dark, savage, and uncivilized.

Surveying the wretched conditions of the poor and the working class in “Christian England” and the incredible social dislocation caused by the country’s industrialization and urbanization, Booth wrote his response, In Darkest England and the Way Out, noting famously that “cab horses lived at standards that the poor could only hope to attain.” Booth surveys and seeks to find a biblical response to issues as varied as slums and urban housing, unemployment, poverty, drunkenness, and homeless children; he offers a clarion call to apathetic church goers to bring good news to the marginal and suffering masses of English society.

As is the case with the other books we’ve mentioned, this is a story about a gospel but not a sub-biblical gospel that simply rearranges my interior and prepares me for a life beyond this world. Rather, it’s about worldview gospel, biblical gospel, a gospel that is a new way of seeing the world and everything in it. It is a book that exposes our blindness and bids us see in new ways.

Most evangelical churches are places where pastors remind bored, affluent members ad nauseam that they are loved by God, thereby confirming their view that they are the center of the universe. It is a devil’s deal struck by pastors and congregants. These books are remarkable medicine for such spiritual sickness.

The Rev. Bob Lynn is associate pastor of missions and university life at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, Mich. He teaches in seminaries in Turkey and the Ukraine, and contributes regularly to Worldview Church and BreakPoint WorldView Magazine.