Started my next set of books this week. The first is The Passionate Church by Mike Breen & Walt Kallestad. It is a book that I've been wanting to read for awhile and that some work I'm doing now at GiANT has provided the perfect opportunity to start. Here's the basic premise of the book from the back cover:

Jesus led and lived with a passion that changed the world. Today, across America and around the world, church leaders and believers - in numbers too high to count - are desperate to experience that passion.

- Pastors ache to see church members become true disciples and to see congregations become communities reflecting the love and life of Jesus.

- Believers yearn to be closer to Jesus, to have a faith that transforms every aspect of their lives

- Non-Believers hunger to experience a faith that is real

To fulfill each of these longings, The Passionate Church offers eight simple-yet-profound truths that help believers fully understand what it means to be a true follower, and by using easy to recall shapes (called LifeShapes), they'll learn to apply those truths to every situation and relationship in their lives!

Best quote so far...

God has chosen people - not plans or programs - to spread his message. Yet somehow most of our attention and energy has shifted from making disciples to buildings and budgets. We ask our members to spend their time serving as ushers, nursery workers, and committee sitters. When told that Jesus' command is to go and make disciples, we are all too tired from raising money to meet the budget and organizing Wednesday night dinners to fulfill His commission. We have made church a business, and that has distracted us from our real call.

The other book I've begun is The Shack by William P. Young. This book came out about a year ago, but I hadn't heard of it until I arrived in Atlanta. All of a sudden it seemed like everyone we were talking to was talking about The Shack! Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, says "This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" did for his. It's that good!" Not sure how much higher endorsement you can grab than that!

From what I can tell it serves as an allegory of sorts wrapped in a novel. Here's the back cover:

Mackenzie Allen Phillips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for the weekend.

Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant The Shack wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!