I am reposting this 2010 review (yes it is a nearly 2100 hundred word review that I posted in 3 parts) because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $4.99. I believe that this is part of Zondervan’s general ebook sale that still has not been announced anywhere and don’t have have an end date. Part two of the review is here and part three here.
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After having read Your Church is Too Small I immediately thought of four people that need to read the book. So the summary review is that I think the book is good enough that I have bought and sent the book to four friends and bought one more to give away here.
After I was about half way through the book I decided that there is just too much rich content to comment on in just one blog post. So I am breaking tradition and I am breaking this post into three parts. Part 2 will post on Saturday and Part 3 on Sunday and I will restart the normal schedule on Monday.
Having read John Armstrong’s blog regularly for the past several years, I can think of few others that would have been better to write Your Church is Too Small. The basic thesis is that only the “…church of Jesus Christ, ministering out of its spiritual unity in Christ and rooted in core orthodoxy, can best serve Christ’s mission.”
Armstrong loves the church and throughout the book reminds us that we should not fear for the church, because it is not our job to build and maintain the church but Christ’s and the Holy Spirit’s. However, like our faith, we are saved by grace and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, but we still have responsibility for participating in our own spiritual growth. Armstrong suggests that the unity the Jesus prayed for in John 17 cannot just be an invisible, spiritual unity, but must be a relational. So while the church is one spiritually, there is a role for our participation in drawing the church together in unity. I think this is an important point. Just like James (2:17-18) tells us that we should not tell someone that we will pray for them, but not actually do anything to help them, we should not talk about the Big C Church and do nothing to build relationships with those outside our stream of faith.
In Money, Steve Forbes provides a brief history on the development of money and monetary systems, and then spends a lot of time explaining his opinion about the recessions in the 2000s””its causes, consequences, and fixes. It should be no surprise that Forbes argues that loose money and over-regulation of the financial markets–not the opposite–are what caused our recent financial difficulties, and he traces the source of trouble to the decoupling of the dollar from a gold standard.
