Ryan loves reading books and quotes and sharing his discoveries with others.
Check out our church library and look for Ryan’s recommendations there.
Here’s my top two recent reads! Check them out and feel free to contact me at the church office sometime if you want to talk about them.
• The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movent becausem the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries by Rodney Stark
– I love this book because it explains how at one time Christians were known for turning the world upside down. Is it possilbe that we could be known for the same thing today?
“What Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity.” p.215
The Rise of Christianity
• The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John H Watson
– This book is written by one of the leading Genesis scholars in our day. He suggests that we may have missed the point of the first chapter of Genesis. I’ll be honest, this can be a challenging read, but it’s worth it.
“Among the many things that the image of God may signify and imply, one of them, and probably the main one, is that people are delegated a god-like role (function) in the world where he places them.” p. 68
The Lost World of Genesis One
I think this N.T. Wright quote bridges these two books:
“The Gosple is not meants to meake people odd or less than fully human; it is meant to renew them in their genuine, image-bearing humanness.”
QUOTE FOR DISCUSSION:
“To the Jewish mind, the understanding of God is not acheived by refffering in a Greek way to timeless qualities of a Supreme Being, to ideas of goodness or perfection, but rather by sensing the living acts of His concern, to His dynamic attentiveness to man. We speak not of His goodness in general, but of His compassion for the individual man in a particular situation. God’s goodness is not a cosmic force but a specific act of compassion. We do not know it as it is but as it happens.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Come talk to me if you want to know from my perspective why this quote changes how I do evangelism.
Suggest a book! Email me at: ryan@gpchurchofchrist.com