What I’m Reading

This year Pastor Nwade and I are, with prayer and God's guidance, seeking to lead the people into a year of HOPE and WHOLENESS. So this week he and I have entered into a week of fasting and prayers to this end. One of the books that I felt inspired to return to was Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola. While his research is solid, his conclusions are a bit narrow-minded. Perhaps it is my African-American Christian heritage that pushes back against his assertions that the Protestant Church with its pastors and choirs is a case in point that the church only adopted the pagan rituals of Greco Roman civic culture. Seems he reads the Psalms differently than I do. Like the rainbow didn't originate with LGBTQ but with God's promise to Noah (and by extension, humanity), choirs didn't originate with Roman magistrates. Much of what he argues for (organic churches) to happen in the worship service is answered by Thom Rainer's Simple Church, which advocates that churches have some type of small group where discipleship happens and the Word is shared between members of the Body of Christ. I digress, the research is solid. And it is causing me to be intentional about not only soteriology, but also ecclesiology. That's one book. The other is The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. I'm at the second agreement: don't take anything personally. (The first agreement is to "be impeccable with your word.") People put poison out with their words. And if you don't take it personally, you can be immune to poison in the middle of hell. Man, that gripped me.