Christ In Y'all

After finally finishing Neil Carter's new book, Christ In Y'all: Following Jesus Into Community, I was left feeling a little disconnected. I kept waiting for everything to come together at the end but it never did for me. In the introduction, Carter states that the purpose of his book is to explain how he ended up having church "in a living room with 25 people, among whom [he has] no special place", despite the fact that he is a seminary graduate.

Carter uses statistics to support the fact that many Christians are looking to get away from the traditional church model, and he gives five reasons why it may be happening to so many individuals. He lists that the church is becoming too impersonal, members are becoming burned out, boredom with ritual is becoming the norm, abuse from other church members will always hurt, and selfish apathy has overtaken any kind of social consciousness.

Because of this trend of breaking the tradition, Carter believes there needs to be a rediscovery of the gospel. It boils down to the fact that the "life of faith wasn't designed to be lived out solo." This is a wonderful idea, but I think it could have been said just as succinctly in one or two chapters instead of the 194 pages that Carter uses. It seemed as if every chapter I read was simply more of the same I had been reading throughout the whole book. I felt like at times I was simply wasting my time reading through the same ideas over again.

Despite this repetitiveness that I sensed, Carter had some good things to say. Occasionally it sounded as if he was down on any type of church other than a small house church. Near the end of the book, however, he made a statement that I really like: "I don't really think it matters how they meet, where they live, or when they gather. The important thing is that they learn to find Christ as their all, and that they learn to express that in ways that can be seen and heard and touched" (pg. 173). That is very well-said, and I think the book would be much more enjoyable if it could be condensed into a much shorter version. The same good points Carter makes could certainly be made just as well.

The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

I decided to read this book largely because the title and cover intrigued me and grabbed my attention. What in the world do blue parakeets have to do with reading the Bible? Well, Scott McKnight is a birdwatcher himself and one summer observed a strange new bird appearing in his backyard. After going through several options of what it might be, he concluded it was actually someone’s pet parakeet which had escaped its cage.

This parakeet was observably out of place among the other birds that frequented the yard. McKnight equates the blue parakeet with passages in the Bible that seem out of place and strange and which often raise questions about how we read the Bible. How do we handle these questions? Do we cage them up? Do we tame them? Do we completely ignore them? These are the questions McKnight tries to answer, which ultimately will answer one far-reaching question: How are we to live out the Bible today?

McKnight encourages his readers to view the Bible as a story rather than compartmentalizing it as collections of laws, blessings, and promises. By reading the Bible as a story with power, we will be able to understand how the Bible is to be applied to in our ways in our days. No longer will Christians be stuck in traditional habits that are no longer useful to the culture we live in.

The last chapter of the book is devoted to a single example of one of the biblical blue parakeets, as McKnight attempts to give his readers an approach on how to handle these tough and often sensitive issues. The issue at hand is women in church ministries today. This topic is sure to raise some hairs and ruffle some feathers amongst Christians and I applaud McKnight for tackling it.

I do recommend The Blue Parakeet to anyone interested in the Bible (which should include all Christians). I found that it was not a heavy read. It was very easy to get through and kept my attention throughout while at the same time using good use of repetition throughout. At times I was concerned that reading the Bible in the way described by McKnight may cause us to lose some of its heart. It seems that by implementing too much of our cultural values so freely on Scripture, we can make it say whatever we want it to say. I don’t think McKnight is to that point necessarily, but I think it is possible that readers of this book could come to that.