I wasn’t sure what to expect when I read The Sacred Search by Gary Thomas. I had grown up in the world of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl with some over-macho’d clips from Mark Driscoll thrown in when I got to college. I tried the courtship thing…twice (sorta). It was enough to disillusion me of the dream-world promised with it. Courtship, as such, didn’t seem worth it.
And part of that was realizing that the principle flaw of that approach is over-thinking it. This means that those who are by nature introspective are doomed, and those who aren’t feel lost, and neither is going to be happy with it very easily. So, in the interest of full-disclosure, I requested this book for review because I was looking for some other way that people could deal with the issue of Christian marriage (besides talking to my pastor. He has some great thoughts on this stuff and I wish he’d write a book so other people could benefit from it, but he’s rather busy).
Thomas does a great job with this book in telling people WHY not to marry, and suggesting that our problem in our American evangelical culture is we spend too much time talking about WHO not to marry. That point is money, and I’m glad Thomas spends as much space in the book discussing it as he does, because we need the chance to sit in that mindset for a little while, and realize we’ve been over-thinking it. Thomas also offers several more practical suggestions about thinking things through with your significant other (taking the time to be honest about what you want in a partner, what your priorities are, and where you are hoping to go in five years, ten years, etc.). It’s so easy, as Thomas points out, to let infatuation carry you through the first year and half to two years of your relationship, but when infatuation fades out…what are you left with?
That said, I do think Thomas spends too much effort on dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s when it comes to the moral nature of Christian marriage. While divorce is a very serious issue, I’m not sure that a book about finding someone to marry is the place to address it. I’m also not convinced that’s the place to talk about your views of gender roles in Christian marriage (as an aside, I appreciate that Thomas does say that you need to talk about these things with your girlfriend/boyfriend, because if you don’t agree on what your roles are in marriage, you shouldn’t get married). But in all things, it seems that the moral aspects of Christian marriage and working towards Christian marriage would be helped more by the power of the radical grace of Jesus than by boundaries and “helpful tips to guard yourself.”
Sacred Search is a worthwhile and even helpful read, but remember it isn’t a promise, and it isn’t The Manual for Getting Married. It’s a tool, and for those trying to think outside of the courtship mindset, I would definitely suggest it as your way out.
Michael John Cusick’s Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Desire is a most-needed voice in a Church in America that is torn to pieces by the devastations of pornography, infidelity, sexual abuse and every sort of sexual immorality. Where the dominant spirit of the age has been to urge men to “Buck up. Be honest. Control yourself. You should be ashamed of yourself” without any regard to the Gospel itself, Cusick writes to remind men about the Gospel, and what it means for their sexuality as men, their call to purity, and a life that honors Jesus. He works through what sexual struggle is really about (not sex), why it clings so close to us (we’re broken), what Jesus has to say to us (a lot), and how these all come together for the wholeness that Christ died to bring us with Himself.
I was skeptical when I requested Healing is a Choice: 10 Decisions That Will Transform Your Life and 10 Lies That Can Prevent You From Making Them. I’ve grown up in the American Christian milieu that sometimes promises things that seem to go beyond what God promises in Scripture: “If you have enough faith…” or “If you claim it in the name of Jesus…” or even “If you tithe faithfully, are obedient, and confess all your sins…” The other side of the spectrum usually as skeptical of God’s intervention as agnostics and atheists, and relies instead on human knowledge and wisdom. Steven Arterburn goes to neither extreme, but seeks to provide a Biblical understanding of healing that those who are Christians can benefit from.
Being in a class this semester on “The Writings”, and having my term paper include an exegesis from Proverbs, I was looking forward to what insights this book might have to offer into the proverbial mindset. The goal of the book, as expressed in the preface is to provide a gateway to understanding and remembering the proverbs in a way that suits the more topic-based orientation our 21st century thinking process.
I first 
“We’ve gotten away from the New Testament pattern.” “I’m tired of human traditions.” “My church just doesn’t feel right to me.” These are words that escape the lips of far too many people in American churches today. They find fault with the liturgies, teachings, and practices that are present, or are noticeably absent, from their churches. What they’re too often unwilling to consider, though, is that the problem isn’t fundamentally with the denomination, tradition, or the leadership as such. The fundamental problem is us. Churches have no soul because we have no soul. In Primal: the Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity, Mark Batterson seeks to address that very thing.