Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland steps away from his usual deep dives into Scripture, theology, and cultural reflection to share something a little different and very close to his heart: books. Derek counts reading and writing among his deepest joys, and today he offers his top five favorite books he read in 2025. Some are newly published, some are older classics, but all have shaped him this year.
Before jumping in, Derek reflects on his lifelong journey as a reader and writer, how his calling as a pastor, teacher, and ultimately a writer grew slowly through mentors, quiet spiritual practices, early encouragement, and the rediscovery of a love for reading after meeting Jesus.
Writing, Derek notes, is simply an extension of his pastoral work, much like the life and ministry of Eugene Peterson. Drawing from Winn Collier’s biography A Burning in My Bones, he shares how Peterson modeled a life of faithful pastoral presence shaped through reading, prayer, and writing.
Along with his top reads from this year, Derek also shares what he’s currently reading: The Heart of Philosophy by Jacob Needleman—a book recommended to him years ago by his high school track coach. Needleman’s search for meaning across philosophy and religion echoes the very kind of reading life that formed Derek: a life shaped by curiosity, openness, truth-seeking, and wonder.
Finally, Derek reveals his Top Five Books of 2025, a list filled with theology, philosophy, classic fiction, and spiritual reflection—books that expanded his imagination, nourished his faith, and reminded him why reading still matters.
Key Takeaways
Writing grows out of vocation. Derek’s passion for writing is inseparable from his calling as a pastor and teacher.
Reading forms the soul. From quiet morning Bible readings as a teenager to deep philosophical works today, reading has been one of Derek’s primary pathways of spiritual growth.
Mentors matter. Encouragement from his high school coach and the example of Eugene Peterson helped shape Derek’s identity as a writer.
Books connect us across time and tradition. Whether classic works or recent releases, good books invite us into deeper wisdom, beauty, and truth.
Your reading life will ebb and flow. The joy of reading returns when we let curiosity lead the way.
Derek’s Top Five Books of 2025
-
A Strange and Gracious Light by Andrew Arndt
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The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
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Answering God by Eugene Peterson
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From Aristotle to Christ by Louis Markos
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Jesus Changes Everything by Stanley Hauerwas & Charles Moore
Other Books Mentioned in This Episode
A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
The Heart of Philosophy by Jacob Needleman
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Transcript
Welcome back to
Another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and I’m glad that you have joined me for this episode.
We are in the season of advent.
Event, getting closer to Christmas, and getting closer to the end of 2025.
And so I have something special for you here at the end of the year.
But before I jump into the episode, let me invite you to leave a rating.
or a review or leave both.
We love five stars.
Your ratings and your reviews helps other people find this podcast.
And subscribe
to peaceable and kind wherever you’re listening.
And if you like the kind of content we’re producing here, let me know.
You can reach out to me on social media.
All my social accounts are in the show notes.
But reach out to me and let me know what you think about Peaceable and Kind.
So this is going to be somewhat of a different episode.
It’s different because I haven’t written out extensive notes.
I’m not going to be talking about specific Bible passages or social issues.
Rather, I want to have a conversation with you about one of my favorite topics
And that’s books.
I want to share with you my favorite books from 2025.
These are books that I read this year, not necessarily books published this year, even though some were, but these are books that I read this year that I loved and I want to share with you.
And now I love reading.
I love lots of books.
I’ve read lots of books, but I’m just going to give you my top
five today.
But before I get to that list of top five books from this year, let me back up and give you a little bit of history.
A little bit of
perspective on me as a reader and as a lover of books.
As you know, I am a writer, I’m an author, but my passion for writing
comes from my calling, my primary calling to be a pastor and teacher
This is how I understand what God has called me to do.
I am first and foremost a pastor serving a local church.
And within that calling to be a pastor, there is for me a call to teach and write and to be a voice.
And so when I’m writing books or Bible studies or articles, for me, this is just an extension of what God has called me.
to do as a pastor.
So for me, pastoring and writing really go together.
This is very similar to my pastoral mentor, Eugene Peterson
He was a pastor for nearly 40 years, and during that time he wrote 30 books.
Well, Eugene wrote
In totality, 30 books, most of them written as a pastor.
He also wrote as a professor
But most of his books were written while he was pastoring a local church
And when Collier uh wrote what is the definitive biography of Eugene Peterson, A Burning in My Bones?
A burning of my bones is one of my I don’t know how I would rank a burning of my bones, probably in my top twenty books that I’ve ever read.
I loved it.
I read it
Um during Lent, as soon as it came out, I actually finished reading the book on Good Friday and I I wept um as I was reading the book.
It is
Beautifully written, but it tells the story of Eugene Peterson.
As you know, Eugene was the Bible translator of the message that I love so much.
But Peterson as a pastor has been a role model for me.
And so in a burning in my bones, when Collier writes about Eugene’s life
As a pastor and writer in chapter 12, let me read just a little bit to you from a burning in my bones.
Wynne writes, As Eugene grew into his life as a pastor, a twin vocation crystallized.
Quote, I saw that alongside and intertwined with being a pastor
I was also a writer.
My vocation was bipolar.
He understood his writing to be an act of worship
as well as work honoring the God who from in the beginning has always pulsed with creative energy
Writing, like pastoring, was knit into his life of prayer.
Eugene even wrote several pieces he labeled prayers at the writing desk.
One of those reads
Lord Jesus Christ, Word from the beginning, Word made flesh.
Shape words also into speech and bring them to print that tell the truth
and speak your glory.
Amen.
Eugene has been my hero for such a long time
And I really see myself as cut from the cloth of Eugene Peterson.
I I feel that sort of bipolar vocation.
Uh that being a pastor and being a writer for me are really two sides of the same coin.
I see it as my primary spiritual gift is teaching.
And so I teach on Sunday mornings in the pulpit.
I teach in small groups.
I teach when I meet with people one-on-one.
I teach through this podcast.
And
I’m teaching through the books and Bible studies that I’m writing.
I love this prayer though written by Eugene Peterson.
I need to get that uh printed out and stuck up on my wall here where I do my writing
So Eugene Peterson had this calling to be not only a pastor, but a writer.
And that resonates so deeply with me now, although I would have never imagined that I would end up being a writer.
But let me tell you the story, let me tell you how this happened.
As a child, I read a lot of books.
I was interested in reading, but then by middle school, I was just much more interested in sports.
And then by high school, I was interested in basketball and girls.
This was the two things that occupied my attention.
And I had stopped reading books in middle school and early high school.
I just wasn’t much of a reader.
I hated when we were assigned, you know, the sort of classic, you know, literature and novels to read in school.
I remember in the eighth grade, we were supposed to read To Kill a Mockingbird.
And I think I watched the movie instead of reading a book.
I was just not interested in reading.
And then at the end of my sophomore year of high school, Jesus
Came into my life.
I was baptized when I was 11, but when I was 15 years old, sophomore in high school, I had this encounter with Jesus that changed my life.
And when Jesus came into my life, a new love for reading came into my life.
I had this
unquenchable desire to read everything I could get my hands on related to Jesus and the church and the Christian life and and of course Bible reading
I would do quiet times.
My early introduction into the faith was in a Christian tradition that emphasized quiet time, that is, Bible reading and prayer.
And as a teenager, uh, particularly the summer between sophomore and junior year of high school, I would spend an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes two hours.
Reading through the scriptures, journaling, writing, using other devotional materials
I just couldn’t read enough.
And I was reading books as a teenager because I was searching for truth.
I was searching for meaning.
Uh and of course I was I was searching for for knowledge.
I wanted to know about this Jesus.
I quickly felt a call into ministry to be a pastor, so I wanted to
Understand what life in the church was all about.
Now, my junior year in high school, our English teacher had assigned to us
John Steinbeck’s of Mice and Men.
We’re supposed to read Steinbeck.
And I was still in this mode of I didn’t want to read what was assigned to me.
By my junior year, I was I was reading just book after book, reading my Bible every day, but I didn’t want to read John Steinbeck.
Now of Mice and Men is a short book, but I still I looked at it like I’m not gonna read this.
And as I was flipping through the pages of the little paperback copy of Of Mice and Men that I had, it was given to me.
by my English teacher, I noticed that the Lord’s name was taken in vain.
It was Jesus Christ this and Jesus Christ that.
And I thought, aha, I have an idea.
So I went to my English teacher and I put my copy of Of Mice and Men on her desk and I said to her, I refuse to read this book on moral grounds.
It uses the Lord’s name in vain.
uh which I’m opposed to.
Well, she didn’t know how to take my religious zeal.
Um so she was talking to other English teachers in the teacher’s lounge
later that afternoon.
Well into that lounge enters my track coach, Coach Reynolds.
I’ve shared on previous episodes that I loved sports, but towards the end of high school I put all of my efforts and energy into track.
I ran
uh the 110 high hurdles and the 300 intermediate hurdles.
And so my track coach was also an English teacher, and he heard my English teacher talking about a student refusing to read a book.
And Coach Reynolds said, Who’s that student?
And she said, Derek Vreeland.
He said, Don’t worry about him, I’ll take care of it
Well, the next day I was in the English class and there’s a knock at our door and into the room comes Coach Reynolds.
And he’s like, Derek, can I see you in the hall for a second?
and I knew I was in trouble.
I didn’t know why I was in trouble.
I just knew, Oh, I’m about to get it.
So I step out into the hallway, and Coach Reynolds looks me dead in the face and calls my bluff.
He said to me, how dare you use your Christian faith to weasel out of this work?
Now, Coach Reynolds loved me like uh like a father.
Uh he encouraged me, loved me, was devoted to me, but he would also challenge me.
He challenged me uh on the track, but this was the first time he had challenged me in the classroom.
He he knew what I was doing.
I was being lazy.
I didn’t want to take the time to read the book
He was saying, read the book, and if there’s things you don’t like about it, write about those things and discuss in your essay why you’re morally opposed to those things.
And a little light bulb went off of my head.
I’d never thought about reading and then writing as a Christian.
Well, I went on to read of Mice and Men and loved it by the way, and wrote my book report.
I wrote this essay, and it was essentially a Christian review.
of the moral dilemma that’s in of mice and men.
Later, at the end of my junior year
Coach Reynolds invited me to take the test in order to get into TAG.
Tag was an advanced English and humanities class, a year-long two-semester class, mostly uh for seniors.
Uh but I told him, I said, Coach, I’m I’m not that smart.
I I’m not really good at this.
And it was Coach Reynolds who told me, I think you can do it
I think you have a voice.
I think you have something to say.
I think you can take this test and you can get in.
Well, I take the test and lo and behold, I score high enough to get into the class
So my senior year, I was taking tag, and Coach Reynolds, by the way, uh was the primary teacher for Tag.
Now, Coach Reynolds was a preacher’s kid.
He was the son of a Baptist preacher.
He had married a Catholic woman, and they were raising their girls.
in the Catholic Church, but he never joined the Catholic Church, but remained a believer all of his life.
And so my senior year, I was taking an advanced English course.
Reading South African literature, reading Western philosophy, and seeds were planted in my heart from Coach Reynolds.
That I had a voice, that I had something to say as a Christian, as a believer in Jesus
Well, I graduate high school and I go on to college.
I actually went away my freshman year to college and I was a philosophy and religion major
And a lot of that was because of my senior year taking tag and being exposed to the Western philosophical tradition.
I thought this would be a great undergraduate degree to study philosophy, to study religion before going on to Bible college or whatever I would do next.
So as a philosophy and religion major, my freshman year of college, but then I moved back home to my hometown, St.
Joseph, Missouri
Because, well, I was in love.
My girlfriend was still here.
And that year away was difficult.
We almost broke up, but I wanted
to be with her.
So I moved back home and I enrolled in college here locally at Missouri Western State University, and they did not have a philosophy department.
They had like one philosophy class.
So when I had to declare a major, I was looking over the list and I saw English writing.
And I thought, well, that sounds like an easy degree to get, plus, learning how to write would probably help me in Bible college or seminary.
And so I ended up graduating with an English degree with an emphasis in writing.
I had no idea
that I would ever use that degree, but this is how God works.
This is how Providence works.
And so God sent Coach Reynolds into my life
to speak these words of life and truth that maybe I had something to say in writing
God brought me my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, to bring me back to St.
Joseph so I could enroll at Missouri Western and become an English major.
And now some 30 years later
Here I am as an English major writing books and of course still reading books
And my reading really ebbs and flows.
There are times that reading is a chore, although right now I would say reading is is really a delight.
And before I get to my top five books, and I promise you we’re going to get there, but let me share a little bit of what I’m reading right now.
Currently I’m reading The Heart of Philosophy by Jacob Needleman.
This book was recommended to me nine or ten years ago, I can’t remember exactly when, by my old track coach, Coach Reynolds.
So I had lived in southwest Georgia, where I served as a pastor for 11, almost 12 years, but in 2011 I moved back to my hometown.
And in moving back, I reconnected with people from my past, including Coach Reynolds.
When I moved back and we reconnected, he had retired
as a teacher and a track coach, but he was still mentoring young high school English teachers.
And we would meet
uh for coffee and we would talk about books and philosophy and literature and theology.
He had still held on to his Christian faith.
We even read a book together.
We read Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.
Oh, I love that book.
We would read a chapter or two a week and then we’d meet to discuss it.
And we had just great, great conversations about that book.
And then tragically, Coach Reynolds died in in 2017
We had met together for years, uh talking, discussing, sharing articles, reading books together, but in 2017, tragically, he had a stroke and he died.
And I’ll be honest, I I still miss him and I still think about him not only when I’m running and jogging, but when I’m reading good books.
And he had recommended Jacob Needleman to me, again, like nine or ten years ago.
Needleman was quite a
eccentric and eclectic philosopher who was searching deeply for meaning in both philosophy and religion
And Coach Reynolds liked him because he was a seeker of truth and knowledge and experience.
And so Coach Reynolds recommended
uh that I read Needlemen, and so I bought this book, The Heart of Philosophy, but I didn’t actually read it.
I bought it long years ago, put it on my shelf, and forgot about it until yesterday.
And I haven’t been able to put it down.
Let me share just a little bit of what Needleman writes in this book, The Heart of Philosophy.
He writes, a problem is something I must solve.
A question is something I must experience.
Needled in here is talking about
The modern dilemma of solving problems.
Solving problems in education, solving problems in politics, solving social problems
And he said the problem with simply trying to solve problems is we’re not asking the big questions, the deeper questions.
And he says that’s what philosophy does.
Philosophy causes us to ask big questions about the world and big questions about ourselves.
And he said to ask those type of big questions causes us to be somewhat childlike.
Not child-ish, but childlike in the sense that we’re filled once again with wonder.
So he says, to solve big problems, we need to ask big questions.
That we need to engage not only our intellect, but what he calls our mind.
And he makes a difference between intellect and mind
For him, mind is consciousness, not just the things that we know empirically, but the things that we also know intuitively.
And so he writes this at the very end of The Heart of Philosophy.
Needleman writes, Mind
Real consciousness is born in the confrontation between great reality and our present false condition
the confrontation of being in appearance, truth and inauthenticity.
Mind is born as and from Eros
An Eros is born out of the union of gods and mortals, the encounter between real ideas and the human ego.
In front of real ideas, I become still.
I am in question.
I am shocked by what I am, and I feel the measure of what I am meant to be
I just read that this morning, and I remembered that was the quote Coach Reynolds gave me.
That the beauty of philosophy is that it causes us to ask
big questions and to face real big ideas.
And in the face of the the big questions of life, questions of meaning,
questions of purpose, questions of identity.
When we ask those big questions, we become still.
We become reflective
Because those big questions cause us to be questioned.
Beautiful.
I love that so much
Well, that’s enough of the background.
Let’s get to the top five books.
If you are still with me on this episode, if you’ve made it through my my love for writing and books and philosophy and hearing my story,
Now I’m ready to talk about my top five.
And what I’d like to do is just briefly describe these books, why I like them so much, and I’ll read a little bit from them to give you a little snippet.
But let’s get started without delay.
And I’m going to start in reverse order, because I do have a number one.
So I’m going to start in reverse order my top five favorite books of 2025.
Number five is I gotta jump into this podcast episode to let you know I have a new book that’s out.
Incarnation eight lessons on how God meets us is available now.
Go order it.
Link is in the description.
show notes.
A Strange and Gracious Light by my friend Andrew Arnt
He wrote this book and published it this year, and I interviewed Andrew about this book.
It was episode 74, so you can go back and
hear my conversation with Andrew.
I read this book while on a trip to California and I loved every minute of it.
This is a Jesus book.
This is a book that helps us see life and to ask some of these big questions, like Jacob Needleman talks about
But it helps us to ask those big questions in the presence of God and to see how Jesus becomes the answer to so many of the questions of life.
I love this book because it is oriented around the church calendar.
As I’ve shared in a previous episode, I think that the church calendar is deeply transformative
if we’ll give it some intention.
If we put intentionality behind the traditions of Advent and Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, Easter tide, Pentecost
you’ll see real transformation.
So I love Andrew’s book because it’s oriented around the calendar.
And here’s just
a snippet from Andrew.
This is a quote from the very end of the chapter about the season of Lent and how the weakness of Jesus shows us that there’s true power and weakness.
Andrew writes, God’s paradoxical power is the power of love, and it will, rest assured, have the final say.
For it is precisely by the long, curious route of salvation history embodied in the strange sojourn of Jesus to the cross that the truth
finally wins the world over, as every knee bows and every tongue finally confesses that the holy fool
hanging powerless on a tree outside of Jerusalem is nothing less than the reign of God in person.
This is a great summation and sort of climax to a chapter.
But I wrote in the margin after reading that, I just wrote this paragraph.
all of it.
And I love this this paragraph shows, I think, the power of Andrew’s writing as a pastor, because Andrew is is a pastor and a writer much like Eugene.
And this is doxological.
This is writing that stirs my heart to worship.
So this is number five, A Strange and Gracious Light by Andrew Arnt.
Book number four is a little surprising because it’s not a new book, it’s an older book.
Book number four on my top five books of 2025.
Is The Great Divorce by C.
S.
Lewis.
Now, this book was written in the 1940s.
I think it was published in 1946.
And I have read this book twice before, but this year I read it for a third time
It was a book that was read in a small group in my church.
And I was a part of those conversations because I loved this book so much.
So The Great Divorce is uh a fiction piece by Lewis, a fantasy novel
of people living in hell, which they call the Grey Town, and in the Grey Town there’s a bus stop, and they are allowed to get on a bus and go to heaven
and to visit it.
And so it sort of chronicles various people, including the narrator, who we don’t know if it’s Lewis or not, probably a C.
S.
Lewis.
but the narrator and others from the Graytown going to heaven and having conversations with
what they call the bright people or the solid people, people who are in heaven.
And they have dialogues about heaven and hell
And it’s in this novel, The Great Divorce, that C.
S.
Lewis paints a picture of heaven and hell.
In a way that just makes sense to me.
So when people say, what do you believe about hell?
I mean, do you believe that people are eternally and consciously tormented in hell?
Before I want to answer that question, I always say, have you read C.
S.
Lewis’s The Great Divorce?
And and often people say they don’t.
I said, well, it’s gonna be hard for me to describe what I really think and believe about hell if you haven’t read that book.
Because this is really what I believe about hell.
And this is also the novel where C.
S.
Lewis uh writes this very famous line, which also kind of sums up my theology of hell.
It’s in this book, in this novel, The Great Divorce, that C.
S.
Lewis has this very famous line about hell, which really describes, for me, my understanding of the doctrine and the theology of hell.
Lewis writes, There are only two kinds of people in the world, those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says in the end, Thy will be done.
All that are in hell choose it.
Without that self-choice, there could be no hell.
No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it
Those who seek, find, to those who knock, it is open.
The Great Divorce.
If you haven’t read The Great Divorce by C.
S.
Lewis, do it.
It’s my number for
favorite book of 2025.
All right, number three.
Number three is Answering God.
THE PSOMS AS Tools for Prayer by Eugene Peterson.
Oh, that’s right.
I haven’t talked enough about my love for Eugene Peterson.
Here I am talking about one of his books.
Answering God is a book I didn’t even own.
It was written in 1989.
Eugene Peterson wrote this while a pastor, while taking a sabbatical break.
He pastored in the Baltimore area, but he was taking his sabbatical back in in Montana, where his family is from.
He writes this book on the Psalms, and I don’t know why it never popped up on my radar.
We read this book as a leadership team.
Someone on our leadership team at church said, hey, let’s read Eugene Peterson’s book on the Psalms.
It’s really good.
And I couldn’t believe that for all that I’ve read of Eugene, I haven’t read all 30 books.
Obviously, I hadn’t read this one.
But we read it together as a leadership staff, and I enjoyed it so much.
My prayers
have grown in the last ten, twelve years because I spend so much time in the Psalms.
I love the Psalms.
And I don’t
Study the Psalms as much as I allow the Psalms to give me a language of prayer
And so Eugene has so many great things to say about the Psalms.
One of the things he says in this book is that the Psalms show us
that prayer is a kind of response to God.
Let me read a little bit from the book.
Eugene Peterson writes
Presumptuous prayer speaks to God without first listening to him.
It obsessively, anxiously, and pretentiously
Multiplies human words to God, but with at best a distracted, indifferent, or fitful interest in God’s words to us.
But God speaks to us before we speak to Him.
If we pray without listening, we pray out of context
Protection against presumption comes in the editorial arrangement of the Psalms into five books, showing that prayer is a response to the Torah’s five books.
Maybe I should stop reading there.
So much content.
But maybe you’re not familiar.
The Psalms are divided into five books.
Most English translations will say that, you know, book one, book two.
That’s how they’re they’re divided.
And so Peterson says that division is on purpose because Psalms is the answer to the Torah, the law, the first five books of the Old Testament.
And that is intuitively how I’ve been praying for years.
I include Bible reading in my prayer time.
Because prayer, as Eugene teaches us, is not first speaking to God, but responding to God
So just like when I was a teenager learning how to have a quiet time, it includes Bible reading, God speaking to us through God’s word, and then prayers, us responding to God.
How beautiful.
I love so much about that.
Answering God by Eugene Peterson, number three.
Okay, two more books.
Book number two on my list.
From Aristotle to Christ, How Aristotelian Thought Clarified the Christian Faith by Louis Marcos.
I would imagine a guess that you have never heard of Marcos, that you haven’t followed his writings.
This book is uh the end of a trilogy.
Marcos, if you don’t know, is an English professor.
He did his PhD work at the University of Michigan, and currently he’s an English professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University.
And there he teaches humanity classes.
And he has a trilogy of books, of which From Aristotle to Christ is the third in the trilogy.
He wrote From Achilles to Christ, Why Christians Should Read Pagan Literature.
Then a second book was From Plato to Christ.
because Marcos describes himself as a Platonist and the importance of Plato and the shaping of Christian thought and Christian theology, which I haven’t read his book, but I agree with the premise
And then I heard him in an interview say, well, I wrote from Plato to Christ, and I couldn’t write about Plato without also writing about Aristotle.
And this book came to me uh in the fall.
I have been reading and researching for well over a year.
on Aristotle, his understanding of moral ethics, virtue ethics, his understanding of metaphysics.
That is our our understanding of our own being.
Um, I’m doing all this research for a book I want to write.
I’ll talk about that at a later episode.
But as I’ve tried to read directly from Aristotle, and I read his Nicomachean Ethics, and I’ll be honest, I understood about half of it.
Aristotle is is very difficult.
And I found Marcos’ book here on Aristotle to be so helpful because Marcos goes through, and he has big quotes from Aristotle, which I love that too.
Describing Aristotle’s understanding of logic and physics, and yes, virtue
And so this was a helpful book for me in my research.
I need to
uh interview him on the podcast at some point.
I’m not gonna read from it.
It gets very dense.
It is pretty philosophical, but it’s my number two book, From Aristotle to Christ.
And with that, I’m ready to share with you the number one book I read this year.
This has been my favorite book
From 2025, and it’s a new book.
It’s a book that was published this year, and it’s Jesus Changes Everything, A New World Made Possible.
by Stanley Hauer-Wass and Charles Moore.
Stanley Hauer-Wass is currently retired
Uh he was a professor of ethics at Duke Divinity School.
He also taught at Notre Dame.
And of all the theologians out there, Howard Wass has influenced me as much as any
And so Charles Moore sat down with Hauer Wass and basically edited what will be Hauer Wass’s final book.
So this is a very short book.
It’s a small book.
Um it’s very accessible, it’s very readable, and it sums up a lot of Hauer Wass’s teachings and Hauer Wass has written
dozens and dozens and dozens of essays and books, and he’s had a deep influence on me.
In fact, I was asked recently why our church doesn’t advocate
for justice issues around the world.
And my response and this is a very thoughtful person who was asking me this question
Um, and I said, are you familiar with Stanley Hower Wass?
And he said, no.
And I said, I would encourage you to read his
New book, which is probably his last book, Jesus Changes Everything, and that will give you a perspective on how we as a church think about serving our
community in the world and issues of justice.
Because this person was coming from the point of view that the church should be mobilizing people.
um to contact their congressmen and get all political and make political statements about this, that, and the other.
And one of the things I learned from Howard Wass is that the work of God
In doing justice and setting right a role gone wrong is first the church being the church
There’s so much in this book I could read to you, but let me read just a little quote about this idea of being the church.
And again, as I think about Howard Wass, one of the reasons I love him so much, not only is he a profound uh theological voice.
But he loves the local church, believes in the local church, and uh I like theologians that are first and foremost churchmen.
So at the this is at the end of Jesus Changes Everything, Howler Wash writes.
The first social task of the church
the people capable of remembering and telling the story of God we find in Jesus is to be the church, and thus help the world understand itself as the world.
The world, to be sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation, which is all the more distorted by sin because it is still bounded by God’s goodness.
The church, therefore, is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.
Oh, so much I could say there.
You know, Howard Wass has famously said that the primary task of the church is to make the world the world.
And that sentiment is echoed a little bit in what Howard Wass writes here, that the church doesn’t have a social ethic or a social strategy.
The church is a social ethic.
The church is a social strategy.
In other words, the church is to be so different from the world
That it shows the world what the world can be.
But that puts pressure on us because as followers of Jesus, living in a community called the Church,
We gotta be loving one another rightly so that we can show the world this is what God has created us to be.
Well, I’ve loved reviewing these five books, and I hope you check one or two of them out.
If you get gift cards for Christmas and you’re able to buy books, I encourage you to do so
I truly am a minimalist at heart.
I don’t like clutter.
I’m not a collector of things.
But when it comes to books, you can’t have enough.
So maybe my discussion of these books will inspire you to reach out for one of these books.
And then maybe in the new coming calendar year, January’s right around the corner, maybe you can form some new reading habits.
You know, people
in January like to set New Year’s resolutions.
Well, maybe you set a new resolution to put your phone down and pick up a book.
Find a good book and read it.
These books have changed my life.
I know they’ll change yours, so go check it out
All right, this is a longer episode than normal.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.