There seems to be no end these days to the production of books attempting to help the church get back to what it is supposed to be. The title Total Church suggests (correctly) that this is another such book. But this one deserves special attention not because of the hype surrounding it but because the authors have done an excellent job of showing what the “bottom line” of “church” is and how that bottom line affects everything we associate with church life.
The book’s layout is simple. The first two chapters spell out the two principles around which every other chapter in the book is based. These two principles are gospel and community. In the rest of the book, the authors consider various aspects of church ministry—things like evangelism, world mission, discipleship, and ministry to children—and show how gospel and community impact and inform these ministries. The result is, as the subtitle explains, a “radical reshaping” of how to do church. The authors contend that “whether we are thinking about evangelism, social involvement, pastoral care, apologetics, discipleship, or teaching, the content is consistently the Christian gospel, and the context is consistently the Christian community” (p. 16). But unless understands what the authors mean by gospel and community, this book will be just another “how to” manual for doing church.
The reason why this book is so effective is because its aim is so simple. Keller begins the book this way, “This short book is meant to lay out the essentials of the Christian message, the gospel” (p. xi). Christianity is certainly not lacking when it comes to the number of books written on a subject. So how can Keller be so successful while writing on something so, well, basic?
“Christianity has an image problem.” That’s how unChristian begins, and it is the problem it attempts to resolve, not by explaining the Christian faith to non-Christians, but by urging professing Christians to fix their image in 6 specific areas. According to the research done for this book (from the Barna Group), Christians are accused of being hypocritical, insincere in their efforts to convert people, antihomosexual, sheltered, too political, and judgmental. Because of these accusations, the writers contend, evangelical Christians, or those who are considered to be “born again,” have lost the respect of those outside the church. These non-Christians consider the Christian faith as it is practiced today to be unChristian, that is, “they think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it was meant to be” (p. 15). Are they right?
