I’m continuing my series of mini book reviews with the new year–goodbye, 2021! Hello, 2022! I hope these reviews are helpful to you without taking up too much of your precious time! 🙂 This quick review is of a book by Hansen and Leeman, called Rediscover Church.
Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ is Essential, by Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman.
Why do we need the local church when we can just tune into the livestream of the greatest orators of our time? Why would we try to get along with people who disagree with us politically? Hansen and Leeman attempt to answer these questions in Rediscover Church. They also sketch a very organized and readable picture of a healthy, biblical church.
Leeman talks about church offering a “gospel word and a gospel society” (23) which is greater than the sum of our political divisions. This book is written very much for this current time—mid-pandemic, mid-social-justice-struggles. Yet it isn’t saying anything new. It’s reminding us that we need our brothers and sisters in Christ.
I found especially helpful the chapters on
- church discipline (which can be a valuable guard against abusers who otherwise go unchecked) and,
- loving members who are different.
The introduction of this book could be a turnoff to some—I’ve heard complaints about it from fellow readers. The authors do make an assumption that readers may be more likely to agree with unbelieving neighbors than their fellow church members about social justice, etc. But that’s the only taste of “wokeness” I noticed in this book. I thought it was, overall, a good contribution to our knowledge of what a church is and what it does. And it made me want to love my church better. Which, after all, seemed to be the authors’ goal as they wrote Rediscover Church.
Favorite Quotes from Rediscover Church
“To offer or encourage the virtual church as a permanent option…hurts Christian discipleship” (53).
“…sometimes humility requires us to place those more intractable conflicts on the shelf for a while and ask the Lord to solve them in his time and his way” (136).
“No one gets the church they want. But everyone gets the church they need” (143).
You might also enjoy reading my mini reviews on Sproul’s The Holiness of God, Vaughn’s Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, or Putnam’s When Doctrine Divides the People of God. View the rest of my book reviews here, or check out my entire booklist of favorites from 2021.