This Beautiful Mess by Rick McKinley. Rick is the pastor of Donald Miller and he spoke at Catalyst '06 back in October. I've never had the chance to meet him but I like his ideas of living out the Kingdom through his church and in his everyday life. He wrestes with the complexity of living as a follower of Christ in todays world and wrestles with the idea of money, pain, and being willing to look outside of our western christianity box.

His last little bit of the book sums it up best. He says it's almost as if there are two gospels of Jesus we read about in the NT. There is the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus. The gospel about Jesus refers to personal salvation and faith in him alone for salvaiton. the gospel of Jesus is the stuff he did to redeem his current culture. Liberal churches embrace the gospel of Jesus while conservative churches embrace the gospel of Jesus. Problem is both are true and need to be lived out but living this out provides a tension. His church, Imago Dei, tries to live out this tension.

4 of 52: 52 books is going to a pretty daunting task for this year. I'm up for the challenge but any book that decides to kick my butt is going to throw off my whole plan. But the goal is not the point the great quality books I'm going to read is the point.

Acknowledgements: My favorite part to read of any book is the acknowledgements. After having read something of the author's heart I like to hear who influenced him. Simply names like Jeanne, Chris, Tom, occasionaly an exotic name like Celestion but just names. I try to decide who will be on my acknowledgements page.