Letters to a Future Church is a pithy, lively little book. It features more than two dozen contributors crammed into 164 breezy pages.

The book, edited by Chris Lewis, comes out of a 2010 conference in Toronto for which speakers were asked to compose short letters to the church, modeled after the seven letters to seven churches that open the book of Revelation. The conference got some Big Names on board — people like Walter Brueggemann, Ron Sider, Shane Claiborne, Peter Rollins and Eugene Peterson (and to those outside of the subculture, trust me, those guys are subculturally famous). But they also, intentionally, didn’t allow church celebrities or “gatekeepers” to dominate the conversation. The conference sought out other smart, but less-famous voices (including terrific bloggers like Rachel Held Evans and Kathy Escobar) and put out an open call for letters that resulted in some of the more interesting and inspiring essays collected here.

The format of these essays gives the collection a sense of urgency. Contributors were given wide latitude on their choice of subject, but were also forced to keep it short. That combination of sweeping ambition and brevity focuses these essays into something like “Here is what I have to say that is most important to me,” and that asks for, and often rewards, our attention.

Because of that brevity, one can readily re-read the essays here that invite further reflection — and many of these do. (And in the case of the handful of clunkers here, that brevity means you’re done with them almost soon enough.)

There are big dreams here, words of gratitude and of criticism, arguments, condemnations, manifestos, visions, agendas, parables, pedantry, poetry and prophecy. There are personal testimonies that challenge and inspire. There are some heartfelt pleas for what we need to change, and a few harrumphing sermons on what you people need to change.

Basically, you’re getting to meet a couple dozen people who are trying, in just a few pages, to tell you who they are and who they want to be as honestly as they can. If you find people interesting, there are plenty of them here.

Tony Jones wrote about Letters to a Future Church yesterday and he makes several points I’d second here. He commends Pete Rollins’ letter (from which I gleaned this joke/parable) and pans the lecturing essay by Tim Challies (which I wrote about earlier in “Healing and the justice of God“) and praises the concise wisdom of James Shelley’s one-point-and-done entry reminding Christians that the Bible doesn’t say anything without our interpreting it.

Tony also reacts to what was, for me, an initial source of great disappointment. He writes:

These aren’t letters to a future church, as the book’s title promises. They are letters to the church today. Actually, I’d be very intrigued by a book of letters to the church 100 or 1,000 years from now. But that’s not this book.

That’s what I was hoping this title promised — a book of letters to the church of 2112. Or, better yet, a book of letters from the church of 2112. What will Christians 100 years from now have to say to us?

I don’t imagine they’ll be terribly impressed with the way we’re still restricting and debating the role of women in the church. I would imagine, actually, that that very phrase — “the role of women in the church” — with all of its assumptions and condescensions, will be viewed a hundred years from now as an embarrassing artifact of our current failings.

Nor do I suspect that our future heirs in the church will be terribly impressed that it has taken us so long to make so little progress lurching and staggering toward the full and equal participation of LGBT believers, or toward overcoming the racial and ethnic and class barriers we have constructed throughout our churches.

The theme of a great many “Letters From a Future Church,” I think, would be “Just what part of Galatians 3:28 didn’t you people understand?”

I also can’t imagine the church of 2112 looking back on us with fond gratitude for what we’re doing and allowing to be done to the climate they will have to endure living in. For example, today in 2012 there is a Christian minority in the officially Muslim nation of the Maldives, but we know that by 2112 there won’t be any Christians living there at all. Or Muslims either. Because, thanks to our actions and inactions, by 2112 the Maldives will likely no longer exist.

What’s most interesting to me about the church of the future isn’t the ways in which it will be different, but rather the ways in which it will be the same. “Love God and love your neighbor” will still be the core of the faith, even when taught by the chaplain for the work crew of an orbiting Planetary Resources station overseeing the robotic mining vessels busily dismantling Mercury for the construction of the Dyson sphere.

But, as Tony said, “that’s not this book.”

This book is about the church today — mostly the North American church. It is a book of its time.

Yet think about the apologetic way that phrase is often employed — “Well, you have to understand, he was a man of his time.” Keeping an eye to the future — trying to imagine how our time will be viewed by generations yet to come — turns out to be a necessary aspect to understanding the present.

Letters to a Future Church is not really one addressed to those future generations. But if some member of the church of 2112 should somehow stumble across a copy, I think they would find a compelling, intriguing snapshot from the church of 2012, as well as a few timely expressions of timeless ideas.

(Part 1 of this review here, by proxy.)

At the end of Ronald J. Sider’s most recent book, Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget, there’s an appendix of “Action Steps” for readers. The first of these reads as follows:

Read and reflect on a few dozen of the hundreds of biblical verses about God and the poor. Then prayerfully ask God to help you share God’s love for poor, hurting persons. If you need help finding the verses, see the two hundred pages of biblical text on the poor in Ronald J. Sider, For they Shall Be Fed: Scripture Readings and Prayers for a Just World (Nashville: Word, 1997) or just go through the dozens of verses in chapter three of Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).

I second both of those recommendations. Rich Christians, in particular, is a powerful book, in which Sider presents a relentless argument for life-changing generosity.*

In that book, originally published in 1977, Sider sets the stage with two long, insistent chapters, one laying out statistics on the scope, depth and impact of poverty around the world, and the other laying out the massive collection of biblical imperatives, laws, stories, histories, parables, proverbs, psalms and suggestions urging God’s children to give generously to those in need. Sider follows those chapters with the core of the book, the case for what he calls a “graduated tithe” — a way of structuring personal generosity to resist the creeping influence of affluence.

Rich Christians also included a coda that included policy suggestions, but the main thrust of the book was Sider’s call for personal, voluntary, individual, private generosity.

So, predictably, the fledgling religious right recoiled and condemned the book as a Stalinist manifesto. Sider was called a Communist, a radical class warrior driven by the politics of envy.

Rich Christians became a best-seller, and the thousands of Christians who actually read it knew that those wild criticisms were baseless and ridiculous. But the critics were brutal and they had a bigger platform than Sider had — they had Christian radio, magazines and the direct mail outrage-machines of the religious right. The nasty intensity of that criticism meant that in the less-politicized “mainstream” evangelical press Sider and his book were categorized as “controversial” — the standard evangelical approach to marginalizing someone with an inconvenient message. People who hadn’t read the book had heard something or other about it — something bad. It was some kind of radical left-wing Contra thing or something, rumor had it. That’s what they’d heard, and they figured where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Sider was stung by that criticism and the viciousness of the attacks. As an earnest, guileless Mennonite, he has always assumed the best of everyone, approaching even the cynical political operatives who attacked him and his book as though they were simply fellow Christians responding reasonably in good faith. So Sider set out to engage them in constructive dialogue.

One result of that dialogue — which has gone on now for more than three decades — is that the central contention of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is no longer instinctively condemned as “controversial.” Even on the furthest fringes of the Christian right, Sider’s contention about “God’s love for poor, hurting persons” is now accepted as something yesofcourse, everyone acknowledges as true. That’s an enormous achievement and a testimony to Sider’s patient determination over many years.

But the influence worked in both directions. The fierce attacks on Rich Christians made Ron Sider a more cautious writer. The voices of the external critics who battered him now seem to have been incorporated by his internal editor.

The policy agenda sketched at the end of the first edition of Rich Christians was a basic wish-list of the sorts of things anti-hunger advocates and development agencies were calling for in 1977. Each subsequent edition and revision of the book moved further away from that, incorporating more of a neoliberal outlook. When you read that first edition, you came away with the vivid sense of a writer who was passionately driven to help the neediest. That passion can still be found in the later revisions, and in the many books Sider has written since, but it’s less compelling and less contagious, muted by a palpable sense that every word has been weighed by someone trying to avoid being attacked again as a leftist commie.

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The girls got an early Christmas present yesterday — tickets to a big concert at the Spectrum II CoreStates Center First Union Center Wachovia Center big arena where the Sixers and Flyers play.

For the chauffeur (me), that meant several hours in coffee shops and diners, which was good because I had a lot of offline reading to catch up on. The problem was that one of the books I’ve been reading is Bob Larson’s In the Name of Satan: How the Forces of Evil Work and What You Can Do to Defeat Them.

Having spend much of the past eight years working my way through the first two books in the Left Behind series, I’ve gotten used to sitting in public reading something appalling, and thus I’m pretty adept at concealing my reading material in coffee shops and waiting rooms. But even so, the Bob Larson had me more worried than usual that someone might catch a glimpse of the cover.

Had anyone asked, I could have assured them that their seeing another person reading this book should, in no way, be construed as suggesting that this book was in any way worth reading. I could have explained that this was research. I could have described my developing theory about the way an obsession with Satan in popular religion feeds a delusional, self-aggrandizing form of piety. I could have pointed out that Larson is a ridiculous figure — a hopelessly pompous idiot who has carved out a lucrative career scamming the gullible to hire him as a rogue demon hunter. And I could have gone on to describe how Larson’s book is the embodiment of W. Scott Poole’s observation of the way that distorted portrayals of religious beliefs in popular culture take root in the imagination and are then reabsorbed in popular religion until ideas that originated in pop culture come to be taught as “traditional” religious dogma.

But what if they didn’t ask?

The concern here isn’t one of vanity. I’m just some anonymous guy in a diner, and when no one knows or cares who you are, you don’t need to worry about damaging your reputation. But what if someone saw me reading Bob Larson’s book and, God forbid, thought: “Hmm, look’s interesting. I’ll have to check that out.” If even one person saw me reading that book and was then even slightly influenced toward perhaps reading it themselves … I just couldn’t have that on my conscience.

My wife ran into a similar situation recently when she was reading Alexander Zaitchik’s Common Nonsense, which featured a large photo of Glenn Beck on the cover. Those who looked closer might read the subtitle — “Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.” But what if someone just glanced over and saw her reading what they mistook to be a book written by Glenn Beck? And what if this observer were to take from that the dangerously mistaken idea that reading Glenn Beck — or watching Glenn Beck, or listening to Glenn Beck — was somehow acceptable behavior? What if their passing glimpse of that book cover were, even in some small way, to reinforce the notion that reading Glenn Beck was something that decent, mature human beings might proudly admit to in front of their neighbors? You can’t risk encouraging that kind of obscenity, even accidentally. So she took off the dust jacket and replaced it with one from a Sue Miller novel.

But so anyway, my question here is this: What books have you been reading that you were uncomfortable being seen reading? Maybe it was a research project, or a guilty pleasure, or something unfairly maligned or something easily misunderstood. Or maybe it was several of those at once. What was the book?

Renovaré has a new book out that seems designed to start an argument. It’s called 25 Books Every Christian Should Read: A Guide to the Essential Spiritual Classics, and it’s just what it sounds like — an introduction to 25 classic works of Christian writing, with excerpts from each and short essays arguing for why these selections are worth reading.

As with all such lists — think of those AFI lists, or those lists of “the best novels,” or NPR’s recent list of 100 science fiction books — part of the fun is the inevitable argument over which books should be included.

In this case, that argument ought to be a gentle one, seeing as these books are mostly classics of devotional literature whose most avid partisans ought to reflect the spirit of those books. One assumes that two friends with passionate opinions about, for example, the relative merits of The Practice of the Presence of God versus The Seven Storey Mountain would conduct their dispute in a manner that would make Brother Lawrence and Thomas Merton proud.

The Renovaré folks recognize this aspect of their project, and they see the fun in it, so they’ve structured their book to accommodate and encourage such discussion. Sprinkled throughout 25 Books are dozens of additional recommendations, including additional lists from a variety of interesting people — lists of their five favorites, or the six books they found most inspiring, or “Seven Books Those Idiots at Renovaré Unforgivably Failed to Include.” (No list is titled quite that explicitly, of course, but the editors are smart enough to realize that this is what many readers will inevitably be thinking.)

Patheos is also helping to continue that friendly argument with a book club forum on 25 Books.

The main list is a good one. I’ve read maybe half of these and am at least familiar with the rest, thanks in part to having been introduced to some of them years ago by a similar, earlier Renovaré publication called Devotional Classics. The excerpts, like the titles listed, are well-chosen, and the short essays make a good case for these entries.

The overall sense one gets from 25 Books is that of having an earnest, bookish friend enthusiastically pressing a stack of books into your lap and encouraging you to read them. Such enthusiasm — even from a stranger — is bound to nudge those titles higher in your mental queue of Books to Read Someday. But the weight we give such recommendations depends upon the friend making them. If it’s someone we trust and regard with affection, admiration and affinity, then the book may move to the top of the queue — even to the top of the nightstand.

So how much weight should we give to this stack of recommendations from Renovaré? That answer will depend, largely, on what one thinks of their list.

So let’s take a look at that list, and please let’s do have the friendly argument it’s bound to provoke.

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