“Community organizing is about believing the world can be different; that we can make concrete changes that bring us closer to the world God desires, if we work together across the lines that too often divide us.” The first of our “Modern Mobilizers” responds…

Mobilizing Hope is a primer, a handbook, an inspirational memoir and a framework for putting your faith into action. Join us at the Take & Read blog as we share stories and conversations from “modern mobilizers” about what it mean to mobilize hope in this generation, in this time.

Quite frankly I was very skeptical reading this book at first. I mean, really, what can Jay Bakker, a onetime drunk and drug user, who also happens to be the son of Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker tell me about grace, let alone the Bible, theology, and contemporary Church culture? I was surprised.

You would think someone who has experienced so much would walk away from anything that looks remotely like the very place he came from. But there is hope. Jay is an ardent grace-junkie. He drinks it. Shoots it up. Sniffs it. Loves it. And he encourages everyone to do the same.

There is a lot of talk about Jay’s book. On a personal note there is something that many will pass over that I want to thank my brother Jay for. This book is a hidden victory. Jay goes public on what many of us work our whole lives to hide in the shadow of the shame that we were schooled in daily from the time the bell went for our first class.

I’m tempted to give people Jay’s book when they want to know what distinguishes a Lutheran theological position from that of other forms of Christianity. The difference of course is that we are all about grace. And not a dry dusty doctrine of grace. Big wet juicy grace. The kind that runs down your chin like a peach you have to eat over the kitchen sink.

When our faith is rocked, we don’t need answers. We need friends. In Kent Annan I have found a kindred spirit. After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken describes in poignant detail Annan’s struggle to make sense of his faith in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake of 2010.

Author Brent Landau gives the reader something she or he hasn’t had before in Revelation of the Magi; a first person account of God appearing in all sorts of ways to all sorts of people. This is a far more inclusive God than Christians might be accustomed to, a God who is incarnate and not choosey about where, when, and to whom God appears, a God who is incarnate in “unspeakable forms.” Editor-in-Chief of the Spiritual Book Club, Susan Baller-Shepard, joins the blogger roundtable on Revelation of the Magi.