MASON KING

It’s the time of year when everyone is putting out their lists of favorites. Usually these lists are bad for my book habit, and they are fun to peruse and see what people enjoyed. This year two of the books we’re using in the Training and Residency Programs were voted books of the year by Christianity Today: both Senkbeil and Earley have written books that I’ve already seen bear fruit in my own life and those of our students. I am thankful for their work (which means I can point to them here and leave them off the lists below! See what I did?)

As my own contribution to the list-making season, I’ve tried to share some things that I’ve enjoyed this year across a few categories, meaning few are brand new works—more so just new to me. Maybe you’ll find something new for yourself to interact with in 2020. Also, as part reflection, I’ve included a few thoughts that in another year might have been blog posts, and for now are sentences at best.

10 is a lot, and it turns out, sometimes 5 is too. Here are 5 (or 4) things in each category.

-MK

Reads I Really Enjoyed

• Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra by CS Lewis
  I’ve often heard that people find this trilogy to be among their favorite of his work. These two books felt like I seeing a new side of an old friend, a secret talent that had long lay hidden away. His work, The Great Divorce, is among my favorite works I’ve ever read—and sections of these two books are now right there with it. Lewis has a way of describing ordinary things in ways that make one feel like they’re seeing it for the first time, and thus need to reinterpret previous experience. These were treats to read.
• Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith by Adam Neder
  This little book is punchy, full of help, and a needed gut check for the learner and teacher. Since I teach multiple times a week now, there were many parts of this work that gave insight and corrective toward how to steward the classroom, and my own heart in the process. Last week I shared a few quotes from the work here.
• The Fabric of Theology by Richard Lints
  This was certainly the densest and most helpful book I read this year in regards to understanding culture. Written in the early 90’s, Lints walks through the patchwork nature of the modern evangelical theological vision, and illustrates the need for comprehensive thinking regarding one’s own theological worldview which makes one wonder how he could read 2019 so well 25 years ago. This book explained postmodernity and its impact upon modern evangelicalism in a single chapter that is worth the cost of the book itself. For the 14 Residents that read it this fall, each found it eye-opening and helpful in understanding the last century of our faith, and the challenge ahead of us.
• How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs
  This book introduced me to Jacobs, and I immediately began to follow his work. I signed up for his newsletter, which I enjoy regularly, and try to keep up with his blog. Jacobs is a regular contributor to Mars Hill Audio, and I constantly learn new things from his work. This is a handbook for how to look at our current moment and resist the urge to fight on its terms. Pair this with The Coddling of the American Mind, and you’ve got quite the combo of thought.
• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
  I stayed up late in a quiet house last night to finish the last few chapters of this book. I couldn’t put it down. I’ve got a shelf of books in my office that all have the theme of sabbath / rest / hurry in their titles, and Comer seems to interact with most of them in this single work, meaning he weaves pieces of arguments together in a way that is readable, relatable, and helpful. This is a good book. It is the why, the what & the how, leaving you with practical steps to think through enacting what he’s talking about: living in the way of Jesus with a more present minded rhythm of life. This is the last full read of 2019 for me, and I am thankful for it.

Things I Will Re-Read

• Who God Says You Are – Klyne Snodgrass
  I will read this book for the third time in January with our Residency Program. My D.Min supervisor first pointed it out while I was researching virtue formation. For a better part of two years I read the field on emotional health and identity formation. I carried four books out of that season, Snodgrass being among the top of the list. The final chapter is his plea to “become a real person.” For a media saturated, digital native age, I can think of fewer necessary calls than that of becoming who God says we are. Not our culture, not ourselves, not our experience, but our Maker. This is true humanity.
• An Unhurried Leader: The Lasting Fruit of Daily Influence by Alan Fadling
  This book is a slow burn. It does some category-shifting for the performance addicted, and is a needed corrective to leadership that is based on task instead of people. Fadling has great things to say. I read this slowly the first time, and can tell that his lessons are born out of living the thing rather than merely talking of it.
• The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson by Stanley Hauerwas
  I first heard of this book on a Mars Hill Audio interview with Ken Myers. The work is a collection of letters that Hauerwas wrote to his godson on the importance of different virtues. So a tenured professor writes to an 8 year old about the importance of constancy. Seventy years between them, and the reader walks away grateful for the reminder of the character we hoped for at 20, lamented at 30, and long for in the years ahead. This book gave language for virtues that I will use with my children, and myself.
• The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) and The Wingfeather Saga (Peterson) – Here’s a short film of The Wingfeather Saga.
  My father read the Hobbit to my sister and I when we were young. I’m doing the same for my children now, and my son is captivated by Smaug the Dragon. He’s four, and I wanted something to capture his imagination. He asked me not to make the Gollum voice any more when I read it, so I think we’re there. We’re big believers in reading out loud in our house, and it has been so pleasant to hear this story in the again. I figure we’ll start in on Middle Earth when it’s time. The LOTR trilogy were the first books I read after my masters, a kind of baptism back into fairy tales from the land of academia. It’s time again. Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga is being re-released this year in a new hardback edition, and we’ll be purchasing them for our library. I’ve listened to the series via audiobook twice through, and am thankful for an epic tale for a new generation that has much depth and beauty within. These are excellent reads.

Things I Want to Finish Reading:

• The Pastor in a Secular Age by Andrew Root
  I must have picked up 8 books this year that began with a reference to Charles Taylor. He was in EVERYTHING. Root is charting the pastoral vocation through the ages, and so far it’s really intriguing, albeit a bit technical in places. I bought it in conjunction with building a lecture around post-modernity and secularism.
• Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang
  At a recent conference, this book was mentioned by a friend as a go-to for pedagogical methods and how to move from lecture to active learning environments in specific, concrete ways. I scanned and found an exercise to practice for our closing lecture in the Training Program this fall and it led to fruitful discussion. I’m eager to read more.
• Invitation to a Journey: A Roadmap for Spiritual Formation by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.
  This book keeps getting referenced and footnoted in a lot of my reading, and so I would like to read his complete picture of being conformed to the image of Christ. It’s a little like Taylor, meaning it’s always in the footnotes.
• The Man of God: His Calling and Godly Life: Volume 1 of Pastoral Theology by Albert N. Martin
  This series is the print version of a decades-old pastoral training course, one that used to be on cassettes for those looking to be mentored in what it meant to be an under-shepherd and overseer. Martin pastored a local congregation for 46 years, forming these thoughts through experience and then among those in the classroom. These are the kind of books that I love to sit with, the collected written fruit of a lifetime faithfulness and the call of the Scriptures to get wisdom.

Things I Learned a Bit More This Year: 

• Communicating clearly with people takes a lot of patience, perseverance, and grace. Then there is the other person involved.
• I overcomplicate most things. Life is more simple than we make it. Love people, be honest, work hard. Take people seriously, yourself less so. Rest and play on repeat.
• In order to be good at anything, I’m convinced I need to do less, better. The lie of this age is that you can do increasingly more equally well.
• The Christian life is a fight to live in reality at every turn. This world offers us fantasy and distraction as a means to escape our inability to be still. The road out of fantasy is the way into true life.
• Mostly, I am praying these days that I would not confuse being well-read with well-lived. These are not the same thing.

Here’s to a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, friends. May God bless you and keep you, may he cause his face to shine upon you.

*Things have been full lately, so here we are a month late. I’m learning to hit send instead of continuing to mull over the right way to say it. Enjoy. – MK

§ Deformed by Distraction

I’ve been reading about spiritual disciplines since high school, and I still struggle to consistently do the thing I know will bring about the ends that I want. Willard says this is the general human failing, to “want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.”

Ouch.

I want to be formed by the Spirit into the image of Christ, and it feels like many days I am being deformed by app designers and dopamine. The road to sloth is paved with glowing rectangles.

And for all the warning of what is happening, we accommodate ourselves to being used by machines instead of using them. After plenty of books, talks, podcasts and posts about hurry, rest, sabbath, and habits—I can tell you there is plenty of data about the crisis of virtue in the western world, largely fed by the very tech we’ve trusted for deliverance from the weight of boredom and the thinness of our own character and relationships. This should be offensive to us, and it momentarily is if we will give our attention to it, but the cost to convenience, false connectedness, and the pull of dopamine (which is merely the anticipation of something good happening, not getting the good itself) keeps us bound.

I attended a conference put on by the Center for Pastor Theologians last month. Given their topic around technology and faith, I’ve been waiting for several of the talks to be available online. When they do, you will find it here. In the meantime, the CPT has released Felicia Su Wong’s talk, Digital Life as Secular Liturgy via their podcast. I took 6+ pages of notes during this talk, and am thankful to be able to hear it again. Note that it is in two parts on the podcast – episodes 34 + 35.

§ Get Wisdom. 

Last week in the Training Program, I taught on the biblical wisdom literature, and then preached on it at Mosaic Church in Richardson (audio here).

In studying for lecture, I was struck by how in our secular, post-christian world, we have traded the classical view of wisdom for the availability of information. The internet in your pocket has leveled the street value of experience and expertise. Life hacks, how to guides, and self-help books have replaced the call of the scriptures to get wisdom, because they have built the foundation of wisdom on self, and not upon faith in our Creating God. The Bible says  at all costs, get wisdom—our modern culture seeks wisdom through information, and we trust in our own judgement, our own rationalism more than revealed knowledge. 

It reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s poem:

Choruses from the Rock

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
o perpetual revolution of configured stars,
o perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
o world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

§ Are you successful?

I really enjoyed this video from Ned Bustard, an illustrator whose work I first came across in Every Moment Holy. (Note: I would buy this book, and consider giving it as a gift this Christmas. It is uniquely special.) Now don’t let that distract you from this video.

“We were made, in joy, to make things in and for joy.” Amen and amen.

§ Currents

• I’m looking forward to reading through Isaiah this year during Advent via Tony Reinke’s reading plan. It starts this Sunday if you want to join in.
• My wife and I have really enjoyed listening and talking through John Mark Comer and Jefferson Bethke’s podcast: Fight Hustle, End Hurry.
• On a recent trip I finally got to see the movie, Yesterday. I enjoyed it so much I watched it on both legs of the trip. Since then I’ve been happily humming the Beatles with zero regrets.
• My oldest child and I are working through Ryan Lister’s new work, Emblems of the Infinite King, and it is fantastic. As a theology primer for kids, it is giving me language to use with adults. Ryan has done a great job, and the book itself is illustrated beautifully.
• If you made it this far, cheers! I’d love to hear from you on twitter or instagram.

§ Alan Jacobs and the Reticence of the Bible

Jacobs writes in his latest newsletter:

“I’ve also been thinking lately about how the Bible tells stories. Erich Auerbach famously said that the biblical narratives are “fraught with background,” with so much that matters but is unspoken. (For example, what does Abraham think when God tells him to sacrifice his son?) Robert Alter calls this the “reticence” of biblical story, and while both of them were referring to the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament can be reticent too. So in response to that reticence I’ve been telling a few small stories of my own: one, two, three.”

There are moments between the text that require the imagination of the reader to see the humanity of the text. The phrase, the reticence of the text, struck me as I read it, along with Jacobs’ own stories linked above. Over the years I have tried to look into the text with my imagination, and akin to Jacobs, here are a few of my own attempts to see the humanity of the text:

Acts 9:26-27
Exodus 12: If We Survive the Night
Holy Week (Day by Day)

§ Art and the Reticence of the Bible: Rembrandt

Rembrandt is one of my favorite artists. Other than an art history course at A&M, my first introduction at length was Nouwen’s meditation on The Return of the Prodigal Son. What a book.

I recently discovered Art Twitter, and have really enjoyed seeing sketches, studies and etchings from @ArtistRembrandt that give image to the biblical text, helping us look into history and think of the background.

I have been drawn to the use (and absence) of detail in these sketches. They are really stunning. Here are a few for you to see:

The Return of the Prodigal Son: 

(I posted this on instagram and my friend shared a quote from Peter Brown quoting Augustine: “The Father of the prodigal son ‘falls on his shoulders.’ It is Christ placing his yoke on the Christian, and in a flash we see the incident as Rembrandt would see it; every line of the heavy figure of the old man charged with meaning.”)

Jesus writing in the sand when approached with the woman caught in adultery:

Pilate presenting Jesus before the people:

Christ being removed from the cross:

 

§ Books to check out

I’ve spent the last two months planning the curriculum for the second year of our TVCI Residency Program. That means I’ve been scouring tables of contents, calculating page counts and trying to refine learning outcomes. I’m really excited and hopeful for the conversations we get to have with our incoming class of Residents.

Along the way I’ve come across some resources that I couldn’t fit into our curriculum this year (or I’m waiting for them to be published). Posting them here for you (and as a reminder to myself to read them).

The Pastor in the Secular Age, Andrew Root  / Podcast Interview with Root: The Pastor Writer
In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, Jake Meador
Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making, Andrew Peterson
Christian Philosophy: A Systematic and Narrative Introduction, Bartholomew and Goheen

§ A Must Listen: This Cultural Moment

The current task of discipleship involves the process of awakening to cultural narratives and anti-gospels presented by modernity, and confronting their impact in our own lives with the true narrative of the Gospel of Christ. It’s an awareness of the history of redemption, of which we stand in the same timeline that Paul stood as he spoke with authority to an unbelieving culture in his day.

To this end, cue the podcast, This Cultural Moment, hosted by Mark Sayers and John Mark Comer.
This is a must listen for what it means to interact with a post-Christian society. These conversations are incredibly helpful. Go ahead, start listening.

§ Routine

Come mid-August, the environments I work with are ramping back up for the school year, and this series will move to being posted at the end of the month. As always, I’d love to hear from you on twitter if you want to interact. Thanks for reading.

Power.

Each of us have it, and handling it well is a daily challenge.

Here’s a few podcasts and a book to help you think through it:

§ Gravity Leadership has been running a series on power that is worth listening to. I’ve taken in two episodes: Chuck DeGroat on Why We Love Narcissistic Leaders, and another with Rich Villodas on Cruciform Power and the Contemplative Life.

Chuck has a work coming out in the next year entitled When Narcissism comes to Church. I’m looking forward to reading it. This episode had me stewing for a few days around the question of why we trust the uber-confident, and how my stability and security seeking self can at times be tempted to look for earthly confidence to trust in before I settle my anxious thoughts and look for the stability of Christ.

Rich Villodas was a great listen, and he described an exercise over a period of a few weeks where when he noticed himself having a reaction to something, he took the time to identify the story he was telling himself, why he was upset, and then think through the true story the Gospel tells him in response to the situation. Rich said after a few weeks he began to notice patterns and see a decrease in the negative power of his reactions. This was a good listen.

§ Pete Scazzero is expounding upon his book, The Emotionally Healthy Leader, via podcast. Recently he covered Dual Relationships and Power. This podcast hit home, as in the last decade I’ve had to navigate lots of crossover in relationships. The combined roles of friend, coworker, manager, and pastor can bring complications into relationships if you are not aware of them and willing to address it. Scazzero’s point is that we all have power to steward, and you need to do an inventory of it to know what you could potentially be wielding when you’re not meaning to – or when you are tempted to use it for ill. Kind of wish I had heard this podcast five years ago.

§ One of the most impactful books on the concept of power that I’ve read is The Way of the Dragon or The Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that has Abandoned It, by Kyle Strobel and Jamin Goggin. I think I highlighted, bracketed or underlined at least half of this book. There are interviews dripping with wisdom and cultural insight toward evangelicalism. Here’s a brief list of 20 truths from the book. Get the book, read the interviews. Notice the age, disciplines, and demeanor of the people they’re talking to. Look at the type of power that we need and juxtapose that with the type of power we want when our longing to be part of something special lands in having a uniquely gifted pastor, rather than living into the cruciform way of weakness.

Newsletters. They’re Back.

Newsletters went away, and now they’re back. You could say this series is my attempt at a newsletter, but without the inbox. I subscribe to a few, and have come to really enjoy their appearance in my inbox.

Here are four I look forward to:

§ John Starke (Lead Pastor, Apostles NYC). John has a thoughtful offering that has recently been engaging how to think about secular culture. It’s fun, varied, and helpful. He’s on issue #6, so you can still jump in and say you got in on the ground floor.

§ Thomas S. Kidd (Baylor Distinguished Professor of History). Kidd writes about habits, his new works, alongside professional and family life hacks. He’s a great writer, and these are fairly to the point. I’ve been subscribing for a while. He writes at TGC, and has numerous biographical works to consider. I have really enjoyed his written works.

§ Alan Jacobs (Baylor Distinguished Professor of Humanities).  This is an eclectic and fun newsletter that can cover what Jacobs had for dinner, to his latest book, and then an obscure work of art that suddenly you realize you needed in your life. I read his work, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, and have been following along ever since. There is something refreshing about his approach, and I kinda like that he has an open letter to his students about how to attend and conduct oneself during his lectures.

§ David Murray and The Christian Man Academy. David has put together something pretty special. This newsletter is a weekly call toward Christian maturity, resourced with diverse readings and media. Each week there is a “required reading” section full of links, and there are themed discussions and videos that David produces. I’ve been thankful for this new endeavor of his, and hope to see it flourish.

Books I’m Into / Need to Finish / In the Queue

More reading would have happened, but Stranger Things happened.

The Fabric of Theology -Richard Lints
Hearers and Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples through Scripture and Doctrine – Kevin Vanhoozer
The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart – Harold L. Senkbeil
Plugged In: Connecting your faith with what you watch, read, and play (Live Different)- Daniel Strange