Book Review: So Beautiful by Leonard Sweet
Divine Design for Life and the Church
As a viral blogger with TheOOZE they send me books and I read them. Nice setup if you can get it. This edition I am happy to read through 'So Beautiful' by Leonard Sweet. (As an aside i think it's pretty funny that a missional guy like Sweet is published by the David C. Cook who also put out books by Tim LaHaye.... :rollseyes:)
Check out this quick youtube preview:
Leonard Sweet, author of Quantum Spirituality, SoulTsunami and AquaChurch; A Is For Abductive with Brian McLaren, and finally Out of the Question…and Into The Mystery. Quite a few books spanning topics on post-modernity, emergent church, and now, his latest installment, chiming in on the issue of ecclesiology.
So Beautiful is another missional church book taking a simple approach (in just five parts) to define the 'new DNA' of church in North America. Mostly going against the attractional church that's more concerned about numbers and money rather than relationships and incarnation, I felt Sweet wrote a book more accessible to the 'laity'. (Although he does include an Epilogue with a 'system' to check the temperature of your church....)
Now I hate to enter into the 'three-pronged' distinctions we have in church (clergy-laity-missionary), but I don't have a better way to describe it. So Beautiful is not geared towards leaders (clergy), as Alan Hirsch, David Fitch, and Darrel Guder write for leaders and theologians, but in my opinion to regular folks.
There are three main components built off the DNA concept, only in this case the components are three-fold: M-R-I. That is, missional, relational and incarnational.
In true Sweet fashion each section comes complete with ample examples and explanations (tell them what you're going to say, tell them, tell them again, tell them what you just said). He of course includes his many quotes, but has a number of his own as well such as this brief collection that caught my attention:
pg.83.... Charles de Gaulle once observed that "church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back"
pg.89.... When the church is not on a journey, the church becomes a relic."
I echo his sentiments that we need a better theology of journey or pilgrimage in our church today.
pg.111.... the church spends more time trying to get people to follow Christianity than follow and fall in love with Christ.....later.... we are not put here to "keep commandments" but to conceive beauty, truth, and goodness.
pg.165.... Not only did God become incarnate at one time and in one place, thus becoming visible to the earth, but the gospel gets incarnated in every culture by design.
I could go on but I'll stop there. The MRI is obviously set against attractional church (how 95% of church operates in North America) but we don't necessarily see that polemic clearly in the text. THat's a good thing since we don't want to create an 'us against them' scenario when we talk about our brothers and sisters in Christ.
What we do find is a coherent and accessible book on what defines a missional identity.
Personally, on a final note, one thing I took out of the book was the use of paradox. Sweet explicitly mentions paradox and the relation to the Trinity, to relationships, and a number of other times in the book. I have never connected or noticed the number of paradoxes we face on a daily basis, seeing these aspects in life goes a long way to connect certain messages in a language people can understand.
I also found his push to get away from individual piety and propositions, to stop trying to be like Jesus but rather to be more human incarnating the gospel message like Jesus did, (I hope I reflected his idea correctly), refreshing.
If I get a chance to nail Leonard Sweet down for a podcast I'll have to ask him to expand on the idea.
Other than that, if you want an interesting missional church primer then this is the book to pick up. I'll leave with this basic concept I took from the book: choose relationships over process or individual piety. Pretty simple but exceptionally exhausting, although eternally rewarding.
[tags]sweet, leonard sweet, so beautiful, mri[/tags]
