Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman. 2021. Crossway. 144 pages. [Source: Review copy]
First sentence: You may have many reasons not to go to church.
The purpose of Rediscover Church is to encourage those who have stopped attending church to start attending again. For those that have never attended church, the message again is simple: start going to church. This short little book has two authors--Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman. The two alternate writing chapters. Each chapter is on a different topic--all topics, of course, falling under the big picture goal of getting you, the reader, back to church.
The chapter titles are, "What is Church?," "Who Can Belong to A Church?," "Do We Really Need to Gather?," "Why are Preaching and Teaching Central?," "Is Joining Actually Necessary?," Is Church Discipline Really Loving?," "How Do I Love Members Who Are Different?," "How Do We Love Outsiders?," "Who Leads?".
The book's biggest strength is its ongoing effort to give a thorough, thoughtful definition of church. Church is a word so simple that you think it couldn't possibly *need* an actual definition. After all, doesn't everybody know what a church is??? Yet, once the authors started crafting and refining a definition, I was like YES, this is necessary.
The book does address COVID and political/race tensions--the very DIVIDED tense and intense state of our union. I haven't decided if that's a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, many points of this one are timeless and universal. One wouldn't need to root this book specifically in THIS time--the COVID pandemic. The role of the Word of God, the role of the pastors, the need for discipleship, the importance of church discipline--all timeless and unchanging. To tie many chapters into the pandemic is almost unnecessary. That being said, truth is truth is truth.
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