Friday, 21 July 2017

So for the sake of completion

regarding the Caesar Kalinowski Gospel Primer review below, I managed to read the first 3 weeks (out of 7 or 8) before it had to go back.

The good:
A stated aim is to get people talking about Jesus and the gospel to each other in normal conversation. This is admirable, though I don't know how effectively the artificial situations of being made to 'talk gospel' would transfer into daily practice. Experience suggests with this kind of thing that it persists about a week after the end of the course, when everyone breathes a sigh of relief and reverts, but who knows.

There is also an encouragement to develop a personal salvation story that puts God at the centre, and again this is very admirable. Tools are provided and help given to do this, albeit in a CK kind of way, and it also made me remember how things were when I first became a Christian, which was useful.

The less good:
The book sets out to belittle the reader's own faith and church, tells them that they are doing it wrong and assumes that they haven't really experienced salvation yet. I found the sets of questions, especially in the first 2 chapters, to be bullying and deliberately dodging the real answers one might give in order to force the user into a weak position. Both Chris and I independantly came to the conclusion when offered a series of options, "none of these" was the only answer for us.

While there is good material in there, this is not a book I could recommend anyone read unless they were strong enough to extract the good stuff without being harmed by the bad.

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