We’re beginning our new discussion of Rob Bell & Don Golden’s new book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians. For more information about the book, read our blog entry or check it out on Amazon. There’s also an audio download if you’re into that kind of thing!

Order your book by Friday, November 7, at 12:00 pm (that’s noon, people), and we’ll do our best to have a copy waiting for you at the next P:F meeting on Thursday, November 13, at 7:30 pm.

Feel free to pick up your own copy, but if we all order together from Amazon, we can avoid shipping charges. We won’t be reading the chapters aloud anymore, so you’ll want to buy the book this time.

Order your copy now »

The next book we’re going to tackle at Project:Fracture is the new book by Rob Bell and Don Golden, Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.

Yes, it’s quite a mouthful.

It sounds a little scary.

So, what is it about?

“There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building.

Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.

This is a book about those two numbers.

It’s a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity.

It’s about empty empires and the truth that everybody’s a priest; it’s about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

It’s about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.” (From Zondervan’s blog)

When do we start?

We’ll start our discussion of the book on Thursday, November 13. I recommend that you read the first chapter before then, but if you don’t have time (or are sadly both illiterate and deaf), I’m sure you’ll catch on to the discussion quickly.

Purchase your copy of the book ($13.49) or audio download ($10.49) now!

Visit the official Jesus Wants to Save Christians website »

Two weeks ago, we began our new book, Deadly Viper Character Assassins, by Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite. Despite the tongue-in-cheek subtitle “a kung fu survival guide for integrity,” this study is anything but shallow.

Each chapter addresses a different integrity issue, what they call a “character assassin.” The first chapter dealt with “character creep,” the sneaky way that seemingly small integrity missteps can grow to become life-shattering, world-altering sins. Using the metaphor of the faulty rivets that broke and caused the sinking of the Titanic, Foster and Wilhite explain that success is often defined by the little things.

Nobody wakes up and decides to tank their lives and careers because of integrity issues. We don’t make an entry in our diary one day: “Dear Diary, today I plan to commit fraud which will eventuall lead to the demis of my career, a nervous breakdown, and ultimately jail.” Character creep happens subtly and slowly. It is a methodical process where small compromises and rationalizations lead to areas we never thought we would go. We drew lines in the sand and then subtly erased them.

Author Mike Foster is one of the co-founders of XXXChurch.com, a Christian website that aims to bring attention to our nation’s pornography problem as well as reach out to people who are struggling with porn addiction and those who call porn a career. If anyone knows what it is to fight for integrity, it is this guy.

Come to Project:Fracture on Thursdays to jump into the discussion.
(No prior reading is required; we read a chapter aloud at the beginning of each meeting.)

After surviving another grueling week of “real life,” we met up again for the second Project:Fracture meeting/gathering/whatever. Fueled once again by the culinary skills of our own Marissa, we discussed our study options for the summer.

Because of our late sign-up date, we just received our Relevant Network kit in the mail today, so we spent some time looking through the books and listening to the CDs that were included this quarter.

Books

• The Vow by Ed Gungor
• The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment by Tim Challies
• Deadly Viper by Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite
• Walking With God by John Edlredge
• The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever

CDs

• Leeland Opposite Way
• The Bridge Band Love
• Jared Anderson Where Faith Comes From
• After Edmund Hello

DVDs

• Everything Is Spiritual (Rob Bell)

After some discussion and a vote, we decided to start with Walking With God by John Edlredge. We’ll create an online form over the weekend so that anyone who wants to order one can do so on Monday. I’ll order the books on Tuesday and try to have them to MCC by Thursday (we’ll see how fast shipping can be!). We don’t have the budget to purchase books for everyone, so if you want a book, we’d appreciate it if you’d chip in $16 to help cover the cost of books + shipping.

ORDER A COPY NOW »

If reading a book seems overwhelming, don’t worry… there’s also an audio book on CD or for download from Amazon. But, you’ll have to pick that up on your own if you want it.

After we picked our study book, we watched the Rob Bell Everything Is Spiritual DVD from his national speaking tour. In the video, Rob discusses creation as described in Genesis 1 and its implications to science, faith, and being a human. If you’ve got an hour or so, it’s definitely worth the time. If you watched it and liked it, check out some of his other work at Nooma or at Mars Hill.

Next meeting: Thursday, June 26 @ 7:30 pm