Books

No holiday is quite complete without a few books to read beside the pool, on the beach or on the bog so here's what I read last week.

Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church by Mark Driscoll
This was perhaps my favourite read on holiday, I found myself being encouraged, rebuked, challenged and brought to tears with Driscolls hillarious way of putting things across.
Here's a quote to wet your appetite;

The comfort zone is the place a church commonly falls into once they have learned how to survive. This is the state of most American churches...
...In the comfort Zone, often there is no longer a visible immediate crisis since the bills are paid, most of the big jobs are being done by someone, leaders are officially in place, a permanent facility has been secured, and the people of the church have generally grown to know and love one another. At this stage, the propensity is for the church to settle in, accept its size, and slip into the mode of maintenance. At some point, people will move away or die, others will get bored, and slowly the church will begin a cycle of decline unless it intentionally reinvents itself missionally to continue to grow by taking risks in an effort to reach lost people for Jesus.

The second book I read was a fiction novel called Wolf of the plains by Conn Iggulden that someone had kindly left on the shelf at the villa we were at.
Here's Amazon's Synopsis

This is the brand new novel from the No.1 best-selling author of "Emperor", his series on Julius Caesar. His new novel, "Wolf of the Plains", is the much anticipated beginning of the "Conqueror" series on Genghis Khan and his descendants. It is a wonderful, epic story which Conn Iggulden brings brilliantly to life. "I am the land and the bones of the hills. I am the winter." Temujin, the second son of the khan of the Wolves tribe, was only eleven when his father died in an ambush. His family were thrown out of the tribe and he was left alone, without food or shelter, to starve to death on the harsh Mongolian plains. It was a rough introduction to his life, to a sudden adult world, but Temujin survived, learning to combat natural and human threats. A man, a small family, without a tribe was always at risk but he gathered other outsiders to him, creating a new tribal identity. It was during some of his worst times that the image of uniting the warring tribes and bringing the silver people together came to him. He will become the khan of the sea of grass, Genghis.

And the third book was The heart of the Bible by John MacArthur.
Basically MacArthur takes us through 52 of the key passages of the Bible and in his usual (or unusual in our day) method he digs deep into these passages, their backgrounds and why they are important to Christians.