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Whistle Stopper - Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope
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List Price: $21.99
Our Price: $9.50
Your Save: $ 12.49 ( 57% )
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Manufacturer: Thomas Nelson
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 261
EAN: 9780849901836
ISBN: 0849901839
Label: Thomas Nelson
Manufacturer: Thomas Nelson
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2007-10-02
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Studio: Thomas Nelson
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope
Comment: Excellent Book. I would highly recommend it to anybody who wants to look honestly at what is happening in our churches, our country, and the world.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Everything Must Change is Lethal Toxin
Comment: McLaren can be considered the chief spokesman of the emerging church movement.
He has outlined emerging church theology and how he sees his theology helping the world.
McLaren proposes and propagates a social gospel with an emphasis on solving the world's social problems such as hunger, disease, poverty, education etc. and ultimately creating a utopian kingdom here on Earth now. He believes God needs man's help to accomplish this. Though hunger, disease, poverty, and education are noble endeavors, he supersedes the primary objective of Christianity and the Church, which is the spreading of the Good News of eternal salvation through Christ's death, burial and resurrection.
In order to convince his audience that the kingdom is on Earth now, we just have to fix things, he seeks to further negate the literal interpretation of biblical prophecy through a very provocative statement "This is why I believe that many of our current eschatologies, intoxicated by dubious interpretations of John's Apocalypse are not only ignorant and wrong, but dangerous and immoral"
The current eschatology that he refers to is the literal interpretation of the Bible, which has Jesus Christ returning to establish His "true Kingdom" at a time when the world is in utter chaos - a complete contradiction of what McLaren puts forward. Even worse McLaren bluntly states that this interpretation is not only ignorant and wrong but also immoral and dangerous.
This kind of theology also has long range repercussions for Jews. It significantly endangers Israel with its replacement theology emphasis. God clearly states he has a prophetic plan for Israel - if this plan/obligation cannot be met how can Christians trust that our plan for salvation will be met?
Sadly McLaren is spreading his theology through some very influencial groups and corrupting many - he would do well to heed the following verses:
Revelation 22:7 (KJV)
7 Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
Revelation 22:18-19 (KJV)
18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WONDERFUL!
Comment:
I have read at least three other of Brian's books, and I believe he is one the greatest forces of good both in and outside Chistendom.
In the book before this one, The Secret Message of Jesus, Brian discloses the essence of Jesus' communication to us.
In this book -- he tackles the answers to two primary questions:
---What are the biggest problems in the world?
--- What do the life and teachings of Jesus have to say about the most critical global problems in our world today?
I expected Brian to have something significant to say about the answer to the second question.
However, I had already lowered my expectations for the significance of his description and analysis of the first question's answers.
What a surprise! He does a marvelous job of answering the first question. As good or better than those experts in more "relevant" disciplines whose books contain many more pages than McLaren's. And, McLaren is a tremendously engaging writer -- one who keeps you turning pages.
He sees our world as a machine -- The Societal Machine --- which in truth is a
"Suicide Machine".
There are three components of this machine: Prosperity System, Security System and Equity System. The black cog in the middle, Brian calls -- The Framing Story.
McLaren spends ample time discussing the problems and then makes a convincing presentation of how Jesus' message and life could be the antidote for the poisonous predicament prevailing today.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A book to buy, not to check out.
Comment: I have to confess that I'm not done reading it yet. I checked it out from the local library, and realized after 5 chapters that I had to own it, so as to pass it on to other people, as opposed to just giving it a quick read.
The ironic part is that I was writing a sermon, where I was saying a lot of the same things, when I started reading the book. While I tend to feel odd in those moments when I realize someone else has "said it first," it showed me that McLaren is onto something that is becoming increasingly obvious to the rest of us and needs to be increasingly voiced before it is too late. My faith has already been picked apart by politicians, pie in the sky evangelists, a self-induced complacency, an unjustified sense of superiority, and money-grubbing thieves. It's high time more of us got together to reclaim faith and make it relevant again.
I tend to struggle with Brian's books, but I read them in order to be able to share with my students and stay a part of the emergent conversation. So far as I can tell, this is easily his best work since Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel and it has me looking forward to hearing more from him.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My Kingdom is Not of This World
Comment: To be honest, the book was an easy read and well-constructed.
What I got out of reading it was how disappointing it was to find the writer's focus so earth-bound and missing Jesus' whole message. After all, the Lord Jesus declared, "I Am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." Without repentance of sin and faith submission to King Jesus, there is zero access to the Father's Kingdom of Heaven, to escape the eternal punitive judgment of God on the ungodly. "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him."
Jesus Himself said, "My Kingdom is not of this world. If it were, My servants would fight for Me. But now My Kingdom is from elsewhere." (John 18:36)
Since people have such differing opinions about the writer's truth quotient (for real or pseudo-preacher), check out how Jesus' disciples and apostles carried out the Mission of their Master.
If you can find any correlation between what Peter & John, Stephen, Philip, Barnabas, Paul, Lydia, Luke, Apollos said/did in Book of Acts to bring in global revolution, and what this writer claims is Jesus' secret kingdom manifesto to engage global crises, I couldn't find it.
The Biblical Key to confirm whether this social justice prophet's agenda is a subchristian plot would be Acts of the Apostles, authored by the Holy Spirit's eyewitness agent, Dr. Luke.
Faith Undone: The emerging church - a new reformation or an end-time deception.
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Editorial Reviews:
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What do the life and teaching of Jesus have to say about the most critical global problems in our world today? Acclaimed author and Emergent church leader Brian McLaren states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction." McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?" What he sets forth in this provocative, unsettling work is a "form of Christian faith that is holistic, integral, balanced, that offers good news for both the living and the dying, that speaks of God's grace at work both in this life and the life to come, both to individuals and to societies and the planet as a whole."
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