You do something very important during your late teens and early twenties: you reconsider just about everything you think you know and what you hold dear. Some of us can hardly wait to leave home in order to become our “own” person though, whether we recognize it or not, we are always influenced by someone or the media or by a community. This is definitely true for the churched person.
Growing up in church may have given you the idea that being a Christian is about being nice and not doing “bad” things. You may have been taught not to ask certain questions lest you be thought a “heretic” (whatever that might mean for your given church culture). In his book Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus, Hugh Halter encourages you to ask questions about what it means to be a follower of the One who came to blow the doors off the religious establishment and reveal the heart of God for the lost, the sinner, the poor and the oppressed.
I challenge you to rethink what it means to be a disciple of Jesus by reading this book. If you take up the challenge, you’ll find in Halter a mentor for living out a life shaped by apprenticeship to Jesus.
If you have written off the church but still think highly of Jesus, you will find a lot of encouragement and challenge from this book also. Halter is straightforward and doesn’t pull punches and that is the sort of prophetic word we all need to hear. He suggests that Jesus doesn’t want any more followers who look like each other. Instead Jesus called people to follow HIM. But sadly the church scene is one where, “followership, instead of true discipleship, has been the norm, and thus we Christians have produced a lot more people who are like us than people who are like Jesus.”
You can check out
Sacrilege and customer reviews of it by clicking
here. Get it. Read it. Then take up the challenge of living out the life to which Jesus calls you.
