Product Description

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. . . . I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened." In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #615 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Miller (Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance) is a young writer, speaker and campus ministry leader. An earnest evangelical who nearly lost his faith, he went on a spiritual journey, found some progressive politics and most importantly, discovered Jesus' relevance for everyday life. This book, in its own elliptical way, tells the tale of that journey. But the narrative is episodic rather than linear, Miller's style evocative rather than rational and his analysis personally revealing rather than profoundly insightful. As such, it offers a postmodern riff on the classic evangelical presentation of the Gospel, complete with a concluding call to commitment. Written as a series of short essays on vaguely theological topics (faith, grace, belief, confession, church), and disguised theological topics (magic, romance, shifts, money), it is at times plodding or simplistic (how to go to church and not get angry? "pray... and go to the church God shows you"), and sometimes falls into merely self-indulgent musing. But more often Miller is enjoyably clever, and his story is telling and beautiful, even poignant. (The story of the reverse confession booth is worth the price of the book.) The title is meant to be evocative, and the subtitle-"Non-Religious" thoughts about "Christian Spirituality"-indicates Miller's distrust of the institutional church and his desire to appeal to those experimenting with other flavors of spirituality.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Donald Miller is a writer, campus ministry leader, and speaker. He is the author of Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, a road-trip narrative about a spiritual quest. His writing has appeared in periodicals such as New Man Magazine, Youthwalk, Believe Magazine, and Faith M.D. Miller is active in a small, but resilient and growing campus ministry at Reed College, which has the distinction of being ranked one of the most intellectual colleges and one of the most godless colleges in the country.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter Eleven
Confession
Coming Out of the Closet

When I was in Sunday school as a kid, my teacher put a big poster on the wall that was shaped in a circle like a target. She had us write names of people we knew who weren't Christians on little pieces of paper, and she pinned the names to the outer circle of the target. She said our goal, by the end of the year, was to move those names from the outer ring of the circle, which represented their distance from knowing Jesus, to the inner ring, which represented them having come into a relationship with Jesus. I thought the strategy was beautiful because it gave us a goal, a visual.

I didn't know any people who weren't Christians, but I was a child with a fertile imagination so I made up some names; Thad Thatcher was one and William Wonka was another. My teacher didn't believe me which I took as an insult, but nonetheless, the class was excited the very next week when both Thad and William had become Christians in a dramatic conversion experience that included the dismantling of a large satanic cult and underground drug ring. There was also levitation involved.

Even though they didn't exist, Thad and William were the only people to become Christians all year. Nobody else I knew became a Christian for a very long time, mostly because I didn't tell anybody about Jesus except when I was drunk at a party, and that was only because so many of my reservations were down, and even then nobody understood me because I was either crying or slurring my words.

o o o

When I moved downtown to attend Imago-Dei, the church Rick started, he was pretty serious about loving people regardless of whether they considered Jesus the Son of God or not, and Rick wanted to love them because they were either hungry, thirsty, or lonely. The human struggle bothered Rick, as if something was broken in the world and we were supposed to hold our palms against the wound. He didn't really see evangelism, or whatever you want to call it, as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life. He saw evangelism as reaching a felt need. I thought this was beautiful and frightening. I thought it was beautiful because I had this same need; I mean, I really knew I needed Jesus like I need water or food, and yet it was frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture, and I absolutely hate bothering people about this stuff.

So much of me believes strongly in letting everybody live their own lives, and when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy trying to build my down line.

Some of my friends who aren't Christians think that Christians are insistent and demanding and intruding, but that isn't the case. Those folks are the squeaky wheel. Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension.

In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn't do it, and moreover, that I didn't want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. "Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?" he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won't do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.

o o o

For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained. Christianity, unlike Christian spirituality, was not a term that excited me. And I could not in good conscious tell a friend about a faith that didn't excite me. I couldn't share something I wasn't experiencing. And I wasn't experiencing Christianity. It didn't do anything for me at all. It felt like math, like a system of rights and wrongs and political beliefs, but it wasn't mysterious; it wasn't God reaching out of heaven to do wonderful things in my life. And if I would have shared Christianity with somebody, it would have felt mostly like I was trying to get somebody to agree with me rather than meet God. I could no longer share anything about Christianity, but I loved talking about Jesus and the spirituality that goes along with a relationship with Him.

Tony the Beat Poet says the church is like a wounded animal these days. He says we used to have power and influence, but now we don't, and so many of our leaders are upset about this and acting like spoiled children, mad because they can't have their way.

They disguise their actions to look as though they are standing on principle, but it isn't that, Tony says, it's bitterness. They want to take their ball and go home because they have to sit the bench. Tony and I agreed that what God wants us to do is sit the bench in humility and turn the other cheek like Gandhi, like Jesus. We decided that the correct place to share our faith was from a place of humility and love, not from a desire for power.

o o o

Each year at Reed they have a festival called Ren Fayre. They shut down the campus so students can party. Security keeps the authorities away, and everybody gets pretty drunk and high, and some people get naked. Friday night is mostly about getting drunk, and Saturday night is about getting high. The school brings in White Bird, a medical unit that specializes in treating bad drug trips. The students create special lounges with black lights and television screens to enhance kids' mushroom trips.

Some of the Christian students in our little group decided this was a pretty good place to come out of the closet, letting everybody know there were a few Christians on campus. Tony the Beat Poet and I were sitting around in my room one afternoon talking about what to do, how to explain who we were to a group of students who, in the past, had expressed hostility toward Christians. Like our friends, we felt like Ren Fayre was the time to do this. I said we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said "Confess your sins." I said this because I knew a lot of people would be sinning, and Christian spirituality begins by confessing our sins and repenting. I also said it as a joke. But Tony thought it was brilliant. He sat there on my couch with his mind in the clouds, and he was scaring the crap out of me because, for a second, then for a minute, I actually believed he wanted to do it.

"Tony," I said very gently.

"What?" he said, with a blank stare at the opposite wall.

"We are not going to do this," I told him. He moved his gaze down the wall and directly into my eyes. A smile came across his face.

"Oh, we are, Don. We certainly are. We are going to build a confession booth!"

We met in Commons-Penny, Nadine, Mitch, Iven, Tony, and I. Tony said I had an idea. They looked at me. I told them that Tony was lying and I didn't have an idea at all. They looked at Tony. Tony gave me a dirty look and told me to tell them the idea. I told them I had a stupid idea that we couldn't do without getting attacked. They leaned in. I told them that we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said "Confess your sins." Penny put her hands over her mouth. Nadine smiled. Iven laughed. Mitch started drawing the designs for the booth on a napkin. Tony nodded his head. I wet my pants.

"They may very well burn it down," Nadine said.

"I will build a trapdoor," Mitch said with his finger in the air.

"I like it, Don." Iven patted me on the back.

"I don't want anything to do with it," Penny said.

"Neither do I," I told her.

"Okay, you guys." Tony gathered everybody's attention. "Here's the catch." He leaned in a little and collected his thoughts. "We are not actually going to accept confessions." We all looked at him in confusion. He continued, "We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them."

All of us sat there in silence because it was obvious that something beautiful and true had hit the table with a thud. We all thought it was a great idea, and we could see it in each other's eyes. It would feel so good to apologize, to apologize for the Crusades, for Columbus and the genocide he committed in the Bahamas in the name of God, apologize for the missionaries who landed in Mexico and came up through the West slaughtering Indians in the name of Christ. I wanted so desperately to say that none of this was Jesus, and I wanted so desperately to apologize for the many ways I had misrepresented the Lord. I...

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Customer Reviews

Blue Like Jazz
This is a book well worth reading. It is appropriate for late teens and early twenties since it covers life in a university. It has a great spiritual depth and we have used is as the basis of study in a small group of men. I recommend it highly.

Shallow or Even Faulty Theology, Powerful Analysis on Humanity
When I read Don Miller's thoughts on human personality and relationship, it is not exaggerating to rate them as powerful as those of C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Francis Schaeffer. But to run an apple-to-apple comparison, I would pick Lewis in this case for a comparison study, because Miller is not a minister. While Lewis is excellent in using illustrations and allegories to get his points across which might be ambiguous and challenging to understand, particularly when one is not familiar with the literatures he used as references, Miller, while equally personal, sharp and hilarious, is surprisingly and impressively much more articulate in conveying and in the presentation of his observation and analysis from his own experience and interaction with his acquaintances. He nails it when he speaks about human depravity, loneliness, and money (somewhat naïve, but still worth pondering),

"I remember a particular midnight, three weeks into our stay, walking into a meadow surrounded by thick aspens and above me all that glorious heaven glowing, and I felt like I was part of it, what with the trees clapping hands and me feeling like I was floating there beneath the endlessness, I looked up so long I felt like I was in space. Light. No money and no anxiety" (p.199).

"When I was in love, I hardly thought of myself. When I was in love, there was somebody in the world who was more important than me. I think being in love is an opposite of loneliness, but not the opposite. There are other things I now crave when I am lonely, like community, like friendship, like family. [The words alone, lonely and loneliness] say that we are human; they are like the words `hunger' and `thirst.' But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface...the soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.

And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions (I might add Internet, blogs, computers, and video games), not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all" (p.151-152, 154, 172).

With this said, however, Miller's theology, which I consider as a close representation of the theology of the emergent church, is shallow, if not faulty. It is a humanistic, anthropocentric theology, where the gospel has been turned into a social gospel, and Christianity as a means to turn the world into an utopia at the expense of neglecting the fundamental issues of sin, the attributes of God; particularly the justice and holiness and glory of God, the authority of Scriptures and the cross of Jesus Christ, the latter being the linchpin of the gospel. He did so by eliminating these and substituting them with a false notion of the love of God, which is common in the emergent camp (the name Brian McLaren usually pops up when the word "emergent" is mentioned).

One might challenge my statement about Miller's theology and accuse it as if I were beating a dead horse considering the sub-title of the book is "Non-religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality." However, this sub-title both sounds like an oxymoron and is inconsistent with what Miller actually does. How can one write about Christian Spirituality without being religious? These two are inseparable. Moreover, despite "non-religious" claim, he does talk about the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, prayer and love. How can one write about these altogether and not be religious? Impossible. Perhaps Miller is trying not to scare anyone away by not giving a religious impression on his book, but it doesn't work. If it is Christian, then it must be religious. He tries not to sound religious but he can't help sounding religious as he discusses Christianity, yet ironically, by violating this non-religious claim by writing religiously anyway about Christianity, he doesn't present Christianity rightly as the Bible teaches, but a heavily diluted version of it, so thoroughly diluted that it barely resembles orthodox Christianity that the Bible teaches. From this perspective, this book is a mess. Though Miller does an excellent job in describing the problems with humanity as well as with the so-called fundamentalist Christianity, but sadly he does not go to the bottom of them, that the true gospel points out and the remedy thereof. Consider for examples,

"Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the Fall. If loving other people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in which state we would like to live.

... I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families,... and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among one another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus... you are human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy" (p. 173).

Just like Lewis, Miller is a great writer-psychiatrist-philosopher, but a horrible theologian. My suggestion is to read Miller with caution, disregard his views on theology, learn from his analysis on humanity and combine it with John Piper's Desiring God.

Great Book
This is one of the most profound books on spirituality I have ever come across. For those who are questioning your faith and feel there is nothing in Christiandom that can help you find the answers to why you feel so miserable, why things don't seem to be going your way, this is the book for you. It has no answers, per say, but it does tell of one man's quest to find the living God and some of the revelations he came to while on that quest. A must have for any Christian library.