Modern Christian Lit.

The Prayer of Jabez is a worthy book, so worthy it deserves all the leather bounding, gold trimming, thin paging it has received. It sits along side with other most important books for your survival as a Christian such as The Purpose Driven Life, Wild At Heart and a million other books just like them. That’s right Christian, you NEED to have this book or you won’t be as spiritual as all the other Christians out there. It will walk you through Bruce Wilkinson’s proven prayer that will bless you over and over again.
 
I’m shocked you haven’t been reading it all day long, and haven’t spent every waking moment you have learning from modern Christian books. Where would we be without Family Christian bookstore and Christianbook.com helping us find our way back to more modern pop-culture Christian literature? What would we do if someone didn’t tell us we would be much happier if we did exactly what they say? They have found a magic formula for living and you can have it! All you need to do is buy their book, their workbook that goes with it. Of course you can offset your spirituality from others around you who are doing the same thing by buying the coin, prayer shawl, floor mat, and the follow-up book. Although I haven’t actually seen these items for other books like the POJ has, most books are similar.
 
I can’t even stand to read more than a few pages in a book I was given by one of my pastors. He has given me three books and each of the three was well-written but suffered from the same problem. Every book seems to swear up and down that it isn’t about formulas and then proceeds to give some kind of formula. Granted, there are steps we take in our walk. Yet, somehow it seems like we’ve become too scientific in our thinking. Maybe it is what everyone wants, but not what we need. If all we hear on Sunday mornings is a sermon that reeks of “Self-Help” or “10 Steps To A Better Life” then we are missing the mark. 
 
Instead I find myself forced to read books by authors of old. Authors who didn’t focus on “steps”, people who didn’t know the first thing about modern psychology. These books help you meditate on God, to sit back and marvel at how good He is to us. To look at the depth of his love, of his power, of his sovereignty, these are the author’s intent. They don’t focus on men or how to fix ourselves, they focus on God. In modern literature there are some books that do this outside of the Bible, but they are infrequent not the normative. Like a machine, new formula-based, self-help and 10-steps books come out all the time. I can’t enjoy these books, something is wrong…
 
It reminds me of the wave of Christian artists coming out of Nashville, TN. It’s like they are robots built by some mad scientist. Every one of them sound somehow… fake. From Toby Mac to Avalon it all makes me sick. I am ever so thankful for the other wave of artists who are Christians like Blindside, POD, Switchfoot and others coming out of San Diego. They don’t sound like the rest of the Nashville bunch, praise God.
 
I draw this connection because I can’t help but wonder if much like there is a Christian machine in Nashville conforming its artists to some mold, the world of Christian books is being ruled by some high ranking executives who find the need to push out the same format in books year after year. It may well be that Christians are so caught up in the American advertising that we’ve become subject to its brainwashing. I think in part we naturally think that somehow the books we read can take the place God is to fill in our lives; in pop-culture it seems things that take many years aren’t worth doing… What if quite the opposite is true.