I found “An Untidy Faith” to be both inspiring and practical. The book encourages you to wrestle with the questions and embrace the process of our faith and how we practice it, helping reveal the good narratives of God versus what has often been taught. One quote that stood out to me from the beginning as so true in my own experience was:

“Looking back, I think you’ll see God was with you in every doubt, question, and decision—using it to shape you into who you’ve become.”

This book invites the reader to look beyond our own experience of Christianity and into those beyond our locality and age and into both the history of the Church and the experience of other Christians throughout the world. Then, later in the book, the author expounds on how we can know the faith Jesus calls us to practice alongside community and in joy.

I would’ve loved even more of the real life experiences the author shared, and the chapter on worship was my favorite.

I particularly loved the story shared about the missionary who needed to translate that Jesus is the bread of life in a different way because the people group she was sharing with did not have such a thing as bread. This makes a good point for not having to try to force someone to understand something with our own term for it when they have no grid for it, and instead communicating that biblical truth and its intent in a way they will actually understand. The author writes,

“If the story of Scripture is true—and I believe it is—then there must be sets of tools to translate its meaning for everyone on planet Earth, across time and space. . . We need to be able to put the Bible into conversation with its various contexts so we can interpret well and apply what we see in Scripture to our lives in a way that transforms us and the world around us.”

I felt that a good summary of the aim of the book is when the author writes the following:

“…my desire is that this journey shows you one way to go about this . . . that it continuously calls you back to the Jesus of the Bible and the legacy of the historical and global church. I think you’ll find there is still hope to be found within Christianity, and that we can begin to be the bridge of that hope among our own churches and circles of influence.”

I received a review copy of this book for free from Netgalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. All opinions are my own. ( )