My last post listed a series of “good reads” that have enriched my life in recent weeks and months.  Shortly after I published that blog I had an email exchange with a friend and mentor who strongly recommended that I read Saving Jesus from the Church by Robin R. Meyers.  When I replied that it was indeed among the best that I had been privileged to read, my friend quickly responded that I really needed to read his newer book.

I am now about half way through my first reading of The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus.  My advice to you is this – if you have not yet read Saving Jesus from the Church you should order it AND The Underground Church, read them (not to worry you won’t be able to put them down), and prepare yourself for an intense season of spiritual growth.

The posts that will be written during the coming days and weeks are from my current writing as I strive to put together my thoughts on the current upheavel that sadly characterizes life as a member of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

A number of things have significantly influenced my recent thinking and prayers – responses of fear from friends who wonder where all of this might lead – yet another meeting of presbytery which was dominated – at least for me – by animated and extended discussion that made me wonder what we really mean when we speak of “gracious dismissal,” and the opportunity to begin to read Robin’s new book.

So I close this post with with an Albert Schweitzer quote that Meyers offers to his readers just prior to his dedication of the book to his father, Robert Rex Meyers, a genuine scholar saint who taught me much about theology – and – much more about English than he could ever imagine possible during the first semester of my undergraduate experience when I truly believed that I knew most of what I needed to know.  Now, with deep deep gratitude, I know better!

“This is how the conservative and liberal forms of religion will meet, when desire and hope for the kingdom of God and fellowship with the spirit of Jesus again govern them as an elementary and mighty force, and bring their world-views and their religion so close that the difference in fundamental presuppositions, though still existing, sink, just as boulders of the river bed are covered by the rising flood and at last are barely visible, gleaming through the depths of water.” — Albert Schweitzer