High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
What people are saying about …
Leonard sweet
Praise for
11
“Leonard Sweet combines theory and practice in lie-changing ways. He notonly makes me think, he spurs me to live. Tis book will not only help youcross the nish line strong, it will also help you bring others with you.”
Mark Batterson,
lead pastor at National Community Churchand author o
In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day
“In this book, Len Sweet has combined his distinctive orm o theologizing with really wise, practical insight to concoct a unique typology o sanctiyingrelationships. Here is a book that will help us move toward a genuinely biblical orm o holiness in a relationally unholy culture. One o a kind!”
Alan Hirsch,
author o
Te Forgotten Ways
andcoauthor o
Te Shaping o Tings to Come
Praise for The Gospel According to Starbucks
“Cultural barista Leonard Sweet serves up a triple venti cup o relevantinsights to wake up decaeinated Christians.”
Ben Young,
pastor and author o
Why Mike’s Not a Christian
“Reading this book is a caeine jolt. Get ready to be accelerated into theuture, with Jesus a central part o the experience.”
Dan Kimball,
pastor and author o
Te Emerging Church
and
Tey Like Jesus but Not the Church
“I have a massive passion or passion. It’s my avorite spiritual topic. And I have a nominal coee obsession, Starbucks being my ritual moreoten than not. So what a treat to read Leonard Sweet’s extra-hot weavingtogether o the two—all in the hope that each o us will drink in themeaningul and passion-lled lie we were designed or.”
Mark Oestreicher,
president o Youth Specialties“Sweet’s bottom line? Christianity must move beyond rational, logicalapologetics, and instead nd ways o showing people that it can oer‘symbols and meaningul engagement.’ Tis whimsical and insightulbook oers a resh approach to a topic o perennial interest.”
Publishers Weekly
Praise for The Three Hardest Words in the World toGet Right
“Leonard Sweet gets us to examine what it takes to live out love in this world, and he does it beautiully.”
Tony Campolo,
coauthor o
Adventures in Missing the Point
and proessor o sociology at Eastern University “Len Sweet has, in his inimitable style, tackled the three easiest-hardest words in the English language, wrestled them to the ground, hugged them,and then let them y again. His imagination takes us on a journey, his mindis an encyclopedia o wonderul reerences, and his language is captivating.”
Tony Jones,
national coordinator o Emergent-US and author o
Te Sacred Way
So Beautiful, by Leonard Sweet
Info and Rating
Sections
« prev | next »- book ofers a fresh approach to a topic of perennial interest.”
- Center and author of Sacred Rhythms
- Jill Heatherly for Amazon.com
- Facebook page (search for “So Beautiful” with quotation
- François Aussermain:
- But without her I would not have been able to open some old springs that
- My partner Karen Elizabeth Rennie helped me see what were the “too”
- Novelist/physician Michael Crichton proposed a boat-building metaphor
- My characters all sound the same because I never listen.”2
- But Alan isn’t just good at listening to other people. His listening skills are
- I dedicate this book to Alan Hirsch. What follows could never have been
- Here’s an “APC” pill
- Ask anyone who ever served in World War II: “Do you remember
- APC?”
- Te acronym APC was widely used in the middle of the twentieth century
- Tere was only one problem: Long-term ingesting of APC tablets could kill
- Perhaps we need a similar lyric to help churches stop practicing APC
- Christianity and become what I’m calling a So Beautiful or MRI church where
- Economy. But one of the most unique is Kevin Roberts’ elaboration of the
- Attraction Economy and the implications of what he sees as the shift from
- Christ. Come is a good word. Evangelism is come to Christ and come to
- Dominican Gerard Hughes ofers a useful rule
- Te church that is relational can’t escape the fact that to say “Jesus is the
- Christian is a colonizer: We are colonizing earth with heaven. We are creating
- Christ to the world. APC Christianity falsifes both Christ and the church to
- Notice how “churched” the frst column looks? Ouch!
- APC Christianity is the wrong default for the following reasons
- Christian story will be completely unknown. Tis requires not only a new
- It is time to push the reset button on Christianity—the original operating
- What made it possible for my mother to know when I or we were “up to
- It had to do with knowing
- God is “up to something.” Do we know God well enough to know what God
- Something is “up.” I am part of it. You are part of it. We can no longer go
- Would you like to hear some “good news”?
- Alan Hirsch mantras this formula: “Christianity minus Christ equals
- Te whole religious system is undone by Jesus’
- God is now baring the Jesus Dream with means only at the divine disposal
- Jesus also came to show us how to join God’s mission in the world. In his
- When Saint Augustine gave Communion in North Africa in the ffth
- Te discovery of the “secret of life” is birthing forth in every arena of
- But the battle is now to the positive. It is time for the church as Salvation
- Navy to build ships and bridges rather than break them. Now is the time for
- You will not fnd references in this book to “the spiritual life.” Te
- But life doesn’t have just one big secret. It has three
- I personally picked up the “these three” habit from three sources. First was
- And the whole Bible resonates with the rhythm of threesomes (whether it’s
- Tird was my graduate-school discovery of Charles Sanders Peirce
- And some come to proft from buying and selling to those seeking insight or
- Tis essentially accounts for the sum total of what humans can do. Even
- Firstness is God the Father
- Secondness is God the Son
- Tirdness is God the Holy Spirit
- Te second most important “threeness” is this keystone species of words
- Te First Secret of Life is … Missional
- Te Second Secret of Life is … Relational
- Te Tird Secret of Life is … Incarnational
- Te part of the Pacifc Northwest where I live has been known since
- Pacifc Ocean comes to rest by a diferent name: the Salish Sea. In the Salish
- You can’t program MRI into the church any more than you can program
- MRI is how it was “in the beginning.”
- Missional is the mind of God. Mission is where God’s head’s at
- Relational is the heart of God. Relationship is where God’s heart is
- Incarnational is the hands of God. Incarnation is what God’s hands are
- I have gotten very wrinkly worrying and wondering over the MRI-shaped
- 1. A reading of a book titled Relational Holiness by two Nazarene
- Teir argument is that holiness is a relational word and that
- 2. A liturgical reading of the Nicene Creed at Redeemer
- Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. As Tim Keller was
- Apostolic is the missional word: We are “sent out” on missions of love
- An apostle is one who is “sent out.” Te Latin word for
- Holy is the relational word: We are “called” to ministries of love. Te call
- Catholic is the incarnational word: We are “called out.” Te essential
- Te “Up To” God-Turn of the Gutenberg world was this: Everyone is
- Te “Up To” God-Turn of the Google world is this: Everyone is dispatched
- I then realized that it appears in biblical form in Jesus’ understanding of
- But you don’t live these serially. You live the Way-Truth-Life
- Tere are many diferent ways of talking about this divine design for life. Here
- Former Dean of Westminster Michael Mayne (1929–2006) had rescued
- A “user interface” does important cultural work. Good interface design
- New Orleans issued this invitation: “Come and be swept away.” Imagine a
- Tere is a new mission frontier for Christianity. We need to reconfgure
- But EPIC is not what God’s up to. EPIC is nothing more than an interface
- Te important question is not what’s the interface but what’s the
- Genesis. Christianity began with an operating system laid out in the New
- OS. Its churches are inward focused; its primary community expression is
- Methodists; Baptists by Baptists; and Catholics by Catholics
- What happens when the operating system goes bad?
- When we attempt to lay a new template (MRI) on top of an existing
- You might even call the defragging and devirusing penance rituals
- Life is a complex system. Te family is a complex system. Te church is a
- Bufett have contributed over a million dollars to introduce bridge to our
- I love the simple
- But the “simple church” or the “simple way” is simply not true without the
- Tere is even a new name for this network of interactions: “interactome.”
- I frst learned the meaning of a “complex system” after my father had a
- Antichrist has been unleashed on the world … subjects that he never talked
- I refused to let up: “Can you tell me how many diferent medicines he
- Te physician was frm: “None of these pills would cause your father’s
- MRI is an embrace of complexity theory. Your life and your community
- You can’t “committee” or “program” into existence organic systems. No
- Te “we” referenced included Crick and his twenty-four-year-old
- BBC in a fftieth-anniversary interview. “Could it really be this pretty? When
- Beautiful can be something you do: “Tat was really a beautiful thing you
- Beautiful can be something you take in with your senses: “What a beautiful
- MRI living. Sometimes the MRI life is like a rose garden: Its beauty leaps out
- We see the unseen
- We subdue by submitting
- We win by losing
- We are made grand by making ourselves little
- We come in frst by becoming last
- We are honored by being humble
- We fll up with God by emptying out ourselves
- We become wise by being fools
- We possess all things by having nothing
- We wax strong by being weak
- We fnd life by losing ourselves in others
- We live by dying
- Te double helix as the “secret of life” applies as much to our spirits as
- Before Lent … Carnival
- Before Ash Wednesday … Shrove Tuesday
- Before Easter Sunday … Holy Saturday
- Or call it the “Age of Turbulence” as Alan Greenspan has
- Tat’s why Christians have such sharp noses for incongruities and ironies. For
- Here is the threefold nature of the divine disclosure:
- Te Movement of God the Creator: A Missional God
- Te Relationship of God the Redeemer: A Relational Son
- Te Participation in Movement and Relationship of God the Holy
- Te missional is God’s “Go.”
- Te primary tense of the Christian is the future. God’s “GO-ing” presence
- Te relational is God’s “Yes.”
- But followers of Jesus operate at maximum bandwidth; we are broadband
- For those who say that Jesus can too easily be made to seem the fount of
- Te incarnational is God’s “No.”
- Jesus puts some “No!” in our “Yes! No! Yes!” character to make us strong
- But part of “No!” is embracing our doubts
- If God’s design for the world is less a futurum (extrapolation of the
- Te MRI-shaped life and church does today what Jesus did then. But if
Add a Comment
David C Cook left a comment