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Deep Church Rising: Recovering the roots of Christian orthodoxy

Reviewed by Paul Beasley-Murray.

This is a wonderfully stimulating, mind-expanding, soul-enriching, delightfully provocative book, which I whole-heartedly commend to anybody concerned by the trivialisation of present-day evangelicalism.

Quotable quotes abound. For instance, “If we position worship as a form of Christian entertainment, we will shape Christians who consume worship as a product; Christians that move from one worship ‘high’ to the next, chasing one stimulating event after another; Christians that assess how good the worship was by how fuzzy it made them feel; and Christians that will leave one congregation for another with little hesitation if a more entertaining gathering springs up in another church. But this kind of worship is, at rock bottom, all about me, and God is approached as if he were under some obligation to keep me happy. He is my drug of choice, but if he gets boring, I’ll move one”.

The authors describe the “rapturous joy of knowing God” as true “Christian hedonism…. The pleasure comes when we are not focusing on it but on God. It is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves”.

They savage the way in which in so many churches the Lord’s Supper has become “fast food” or “MacEucharist”. At the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is the host who invites us to come to his Table: “He welcomes us to have fellowship or communion with him over this meal. Jesus calls us to eat with him and to do so not as individuals alone together like customers in McDonald’s but as a family at table.  It really is a meal of ‘Holy Communion’”.   Furthermore, we need to reflect on what it means to feed on Christ by faith (John 6.54).  “When you eat or drink something, it enters right into the depths of you – it brings you life – it becomes part of you…. Jesus speaks of drinking his blood and eating his flesh as a metaphor for taking his very life deep into our own spiritual lives by faith. We are united with him – his life becomes our life”. You are unlikely to agree with everything that is put forward in this book, but you will undoubtedly gain new insights about how as churches we might ‘go deeper’.