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10 May 2010
Enjoy a laugh as Jon Acuff talks about his new book, Stuff Christians Like. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with the blogger-turned-author. Click to listen now or subscribe at iTunes.
You’ve got a chapter in the book entitled "The Bible", in which you’ve got a few different ideas and takes on how people view the Bible. One of them is that people are afraid to throw it away. Why is that?
It feels too holy. Its God’s Word. Like, it’s been marched down from a mountain. I wrote that in part because I have a Bible in my car and I brought it inside the other day and it stops at Thessalonians. It’s just missing that chunk, so it’s a good Bible up until Thessalonians, and then the Word just falls apart, literally. But there is still a part of me that's like, “Aw, I know I lost half of the New Testament, but I just can’t get rid of that Bible.” And I think it’s just innate that we don’t. Although the funny thing is, if you go to Christian bookstores, there will be return Bibles. So like someone will have spelled the name wrong on the front. That’s just an awkward exchange right there. It almost feels like, “Here, this just didn’t take. I’d like to go ahead and get my money back on this. I’d like to return God’s Word, if I could, and I don’t want store credit.”
What’s your story with the church? You obviously had to have grown up in it to have this depth of insight.
My dad’s a minister, so I definitely grew up being surrounded by it. And he was a Southern Baptist minister that started a church in Massachusetts, so I got to see a unique expression of the church, in that Massachusetts is predominantly Catholic. So [I got] to see the mix of how he shared the message of Christ with a Catholic audience, and his understanding and how he did things. My dad shaped a big part of my understanding of the faith and how I think the church expresses itself. I love the church. I think sometimes we like to use it as a big, upper-case noun and we’re like, “Oh man, the Church is doing really bad things.” Kind of like in a corporation, how you blame the corporation for things. And sometimes I don’t think we take ownership of that. So I hate when we use the church as a pinata, and really don’t want to change anything cause it’s just hard. I have friends on both sides of the coin. I wrote in the book, there’s people that hate mega-churches and there’s people that feel bad for small churches. I think we’re in this weird position where we weren’t doing things well, and then we kinda got drunk on the idea of doing things with excellence. I think we’ll kind of land back in the middle there. But I love the church, and I think it’s really powerful when applied to good things. And it can get- just like anything else- it can be toxic, cause it’s essentially built of broken people, just like me.
