Religious Rebels Book
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Description
SOMETHING IS WRONG. It’s become common for Christian celebrity leaders and organizations to be caught in corruption and public failure. Former believers are deconstructing their faith to the point of abandoning it. Many of us have experienced deep pain and resulting disillusionment because of things that happened at church or at the hands of other Christians. Are we missing something? What if there’s more?
What if the doubts, questions, and rebellious rumblings in our hearts are good? What if they are exposing a fake god and a broken religious system? What if our questions are pushing us to find a real God who is bigger and better than we’ve ever dreamed?
Christy spent her teens and early twenties in a cultic sub-group of Christianity characterized by legalism, twisted Scripture, and lies. But Jesus found her anyway. Getting to know the real Jesus changed everything. A people pleaser and good girl by nature, Christy began to feel a strange rebellion creeping into her heart. Religious Rebels shares Christy’s journey while exposing familiar lies she has noticed in mainstream Christianity. With stories, humor, and grace, she encourages her readers to embrace their own questions and doubts as they begin an awkward search for the real Jesus.
Additional information
| Weight | 10 oz |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × 9 × 0.5 in |
Karen Sheffield –
This book is such an encouraging, challenging and eye-opening read!
Christy really focuses on how the real Jesus truly meant us to experience his love, life and freedom. Also, the book challenges people to seek Jesus as the God who truly desires a restoring vibrant relationship of love with us. I was especially challenged to follow Jesus, not with a “black and white”, “us verses them” mentality, but to humbly listen and learn from a compassionate and loving and amazing God who is greater than anything we can fully imagine.
Liz –
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Religious Rebels. It is well written with a comfortable, friendly tone that invites you in. At first, I wasn’t sure I would fit in. However, it didn’t take long for me to be drawn into the story and questions raised. It got me thinking more deeply about my faith and my relationship with my church. I believe this book helped me to see a bit more clearly the place of my church in my life. I haven’t changed my core beliefs (I don’t think that’s the goal), but I have started looking at some things in a different way – and that’s a good thing. Any time we are asked to look more closely at our faith, there is an opportunity for growth. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has been hurt by the church. I also recommend it to people who don’t feel that pain to help them understand the pain of those who have been hurt by the church.
Tracie Newton (verified owner) –
This book is one of the most beautiful books I have ever had the privilege of reading. I love it so much, I’m buying 10 more to give away! And I never do that! Christy has written a book that needs to be read by anyone who has been a part of any “religious” organization and wants to find the Real Jesus. She writes with clarity and transparency but doesn’t shove her ideas down your throat. She asks great questions…”what if God isn’t who we think He is? What if God cares more about our heart than our outward actions? What if He wants to heal our deepest wounds and messes more than He wants our behaviors to change?” but doesn’t claim to have all the answers herself. She shares her own journey and recognizes that not everyone has the same journey and that’s OK! Reading this book is like sitting down for coffee with a friend you didn’t know you had, who really understands the struggle of coming out of spiritual abuse and trying to figure out what to do now. She has put words to so many of my own thoughts, feelings and experiences and the entire book resonates with truth for me. I’m going to share the last paragraph of her book with you:
“We don’t have to be people who conform to the religious norms, customs and traditions of our day. We can be rebels who seek to know God for ourselves and believe that He wants to be found. We can join hands in the Awkward Middle What where together we hold the mystery of tension and paradox. Where we offer scandalous grace while looking for truth. And where we attempt to follow the One who called Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Come with me, friends. Let’s keep seeking the real Jesus.”
Stephen Gosden –
I wanted to write a “Goldilocks” review. Neither too long nor too short, too detailed nor too sparse. “Just right” in fact.
Do you know the story? Goldilocks tries bowls of porridge, chairs, and beds successively, each time finding the third “just right”. Christopher Booker says, “The idea that the way forward lies in finding an exact middle path between opposites is of extraordinary importance in storytelling,” and, I would add, in life.
We’re going to see that Christy’s book is about this middle path and how she found it. In some ways it’s a Goldilocks book, though I don’t think she’s tried both extremes of faith. Maybe it’s better that way!
I have followed Christy for several years on Instagram, so when I saw that she was publishing a new book, and that I had the chance to be on the launch team and to review that book, I looked forward to it with enthusiasm. I was not disappointed!
Religious Rebels is easy to read. But that doesn’t mean it’s facile. On page after page, there are insights that bring you up short. Make you stop and think. Is that right? Do I believe that? Could that be right? Or indeed, “Wow! Yes!”
The book is well-structured in three major sections with five chapters each. But it flows so well that I hardly noticed the change from Becoming a Rebel, to Embracing Questions, and Rebuilding our Faith.
An Introduction sets us off on the right path, and a Conclusion wraps it all up nicely. I like order!
In between, I love the way she tells stories, whether her own story or stories about other people; the book is never boring.
It’s autobiographical but also educational. Christy draws from her own experiences and traumas to help us with ours. Along the way, we can enjoy her discoveries about faith and Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit. Some of these may be new to the reader, or a welcome reminder of truths forgotten.
And she asks difficult questions like these:
What about you?
Are you satisfied with the God people have taught you about?
With the God you think might exist?
With the religion you’ve experienced?
These questions may cause us to doubt and, as she says, it’s terrifying to think we might be losing our faith. But what if the doubt, frustration and confusion we feel isn’t wrong; maybe that’s the Spirit calling us to something else. It could be the starting place to finding someone bigger and crazier and lovelier than we could ever imagine.
And if our faith is based on a religious impostor and not “the real God”, then we need to lose that faith.
The real God. That’s an idea that Christy keeps coming back to: the real God. She suggests that maybe we don’t know the real God, but we could. And if she’s a rebel – which she is – it’s not against God, it’s against religion which, as she says, is the business of appeasing gods, and turns a life-giving friendship into dutiful servanthood.
Or we may be reading the Bible and claiming promises out of context, turning God into a vending machine where we push certain buttons to make things happen. That’s not the real God.
Christy says she has more questions now than when she started, but is also more comfortable with not having answers. I relate to that; I’m the same.
This could be the end of the short review, maybe the Goldilocks review. If you want some more detail, read on.
Skip to the end of the review for an invitation to join us on the Awkward Middle Way – the Goldilocks way.
CAVEAT
I would only like to add one caveat at this point. Christy clearly subscribes to the theory of Penal Substitutionary Atonement which dates largely from John Calvin’s time. It is not what early Christians believed. Christus Victor is much older and, I believe, closer to the truth.
This is not a major drawback to the book as a whole, so I still heartily recommend it.
Calvin’s doctrines have convinced Christians today that God requires a human blood sacrifice, and that without the shedding of blood He cannot—and does not—forgive sins. Under this PSA theory, the Father of Jesus is one who will not settle for anything less than a virgin, pure, spotless human sacrifice—even His own son—in order to appease His wrath. (“Jesus Unforsaken: Substituting Divine Wrath With Unrelenting Love” by Keith Giles.)
She talks, albeit briefly, about Jesus appeasing God by his death. However, Jesus says that he and the Father are One.
It is my belief that God the Father did not need to be appeased. He forgives sins freely out of His generous love. And when there is forgiveness (of a debt, for example) there is no need for payment by the debtor or anyone else.
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Now for some more detail.
Christy goes on to talk about salvation, a word that is often bandied about without any real definition, as though everybody understands what it is. (A lot of the text below is taken directly from the book.)
“What must I do to be saved?” the Philippian jailer asked Paul and Silas in Acts 16. It was a good question and an important question. He probably wants to be saved from his Roman masters who are going to execute him for losing the prisoners, but Paul takes advantage of it to answer the question about how he can be saved from the consequences of his sin, from the life he was in, and from “this corrupt generation” as Peter describes it in a sermon recorded in Acts 2.
If we were to ask this question, we’d probably get all kinds of answers: pray the sinner’s prayer, ask Jesus into your heart, raise your hand, make Jesus the Lord of your life, get baptised… all kinds of things.
Paul simply says, “Believe in Jesus.” Why do we complicate salvation; can it really be this simple?
What if salvation isn’t what we’ve been taught it is within our version of religious Christianity? What if we have missed the truth because of our obsession with behaviours? And what if it is far deeper and more amazing than we could ever dream?
Sometimes salvation is more of a process than a moment, and that’s okay too. There doesn’t have to be a special prayer, or action, or anything. It’s about what Jesus did, not about what we do, anyway.
It’s the same when we talk about the Gospel, but don’t really define what that is. There is a version that focuses on what terrible, horrible, no-good sinners we are. It concentrates on God’s wrath and how we all deserve hell. The god they talk about isn’t someone I really want to spend time with anyway.
Another tries to guilt us into surrendering everything to Jesus in a desperate attempt to make him Lord. This God seems demanding, and I’m not sure I’ll ever measure up to his expectations.
Often the Gospel is not exactly the Good News the word suggests!
Christy shares one way of looking at the Gospel:
G: God created us to be with Him.
O: Our sin separated us from God.
S: Sin cannot be removed by good deeds.
P: Paying the price for sin, Jesus died and rose again.
E: Everyone who trusts in Him alone has eternal life.
L: Life with Jesus starts now and lasts forever.
It’s a good mnemonic, but I do have a couple of questions:
* If our sin separates us from God, why does Paul write to the believers in Rome that absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God?
* It’s a core component of the Penal Substitutionary Theory of Atonement that Jesus paid for our sins. But who received the payment? Jesus is one with the Father, so are we supposed to imagine that he paid himself? Let me say again that no payment was required. Forgiveness is free.
In fact, the Gospel is even better than this mnemonic suggests!
My own belief is that separation from God is an illusion on our part. Knowing Jesus removes that illusion. Perhaps that’s what is meant here.
As regards payment for sins, I believe that God freely forgives us (this is taught throughout the New Testament) so no payment is necessary.
I feel like I may be quoting too much of Christie’s book. But if so, it’s because it’s so eminently worth quoting!
So perhaps I should now restrict myself to a few gems from the remaining chapters, giving you an incentive to read the book for yourself.
For example:
* The real God never gets disappointed?
* God is full of grace and love, not condemnation and disappointment.
* The real God will not always make sense.
* We’ve got to throw away the understandable, controllable God that we have created in our own image.
* We must allow the real God to be bigger, greater, and more than we can comprehend.
* People in power like to use fear because it works, but Jesus doesn’t use fear to motivate people.
* Fear is not from the real God. He is not a god of fear. He doesn’t use fear to control us, and these are important truths to grasp in our minds and believe in our hearts.
* If we do this and that, then God will give us the blessings we desire. But if we mess up, then He is going to punish us. The real God doesn’t work like that.
* We try to stuff God in our little God boxes. We want to explain him, minimise him, dismiss him and move on.
* We act like we have got all figured out, but what if we are wrong.
* God used Freddie – a messed-up eighth-grader from a family of known felons and drug addicts – to show me what unconditional love looks like. Jesus poured His love for Freddie into my heart and I couldn’t help myself. And when I thought about how bad Freddie was and yet how much I loved him for no reason, I often heard a quiet whisper, “That’s how I love you.”
* Not religion, not rules, not trying harder, not human effort, but meeting the Person of Jesus Christ, getting to know Him, falling in love with Him, and choosing to follow Him changes everything.
* The world is broken, we are broken. The sooner we realise that, the better off we will be.
It’s not popular these days to admit that we might be broken. Indeed, many people on social media say that we are not broken, we’re fine. Christy goes against the grain here, and all credit to her for doing so.
There’s so much more, please read it for yourself.
As we get older, (and I’m a lot older than Christy!), beliefs that seemed black and white years before, are no longer so clear-cut.
But there is a middle way. “I’m choosing to hold truths in tension,” she writes. “I’ve settled into the belief that tension theology is the place where truth lives.” I agree.
Christy ends Religious Rebels with this statement and invitation:
“We don’t have to be people who conform to the religious norms, customs, and traditions of our day. We can be rebels who seek to know God for ourselves and believe that He wants to be found. We can join hands in the Awkward Middle Way, where together we hold the mystery of tension and paradox. Where we offer scandalous grace while looking for truth. And where we attempt to follow the One who called Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Come with me, friends.
Let’s keep seeking the real Jesus.”
I, for one, am joining hands with Christy on the Awkward Middle Way.
Perhaps when you’ve read this book, you’ll find yourself drawn here too.