RECOMMENDED READING JANUARY TO APRIL >

Crazy Love: Francis Chan
One of the pleasures that people in book groups talk about is reading books that they wouldn't normally even pick off the shelf and finding to their delight, or mild embarrassment, that they really enjoy them.
Crazy Love is probably that kind of book for many of us; it would have been for me. Oh how wrong we can be!
Not since I read Jim Cymbala's Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire have I been so stirred and refreshed in my fellowship with God by a Christian book. Like that one, Crazy Love is not academic, yet it really gets you thinking. Francis Chan doesn't pretend to be writing a commentary but Crazy Love is thoroughly Bible-soaked and deeply biblical in its convictions. It's about God but not in a detached way as if God is capable of being written about with a disinterested mind. This book wonderfully exemplifies a point that I've made many times: that God is not interesting. He's totally life-changing and electrifyingly captivating.
This book will bring you closer to God. It will, if you have a heart to learn, refresh your zeal and rekindle both your wonder at God and your love for him. If you feel that your walk with God has gone dull, tired and stale and that you’re ‘running on empty’ you’ll really benefit from Crazy Love. It will inform and inspire. It will get your brain working and your heart responding to God's crazy love for you. But beware: these blessings only come because it is also sharply perceptive and challenging, with much to say to us at Gilc that is timely and helpful. Chan ruthlessly describes lukewarm Christianity; he lays open, with relentless accuracy, the utter uselessness of an uncommitted life; he describes with profound conviction the blessings of being obsessed with Jesus Christ. If you appreciated the message from the New Year’s Day morning service about the exaltation of the King being where everything in the universe is heading, you’ll love this.
It’s a deceptively easy read. The chapters are short. It’s compelling. There is a website with loads of content to take things further than Francis Chan can do in the book. It’s achieved something of a cult following in the States, but don’t let any British academic snobbery put you off: it really is good.
We've only ordered 60 copies and 40 of those are earmarked for the Young Adults Group, for whom it’s required reading before their weekend away in February. We can get more very quickly and perhaps we should: if a book was to be required reading for the entire congregation at the start of a new and challenging year, then this would probably be it. The problem is that as soon as I’d call it ‘required reading’ some of us would, without even picking up a copy to look at it, say in our hearts ‘Huh! Not for me then.’ And such would be the very people who need it the most. So welcome to the weird world of reverse psychology: whatever you do, don’t read this book!
Crazy Love is a bargain at £5.25. Given the value to your soul it would still be a bargain at twice that price.
Dominic Smart