Book Launch: Broken but Beautiful
I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to collect a team of gifted writers to reflect on the beauty of the bride of Christ. The book launches today.
People have been pointing out church-hurt for a long time. Over fifty years ago, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “With much of this criticism of the Church one has, of course, to agree. There is so much that is wrong with the Church—traditionalism, formality and lifelessness and so on—and it would be idle and utterly foolish to deny this” (Preaching and Preachers, 8). I suppose we could grab similar quotes from the Reformation era or any era in church history. We can even find similar sentiments in the New Testament itself. “But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together,” Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “it is not for the better but for the worse” (1 Cor. 11:17). Indeed, over two and a half thousand years ago, God told his people, “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21).
Certainly, there is a lot of junk that happens in the local church. But please also remember that God still uses the church to bless the world in beautiful ways. He may discipline his church to make her more holy, but he loves his church. His sons and daughters are always his sons and daughters. God even calls the church his bride, dying to purchase her and make her radiant. And one day we will see her in all her splendor.
I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to bundle some of our favorite essays about the beauty of the bride of Christ and put them into a book called Broken but Beautiful. The book launches today!
We adapted the book’s title from the first article by Glenna Marshall. She learned in deeper ways the beauty of the church during the unexpected death of a church member and the way her church served together in the days that followed.
As I think back to my own life, I think of a time sixteen years ago when my oldest son was born. The birth did not go well. There was an evening and morning of hard labor, after which the umbilical cord wrapped around my son’s neck, and they did an emergency c-section. Mom and baby, in the end, were fine—praise God. But recovery from the trauma induced by a night of labor and the emergency surgery lasted weeks. Then postpartum depression bit like a rabid dog that wouldn’t let go. But before postpartum, right when we got home from the hospital, everyone got the flu, including everyone who came to stay with us and help. Yet this is the time, my wife and I often say, that we learned when the church was the church. So many people helped and cooked and cleaned and cared. They sat with my wife when I eventually had to go back to work. We no longer live in that same city, but we saw God’s blessings in that local church so strongly that a dozen years later we named our youngest son after that church.
In the providence of God, somehow you’re reading this email. If your heart is in a season of disappointment with the local church—maybe you’d even use the word hate to describe how you currently feel about the church—we hope these stories will minister to you.
I put the table of contents for the book down below, so you can see all the authors and the entries.
You can buy the book on Amazon’s website, here. If your church would like to purchase books at a significant bulk discount, when you buy twenty on the publisher’s website, they are only $5 each! You can do that here.
As an author with a small platform, it would mean a lot to me if you’d buy a copy and consider leaving a short Amazon review. Those reviews help a ton. Seriously. And the review only needs to be a sentence or two.
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Table of Contents
Preface | Benjamin Vrbicek vii
She Is Broken, and She Is Beautiful | Glenna Marshall 1
Missing Church Is Missing Out | Timothy M. Shorey 7
How God Humbled Me through a Church I Didn’t Agree With | Lara d’Entremont 11
The Dearest Place on Earth | James Williams 17
The Unexpected Blessing of a Rural Church | Stephanie O’Donnell 21
The Local Church Helps Rid Me of Morbid Introspection | Chrys Jones 27
The Church Is Not a Meritocracy | Jessica Miskelly 33
A Family of Redemption for Children of Divorce | Chase Johnson 39
The Warmth of the Local Church for the Suffering | Brianna Lambert 45
The Singles Among Us Deserve a Better Church Culture | Denise Hardy 51
Love Your Church Anyway | Heidi Kellogg 57
For the Love of Liturgy | Erin Jones 63
God’s Good Design of the Local Church | James Williams 69
Finding Beauty in the Local Church in Our Age of Social Media | Cassie Pattillo 75
The Hands of Grace | Amber Thiessen 79
How the Church Shapes Us on Our Faith Journey | Rob Bentz 83
On the Other Side of the Church Split | Abigail Rehmert 89
Dear New Mother, Embrace the Body of Christ | Lara d’Entremont 95
The Gold Mine in the Local Church | Chrys Jones 101
The Local Church Is a Sandbox | Timarie Friesen 105
Unless the Seed Dies | Tom Sugimura 111
Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme and Shall Be Until I Die | Timothy M. Shorey 115
Epilogue | Jeremy Writebol 119
Notes 121
Author Bios 123
About Gospel-Centered Discipleship 127
Resources from Gospel-Centered Discipleship 129
Please Join Our Book-Launch Team: Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World
We’d love your help spreading the word about our book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World.
Bloggers around the world publish millions of posts each day, many written by faithful Christians who want to honor God with their words but struggle to know how. Christian bloggers need guides to lead them through the basics of setting up a blog—everything from affiliates and algorithms to widgets and WordPress. They need a mentor to help them become a godly landlord of their internet real estate.
My friend John Beeson and I wrote the book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World to help bloggers do these very things. In the book, we explain where the spiritual stamina will come from to serve a small readership faithfully and how to steward attention in a way that honors God in a world that seems to only celebrate chasing profit and pageviews.
Tim Challies, the godfather of evangelical blogging—or the blog-father as he is sometimes called—is writing the foreword to the book. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.
For the last week or so, we’ve been asking friends who had heard about the book if they’d consider joining the launch team. So far nearly fifty people have joined. John and I are super happy. But we’d still like your help too.
Starting today, we’re inviting others to join the launch team (here). [update: link removed]
Just to be clear: you do NOT have to be a blogger to join the launch team. Maybe you like to share interesting ideas on Facebook, or maybe you work in marketing or graphic design. We think you’d enjoy our book, and we’d love to have you on the launch team. But perhaps none of that is true of you. Perhaps you just happen to like the work I do on this blog or John does on his blog, and you’d like to support us. That’s great too. We’d love to have you on the team.
For those willing to serve on the launch team, we will send you a digital version of the book in early October to give you time to read it before its November 3 launch.
If you join, here is what we hope you’d commit to do:
Once the book launches, post an honest review on Amazon (and Goodreads, if you have an account) within the first week of the launch;
Help us catch any small errors in the book (i.e., not a full-edit of the book);
The day before the book launches we’d ask you to purchase the Kindle version of the book on Amazon at the reduced price of $0.99. Buying the book gives a “Verified purchase” tag affixed to your Amazon review. This helps to protect your review from being removed as fraudulent. Any review helps, but Verified Reviews boost the book in the Amazon store.
When the book launches share the book on your social media accounts.
That’s it. Pretty simple.
If you would like to join, please fill out this quick Google questionnaire (link). [update: link removed]
Thank you,
Benjamin