It took me a while to get completely through The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, but that was really more about my crazy life transition than the book. The book itself is extremely readable, written in a style that’s very accessible. Personally, I’m really glad about that, because this is a book I wish a lot of people would take time to read.
The Hole in Our Gospel calls for the church to fully engage in the various humanitarian crises that affect the poor of the world, such as hunger, injustice, AIDS or other diseases, and the lack of clean water. Stearns effectively uses three rhetorical weapons to issue this prophetic call. The backbone of the book is autobiographical, chronicling Stearns own spiritual awakening and professional transition into leadership at World Vision, an evangelical humanitarian organization with a wide reach. Stearns breaks from the autobiography into sections that detail the span of several humanitarian issues. Using the broad strokes of statistics and more focused stories of individuals, Stearns does a really great job of bringing the reader into the realities of poverty in the modern world. These are facts most of us want to hide from, and at times the book is brutal in forcing the reader to recognize the reality of human suffering in the world. The last part of the book, and perhaps the weakest, is a smattering of Biblical interpretations and theologizing. It’s not that Stearns is way off the mark in those areas, but a book can only do so much, and this is the weakest part mostly because it can only be minimally developed.
As a whole, I think the book was very compelling, and makes my short list for books I think I’d like the whole church to read, and really absorb. We wealthy Christians really must wrestle with what our wealth means before God as we live in a world full of suffering. There will certainly be a reckoning for our failure to do so.
(Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a complimentary review copy through Booksneeze)
