Review: Not The Religious Type

Confession- I haven't finished reading this book yet, but I'm enjoying it a lot and have read enough to want to recommend it. 

Dave Schmelzer pastors a church in Cambridge, MA- a church that lives and breathes in the heart of a decidedly secular and even anti-religious community. The book describes some of his journey from atheism to Christianity and some of the thinking and winsome approach that allows a church like his to reach a community like that. 

From the inside cover:

"In the tradition of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy comes this illuminating collection of thoughts on faith in a postmodern world.Not the Religious Type bridges the gap between the two communities in which many of us live--the secular and the religious--and suggests a new, unexpected way of seeing the world and our place in it.
Whether we're the religious type or not, there's a certain part of each of us that invariably wonders if it's true--if there's a God we can connect with who is alive and active, with the kind of perspective on our lives and futures that we could never have on our own.
As Dave engagingly explores these most important questions, he invites his readers into "a new and warmer spring," a way of thinking that will help both secularists who never imagined they would become people of faith and also people of faith who perhaps haven't experienced all from God that they've hoped."

The section on Peck's stages of belief and how they apply to the move from a rigid faith to a state of questioning and then on to a more mystical place of belief again was worth reading the book just for that- very helpful in understanding the kind of city I'm living in and what kind of church we need to be...

Check it out: