For The Someday Book

Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism, Church Leaders Study, by Martha Grace Reese, Chalice Press, 2007, 148 pp.

Unbinding Your Church: Pastor’s and Leaders’ Guide, by Martha Grace Reese with Dawn Darwin Weaks and Catherine Riddle Caffey, Chalice Press, 2008, 146 pp.

Unbinding Your Heart: 40 Days of Prayer and Faith Sharing, All Church-Study and Personal Prayer Journal, Chalice Press, 2008, 164 pp.

This series of books, along with the fourth volume, Unbinding Your Soul, have been all the talk in the last few years among mainline Protestants looking to learn how to do evangelism that is authentic to our identity and faithful to our mission. I purchased the original (and skimmed it) over a year ago, but I am just beginning to work with congregational leaders to make use of this program at our church. As a first step, I read all three volumes, and gave two key leaders a copy of Unbinding the Gospel to preview as well. A key component of the process seems to be the prayer and exercises, which are done in groups. I have not yet undertaken that work or level of study with these books and their program.

Martha Grace Reese’s work in these volumes is the outgrowth of the Mainline Evangelism Project, a research effort funded by the Lilly Foundation. That project identified adult baptisms as the chief sign of evangelism, since baptisms represent the entry of new Christians into the church (not just people moving around or changing churches). The study first identified the dire nature of the problem. If you eliminate churches in the South and churches that are predominately non-white, only one half of 1% of mainline churches are doing significant work reaching new people and bringing them into the faith.  While they did identify some factors in this lack of evangelism, the study devoted most of its resources to studying those few churches that are successful evangelists. They chose for in-depth study the top 150 mainline churches in the country in numbers of adult baptisms. They identified what they were doing to be so successful, so other congregations might learn from their example. This book series is a program to help churches become better evangelists.

The heart of the series, of the research and of the program, is that there is no great program that will save us. The path toward becoming better evangelists involves learning to pray and ignite our relationship with God, and having the courage to invite others to know the love of God. One of the participants sums it up like this: “You can’t give what you don’t got—your relationship with God must be hot!” (Unbinding Your Heart, 53) The Unbinding Series aims to generate some heat in our relationship with God through intentional prayer and small groups, so that we can then share that passion with others. This accords with my experience—if someone’s own faith is growing and deepening, they will tell others about it and want to share it with them.

I found the books to be very insightful and stimulating for conversation, and I intend to follow through on the process for working on them with my congregation. I am excited about it, and believe it will be a great time of growing faith and prayer and evangelism in our church.

However, I do want to share my struggle with these books. I feel like I have a personality-type conflict with the author. The books are packed with detail and instruction. Reese is clearly an expert in offering step-by-step instructions, planning for stages of effort and breaking down big jobs into small tasks. However, my brain doesn’t do such a good job of putting that back together. I am a big-picture thinker and learner, and I struggled in these books to get my head around the main ideas. As a leader, I want to have a clear vision of the whole picture, and I had a difficult time working that out in these books. This was especially true in Unbinding Your Church, which is really a workbook and instruction manual for using the Unbinding Series in your church. While she offers sermons, hymn choices, liturgical resources, exercises, job descriptions, meeting outlines, handouts and more, I yearned for a more simple overview that said, “Here’s what we hope to accomplish. Here is the experience we want to create. Here are the overall things we want people to encounter and remember.” I can follow step-by-step directions, but I would much rather have a whole map to orient myself in time and space. I often found myself feeling lost in details and no longer sure where I was going. If you are a detail person, you’ll love it. If you’re not, prepare yourself to wade on through—I think it’s well worth it.