The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren
This book kinda makes me uncomfortable. I think we are important and loved for who we ARE more than what we DO. And, saying one has to be "purpose-driven" only increases the guilt and frustration when one is laid up with an illness, surgery, injury, or just plain age. What about just praying and listening? What about mystics? I dunno, the book just seems too "formulatic" for me - with Spirituality, no one formula fits everyone. But some people at my church are studying the book and getting a lot out of it.
This book kinda makes me uncomfortable. I think we are important and loved for who we ARE more than what we DO. And, saying one has to be "purpose-driven" only increases the guilt and frustration when one is laid up with an illness, surgery, injury, or just plain age. What about just praying and listening? What about mystics? I dunno, the book just seems too "formulatic" for me - with Spirituality, no one formula fits everyone. But some people at my church are studying the book and getting a lot out of it.
Quote:
Pastor of Saddleback Church, a Southern Baptist mega-church in southern California with weekly attendance of more than 15,000, Warren now applies his highly successful "purpose-driven" framework, developed in the best-seller The Purpose-Driven Church, to individual experience. The same principles Warren has taught to thousands of pastors to help churches be healthy and effective can also drive lives, he says. The book argues that discerning and living five God-ordained purposes-worship, community, discipleship, ministry and evangelism-is key to effective living. His 40 short chapters are intended to be read over 40 days' time, giving readers small pieces of his purpose-discovering program to chew on. Warren certainly knows his Bible. Of 800-plus footnotes, only 18 don't refer to Christian Scripture. He deliberately works with 15 different Bible translations, leaning heavily on contemporary translations and paraphrases, as an interesting way of plumbing biblical text. The almost exclusively biblical frame of reference stakes out the audience niche for this manual for Christian living. It's practical yet paradoxically abstract, lacking the kind of real-life examples and stories that life-application books usually provide in abundance. The book has flaws editing might have fixed. People are quoted without being identified, and subheads simply repeat lines of text, which tends to make the prose sound too simple. This book is not for all, but for those needing a certain kind of scriptural rock, it is solid.







