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SHAPE

Finding and fulfilling your unique purpose in life

One size fits all

SHAPE: finding and fulfilling your unique purpose in life
By Erik Rees
Zondervan. 256 pages. £7.99
ISBN 0 310 27418 4

Erik Rees is a pastor at Saddleback church in California. The senior pastor at Saddleback is Rick Warren, author of the phenomenally successful Purpose-Driven Life.

Purpose-Driven Life touched on an individual’s SHAPE (Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, Experience) and Mr. Rees’s book looks at this in more detail, with the aim of helping people discover their unique purpose for their life, based on the way God has shaped them.

If you have never done an inventory of your life (here, your SHAPE) and how God might use you — or if you feel the need to review these areas — then this book might be useful. There is good teaching on spiritual gifts and the importance of having other Christians around you for encouragement and advice. Also, there is a related website where you can fill in the book’s questionnaires online and get feedback.

The book contains nuggets of wisdom. Among my favourites were: ‘You cannot be anything you want to be, but you can be everything God wants you to be’ (Max Lucardo); ‘I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble’ (Helen Keller); ‘God didn’t create other people to please you, and he didn’t create you to please them. He made us to please him’ and ‘Ministry is what we leave in our wake as we follow Jesus’ (Gerald Hartis).

But one concern is that the book is formulaic: it might leave the impression that if you follow the steps, all will be well and you will lead a successful God-honouring life with a significant ministry. This is not to say that Mr. Rees is promoting a prosperity gospel, but in his book, as in life in general, you hear only the success stories.

I can imagine people following all the steps in this book and still finding a life of toil and frustration; they might aim for significant things for God, yet still achieve what appears to be very little. Even though Mr. Rees recognises this, the impression is that it does not have to be this way. In a fallen word, I am not so sure.

The book also suffers from the exaltation of professional Christians, i.e. people who earn their living exercising spiritual gifts or who work for an organisation with explicit Christian aims. Too many of the examples involve professional Christians and phrases such as, ‘The truth is there is only one Mother Theresa, one Rick Warren, one Billy Graham’ and ‘take Rick Warren, for example’. . . and betray a lack of imagination as to the variety of plans that God has for his people as individuals. Mr. Rees does counterbalance this elsewhere in the book, but the impression of what constitutes a suitable purpose in life is still tilted one way.

The concept of SHAPE is a useful one, as is the book as a whole, but I do not think it will do for everyone exactly what it says on the tin. But Mr. Rees’s heart is certainly in the right place and this book will, no doubt, help some people, perhaps especially newer Christians, to discover what God intends for them and to start doing it.

Alan Bright
works in the City of London and is a member of St. Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate