One of the habits we’ve developed as a church staff team is to have a book that we commit to reading and discussing as part of our weekly staff meeting. Normally we opt for something theological but occasionally, to keep things lively, we go a bit rogue.
Recently we’ve been on one of our excursions into left field and have been working through Brené Brown’s bestselling book on the subject of vulnerability, Daring Greatly. In all honesty, to employ a clerical metaphor, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg of a book.
Flashes of brilliant insight rub shoulders with good old-fashioned common sense, along with occasional descents into psychobabble, all underpinned by an anthropology that doesn’t fully match the Bible’s balanced view of us as possessing inherent worth by virtue of being created in God’s image, while being fatally flawed by our, also inherent, sinful nature.
‘The God who is’
In recent years I’ve discovered and learned to appreciate the Westminster Shorter Catechism. It’s a bit of a niche thing …