Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile

There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers. Jesus Wants to save Christians is a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity. It's about empty empires and the truth that everybody's a priest. It's about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from. It's about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.

"The author of Velvet Elvis and Sex God teams up with fellow pastor Golden to write a manifesto that packs as much sociopolitical zing as rhetorical punch. If Americans today miss the central message of the Bible, say the authors, the reason is that the United States is an empire like those described in Scripture that build powerful armies and seek to protect what they accumulate rather than promote justice and mercy. Chapter titles such as 'Swollen-bellied black babies, soccer moms on Prozac, and the mark of the beast' will provoke many readers. Likely to get a bigger rise is the suggestion that when the Bible says enemies will one day worship together, that includes today's enemies, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The writing is frequently paragraphed into very short chunks of prose. This dramatic book is politically charged but not party-bent, bearing a message evangelicals need: that Jesus didn't come just to save people for heaven someday but to transform his followers and the physical world now." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently added a $25-million addition to its building; meanwhile one in five people in Grand Rapids lives in poverty. This book about those two numbers tells what happens when Christians support and participate in the very things Jesus advocated.