Here’s some news for those who might not know: my newest foray into the non-fiction, Christian living / theology territory, releases next week Wednesday, 3 February. It’s called Jesus Crushes Sin: A down-to-earth, Jesus-centred holiness for those who keep losing.

It’s a book for the losers in Christian living. Those of us who know what God expects of us, but find we just can’t do it. We never quite seem to reach the place where we know we’re supposed to be. And the “good news” doesn’t seem to be so good anymore.

When I started writing I wanted to release my Christian-specific books for free to the public, and print versions at cost. I just think that kind of stuff should be free. But, of course, a writer has to also make a living. Plus, many people have told me that they actually want to support me financially, but if I keep doing everything for free they can’t really do that, unless I take donations (which I’ll feel a bit weird about, to be honest).

Over the years I’ve never quite known what to do.  But now I think I’ve finally found a way to do both, and why on earth I never realised it at first, I don’t know.

1. I’ll be offering up the ebook and PDF versions of Jesus Crushes Sin at my website for free download from 3 Feb.
2. The paperback version (I’m still busy with the printers) will be made available at just above cost, to give me some margin for calculation errors (I’ve learned that there are all sorts of sneaky costs that come in with print at various stages of getting it to people). It’ll be available directly from a distributor’s website. The link will be made available here when it’s all ready. ** UPDATE ** – it’s now available for preorder.
3. Those who want to support me financially and want the ebook can purchase it from their favourite platforms. All the main distributor links will be on my site. ** UPDATE ** now available for preorder.

I think that’s a great compromise.

** UPDATE ** The book can now be preordered.

From February 3rd, you can download the free ebook here at my website.

I’m really excited about this book as I’ve been working on it for about three years, on and off! It’s finally ready, and I think what it has inside is going to be super helpful for people who struggle to live the Christian calling.

In fact, if anything, the real shallow philosophy worth speaking about is the general church culture and hopelessly pathetic theology around depression. Yesterday when I read the news of Williams’ death and how he battled with depression I felt a jab in my heart. I’ve known too many people who’ve lost their lives to this disease. In fact, I think I know more people who’ve battled with this than any other disease, including cancer. And I’ve been a first-hand sufferer of it too.

If you’ve battled with depression you know – modern ideas of success and happiness miss the point. Motivational clichés lack power. I think Robin Williams knew that. I think that’s why he chose the film roles he did.

I know that feeling of being surrounded by friends and family and people who really do love you at a dinner table – and everyone is laughing – and you’re laughing – and suddenly, out of nowhere, something deep inside you changes. It’s hard to explain what it is, but heartbroken kind of does explain it. You literally feel like something inside is broken, as if you’ve just been cut open inside, and it burns. Before you realise it, you’re talking to yourself in your mind about how you’re really not worth anything – that it would be better if you just didn’t exist. All of your fears and your guilt and your absolute inability to win with anything crush any semblance of happiness inside. Some might call it an existential crisis, saying that everyone gets that, but here you’re having an experience where you wish life itself just didn’t exist.

It’s interesting to me that at the age of 63, Williams still hadn’t “gotten over it”. People who don’t really experience this sort of thing to this sort of degree perhaps don’t realise how “getting over it” and “think positively” and all the usual motivational nonsense means precious little. Motivational posters aren’t going to cut it, and your sayings like “your attitude determines your altitude” are just nonsense. And, (some) Christians, “praise music” is not a cure-all. At the wrong time it can do the very opposite to what you think and can diminish faith.

While I don’t think I’ve ever suffered to the degree of others I know (including loved ones in my family) I do think I’ve suffered a bit more than I was ever comfortable admitting when I was going through my worst time. It was then that I realised just how shallow modern theology is – how so much of what we preach from the pulpit is geared for the winners and the successful and the strong and mighty and the able and the moral and the cool and the popular and the leaders.

So much of our modern day preaching is more to do with being a good leader and a success in life and taking it by the horns and being a good example and on and on and on it goes. You must be this, do that, look like this, act like that, and only then will God or anyone else take you seriously. It’s all a formula. People have built ministry empires around providing all the formulas to make you healthy, successful, and a strong, respected leader. Some has its place but most of it isn’t the gospel, it’s just shallow motivational-speak.

Ann Voskamp, in a recent blog post on the subject, says it perfectly when she says: “The Jesus I know never preached some Health Prosperity Gospel, some pseudo-good news that if you just pray well, sing well, worship well, live well and deposit all that into some Divine ATM — you get to take home a mind and body that are well. That’s not how the complex beauty of life unfolds.”

How true. But don’t think it’s just prosperity churches – evangelical churches can place such a big emphasis on leadership and success in that area that the result is fewer leaders, not more, because so many people feel they can’t make the grade, don’t have the right personality, or just don’t have the right ambitions in life. (Meanwhile, 1 Thessalonians 4:11 tells us to live a quiet life!) I often wonder if we now, in the evangelical church, have too many leaders and too little actual pastors. Pastoring is hard work. And thankless.

Over the years when I really had to face my depression head-on I realised that modern Christian pop-theology offers no real answer: it’s too shallow, full of clichés, and only seems to work for the strong. My depression did two things: one, it opened me up to a pornography addiction and, two, it (and the addiction) forced me to really get to the bottom of my faith. In a strange way, I’m thankful for it and even the addiction. It’s brought me to a place where I can say this with experience and conviction: what most people think Christianity is, it actually isn’t. What most people think Christian theology teaches, it actually doesn’t. What most people think Jesus was about, he wasn’t. 

In my struggles I discovered some funny things: Christianity isn’t for the winners at all. It’s not for the big names and the popular. God isn’t actually impressed with big leadership and big ambitions (although we certainly are!). He isn’t into categorising people. He also isn’t just into accepting everything about our sin. He it totally Other, yet we can know him. Jesus wasn’t a success by the world’s standards – he died without creating a political movement or creating a squeaky clean philosophy with all the answers. He himself had to cry, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 46.) Read Lamentations and see how real Christianity can get. This is a faith full of promise and positivity without ever side-lining the reality of the brokenness of our world and the souls that live in it. Christian theology isn’t squeaky clean – it makes space for the questions and often only answers by saying: You don’t need answers. What you need is Presence. Intimacy and union with God.

Life is a romance – it’s full of heartbreak and it’s full of beauty. All at the same time. Often beauty and joy actually rise out of the heartbreak. “Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Psalm 30:5.) There is something deeply perplexing about this and our rational mind finds difficulty in grasping it. It just doesn’t make sense. Yet, actually, it does, if we think of sense in the fullest meaning of the word. Christianity is both rational and experiential, just like life is; and ultimately just like God is. He is not all mind. He is not all spirit. He is a person. Once you come to accept mystery you come to find that mystery is actually far more rational than cold, hard logic.

Williams was an episcopalian, which he jokingly called “Catholic lite – half the religion, half the guilt!” My prayer is that somewhere in there he found Jesus and who he really is. Perhaps he never explored the depths of Christian theology and perhaps he had some other funny ideas, who knows? There is so much rubbish in this world I’m sure we all have some funny ideas that just aren’t true. But Christianity isn’t about knowing the facts but knowing the Person who is true – God the Father, revealed in Jesus Christ.

Recently, John Ellis from Tree63 came under a great deal of fire when he had jokingly said in an interview with well-known personality Gareth Cliff that he had written Christians songs ‘for the money’. He also stated that Tree63 were not a Christian band – in an effort to try and make the (rather tired, by now) distinction between a “Christian band” and a “band full of Christians”.

Over at JohnEllis.co.za, Ellis put the record straight and apologised for the whole ordeal. The money comment was, in Ellis’s words, a “wry joke, badly timed,” and regarding the issue of a Christian band versus a band full of Christians, Ellis says:

“I tried to make the age-old distinction between a band full of Christians and a ‘Christian’ band. It’s a thorny issue that’s been raging since the very first idea of Christian-themed pop music ever surfaced, and any band that has sung about spiritual things in the secular arena (Stryper, U2, Kula Shaker, Delirious?, Switchfoot, Tree63 etc.) has had to field those questions. It can come across as splitting hairs, which is ironic for a bald man to do… essentially Tree63, as ‘Christian’ as it became, was primarily a rock band singing about Jesus, not a church band with a missional agenda and music as second-thought.”

Meanwhile, in the comments section at his post, you can see how people responded. Some happy, others shocked.

Is there such a thing as a Christian dentist?

My brother-in-law, Jonno Warmington, said this to me the other day when we chatted about this: Is there such a thing as a Christian dentist? If you mean a dentist who does his work for the glory of God, well that’s fine and well – that’s what we all do. But if you mean a dentist who only ever does dentistry on Christians; only ever works in Christian mouths; and only ever pulls out Christian teeth; wouldn’t that be a rather odd practice? Most of us wouldn’t think it strange and a sell-out when a Christian dentist says he is happy to work on anyone’s teeth.

But when it comes to music, we seem to think that, for some reason, it ought to be different. In fact, it seems that this is really a general problem for most of Art – there’s some reason why you can’t be a Christian musician, or a Christian writer, or a Christian painter, without looking to use your art exclusively for overt evangelism. Why is this?

Perhaps it’s because of how art appeals to the imagination. But the problem is this: once you try and dictate to an artist what his art is supposed to look like (AKA, how Christian it’s meant to be) you sell the art out to the corporate, one-size-fits-all squeeky clean mass-produced culture. In other words, you actually force the artist to become the very thing you complain about: a sell-out.

Let artists be artists and then you’ll be surprised what they can do. Force them to fit your mould and wishes and you’ll be shocked at how they’ll respond. Never corner an artist. In place of it you’ll get a raging beast who will bite back, feeling trapped and confined. They don’t fit in the box, so why expect them to? Why tell them they must? It goes against the very God-given gift and personality they have.

Christian leaders are not always the best in telling people not to be rock stars

In my younger years, when I wanted to be a rock star, I noticed something that’s worth saying here, even if it is a bit harsh. A lot of Christian leaders had a lot to say to me about my desire to be a rock star, but for some reason they were blind to their own “rock star” ambitions. You know, the very real ambition to become a big deal in the church. A superstar preacher. An apostolic asteroid. The guy with the biggest church and the most influence. And for some reason, all that kind of ambition is okay because a lot of Christian leaders hide behind the idea that all that is “for the advancement of the Kingdom.” Actually, it’s the advancement of their own Kingdom and built on their own need for affirmation, and pastors and preachers and evangelists and apostolic guys need to face the reality and motivation behind the ambition in their own hearts.

I feel perfectly comfortable calling this what it is because I’ve had to work through it. Here’s a post I wrote that spoke a bit about it: I’m not interested in counting for God anymore. This sort of unhealthy ambition is one of those sins in the church that too few leaders bother to address in their own lives but are quick to see in others. I’m by no means pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but I am making the point because I think it does add value, especially when I consider how celebrity focused the evangelical church has become. (Cue this week’s unhealthy finger-pointing furore over Mark Driscoll.)

So, is Christian music important?

In short, I say no. Or, rather, not as much as we seem to think. I believe music is a nice-to-have for church services, but I don’t believe (as I used to) that it’s imperative. Most of the mainstream evangelical church puts a heck of a lot of stock in it, and I can’t really see why any more. We can use music as a “means of grace” (a way in which we connect with God and experience his grace in an intimate way) but there are plenty of other “means of grace” (I use the term loosely, not as some liturgical churches would use it) which seem to get less airtime. In fact, one of the most legitimately Biblical “means of grace”, the breaking of bread, gets far less airtime in contemporary evangelical churches than music – yet there’s scant reference to music in the New Testament.

In fact, we can’t really know for sure how the early church incorporated music into its worship services (one can build a stronger argument for liturgical practices than for the modern day contemporary service, by the way). If we thought about how we’ve put music on a pedestal in Christian living carefully, we wouldn’t get so easily shocked and shout the “sell-out” label when good musicians want to just be good musicians and make a living off it. Rather than do that, why not find ways to support the arts in our country – because you may not realise just how little support it receives in Corporate South Africa.

After reading the blurb of the book I was left dumbfounded. All I could say was, “Really?” Here’s what it’s about:

“Before its end as a nation, there appeared in ancient Israel nine specific warnings and omens of national destruction – These same nine Harbingers are now manifesting in America with profound ramifications for America’s future and end-time prophecy.

“Hidden in an ancient biblical prophecy from Isaiah, the mysteries revealed in The Harbinger are so precise that they foretell recent American events down to the exact days… the 3,000-year-old mystery that revealed the exact date of the stock market collapse of 2008… the ancient prophecy that was proclaimed from the floor of the US Senate and then came true…and more. The revelations are so specific that even the most hardened skeptic will find it hard to put down. Though it sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller – IT’S REAL.”

I wondered – is this actually fiction and listed in the wrong area? No, it’s not fiction. It’s even got a study guide.

Now I’ve been around and I’m quite aware that many Christians believe that America is some chosen nation of God.  This dates back to some of the Puritan founders. I’m also aware that this sort of thing is nothing new. But what strikes me as dumbfounding is the sheer “mainstreaminess” of it all. Are there really so many Christians out there who have no clue about the Bible that they’ll believe this sort of thing? Why on earth is a book that’s so blatantly non-Biblical so popular and why are so many people in the review section praising it and calling it a good interpretation of scripture?

Here’s what one reviewer said:

“The word of God is faultless,as this book proves… who other than our Father could bring it to pass. Out of the mouths of mere men… amazing download direct from the Spirit.”

That shows me that way too many Christians have lost their way and, rather than really reading the Bible, they’re just going with whatever is popular and whatever is being marketed well. I have no doubt that local publishers will market this book as well and local magazines will give it coverage. I’ve no doubt that many South African Christians will believe it, too. I think that the rest of us, however, can’t ignore this sort of thing – we have to at least make sure that we’re open about why we think this is nonsense and we need to educate our people in our churches about why they shouldn’t believe this sort of thing. Because otherwise the media will educate them and all the media are really about, and I mean the Christian media here too, is making some bucks out of this kind of thing. Truth is unfortunately not on the forefront of why they publish anything.

In my usual meanderings through the Internet I’ve recently come across work from Jeffrey Van Duzer, the business school dean at Seattle Pacific University and a former corporate attorney. He has some interesting things to say, including that maximising profit is not the top priority of business.

In today’s culture, that’s quite a statement! It seems that you really only have two choices when it comes to work and business: (1) Make a lot of money or, (2) If making money doesn’t appeal to you, do something else.

For many, many people, they are very good at what they do but they struggle to buy fully into the culture of the day, and for good reason! It seems, however, that sensible people who are sensible about business and money often feel as if maybe they’re called to something else, since they can’t “play the game” as the world plays it. This leads to us also viewing work and business in a negative light.

But Van Duzer doesn’t say this without offering a healthier alternative worth pondering:

“Probably the most controversial aspect of this view of business is that it relegates profit maximization or increasing shareholder wealth to a means and a constraint rather than a purpose. That doesn’t mean profit is not important. In the business school, we still teach how to run profitable businesses, but profitability is what you need in order to attract the capital that enables the business to do what it should be doing, which is to serve in the ways I mentioned.

“(These are: business… helps provide meaningful and creative work for people to do, which is part of how people express their God-given identity. Two, it produces goods and services that enable communities to flourish.)

“The dominant paradigm says the purpose of business is to maximize profit and increase shareholder value. This approach turns that upside down.

“Profit is like blood in a body. If blood isn’t pumping through your body, we don’t have to talk about your purpose, because you’re dead. Similarly, if profit isn’t flowing through a business, we don’t have to talk about the business’ purpose, because it’s bankrupt. Few of us get up in the morning and say, “Today I’m going to live to circulate blood.” Blood is important, but it’s not our purpose, and similarly for profit.

(Quoted from the website Faith and Leadership)

With my craft, ghostwriting, I’ve often wondered how I can run a profitable business when my heart is actually to just serve people; do stuff for people; use my talents for the community; and enjoy meaningful work. I’ve never been that excited about the bottom-line, about making the money, but more about all that other stuff. But yet I’ve known, somehow, that making money is something I should be interested in doing. Van Duzer’s putting this in a way that really makes sense to me.

It’s worth exploring this more, I think!

Thought Leader / Mail & Guardian has very kindly published a piece of mine called “Science v Religion: Who Cares?”

Read it here: Read Science v Religion: Who Cares?

Comment away at the piece and enjoy! Or don’t enjoy… depending on where you’re at

I’m really enjoying everything that I’m hearing about John Ellis’ new album Come Out Fighting.

You can read a short review here.

For those that don’t know, Ellis used to be the front man for the band Tree63. The band have broken up and now Ellis is embarking on a solo career, which is very different to what fans of Tree63 are used to. Ellis is getting political and I find myself saying, “yeah, now we’re talking.”

John Ellis is talking a lot about protest songs. Since he is South African he is protesting against many of the problems we have in South Africa. I love it.

I think that most people in our country complain and complain but seldom do anything about the problems. Ellis is using his talents to make South Africans think, to challenge their way of life, to kick people out of their moaning chairs and do something, and to shout from the rooftops that things must change. That’s the impression I get and I’m totally with it.

Armchair moaners really do need to move beyond moaning to action, we should all use our talents in some way — even a small way — to make a difference. But most of us just carry on with our lives and our world ends at our front door. Outside of that is someone else’s responsibility. Someone else should do something. I don’t have the time or the resources. What matters is my own prosperity, my own comfort, my own life, and if the outside doesn’t line up with helping me then I’m just going to moan. And we see it as our job to moan, but that’s it.

We have to come out of that mode of thinking.