Customer Reviews

Sailing Acts

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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Linford Stutzman's Sailing Acts: Following an Ancient Voyage is a book of facts as interesting as fiction. In it, the author presents specific data about the apostle Paul, his journeys, and, incidentally, some sailing techniques. There is a wealth of information in the book, all of which is important to understanding how it feels to follow in the footsteps of one of the first missionaries of the Christian faith.

Sailing Acts is arranged in chronological order from the time when Stutzman first considered this voyage to its completion years later. It records the struggles in getting time to take the trip, buying the boat, and navigating through Paul's missions. The pace, like that of a sailboat, is slightly varied yet always interesting. It feeds the imagination as well as the logical mind with adventure and contemplation of life in another time.

Part of the charm of Sailing Acts is the personal touch Stutzman brings by telling his own story. It is not just that the apostle Paul had hard times when he took his voyages. It is not even that others after him found it difficult. It is the storyteller himself who works to make the trip a success, and he knows first hand what struggles, exertions, and blessings it takes to succeed. The reader feels as though he is there along with him, worrying about boat prices and getting through customs. The people seem real and ready for conversation. Weather in the Mediterranean takes on a whole new significance, and Paul takes on new realism. This realism and immediacy stem not so much from facts, but from the story of experiences.

As a professor of religion at Eastern Mennonite University, Stutzman has authority to speak about the facts of Paul's life and travels. His knowledge is woven together with his impressions of the people, places, and stories he encounters to form a solid image of what it might have been like for Paul as he made these same journeys nearly two thousand years before. Passages of Scripture that used to seem dead and boring come alive when the subject is examined from a real-life perspective. - Linette Yoder, Christian Book Previews.com

Reading SailingActs is like climbing on board the sailboat with Linford and Janet Stutzman and traveling with the Apostle Paul on his first century A.D. missionary journeys. This very readable book vividly teaches about the history and culture of the Mediterranean regions that the Apostle Paul visited by relating adventures and misadventures of the Stutzman's 15-month journey.

SailingActs can be used as an inspiring devotional book as well as an adventure story. The author shares biref spiritual insights as he discovers more about Paul's life and his own spiritual quest.

Stutzman's humor, his descriptions of his fellow travelers in the sailing community, and his entertaining first-hand accounts made me wish that the journey would go on and on!

I've always loved traveling books. As a kid I read Peter Jenkins' Walk Across America and The Walk West and really wanted to do something like that myself. I've read Bruce Feiler's books (Walking the Bible, Abraham, and Where God Was Born) and again wanted to do it myself. Even Sunday Money with its trip around the country following the boys of NASCAR was enough to make me want to buy an RV and roll. I enjoy travel, even though I get to do so little of it anymore.

SailingActs is Linford Stutzman's account of the journey he and his wife took throughout the Mediterranean following the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul. From the purchase of their boat, christened the SailingActs, to each port of call that they (and Paul before them) make, to the end of the journey 15 months later, we sail with the Stutzmans to Israel, Turkey, and Greece in a quest to find out more about the man who brought the Gospel to the Gentiles.

Stutzman gains some valuable insights into the hazards of travel on the Mediterranean, hazards that were there in Paul's day just as they are today. Bad weather, government officials and their red tape, delays, the potential of shipwreck; Stutzman faced all of that, just as the apostle did thousands of years before.

I appreciate that Stutzman doesn't sugar-coat any part of the journey. When problems crop up, he tells about them. When parts break, we get to see just how hard it is to buy boat parts when you don't know the local language and the parts are for an older boat. The Bible only tells us of a few of the difficulties Paul faced in his journeys, but it's clear that there were a LOT more hurdles that he faced, but didn't write about.

The saddest part, for me, were the stops in Turkey. Turkey has a rich history of Christian ministry; the churches listed in Revelation chapters two and three were in Turkey, churches in that part of the world were instrumental in the early formation of Christianity. But the people there are ignorant of that part of their history. They don't know who Paul was, or what the big deal was about him. Everyone in Greece knows Paul, and honors him, but in Turkey (where he spent just as much time), he's an enigma. People are missing out on a major part of their heritage, and it's a shame.

SailingActs is an outstanding account of a tremendous journey. In the tradition of Feiler and Jenkins, Stutzman goes beyond a simple travelogue and learns to identify with Paul even as he learns more about him.

Sailing Acts is simply wonderful- an inspiring book that often I could not put down. Perfect for lovers of travel, religion, history, sailing or those who just love a great book. Highly recommended!

This book combines two of my favorite topics, sailing and biblical history/geogrpahy. The sailing stories provide a great travel log and cover some of the pitfalls of dealing with international bureaucracy. The biblical geography stays away from deep theology and provides a great understanding of what travel may have been like in the Roman Empire era Mediterranean.

I am a sailor and was interested in the book from a sailing as well as a Biblical angle. I particularly enjoyed the description of the social and political atmosphere in which Paul lived. Frequently the Roman Empire descriptions are ignored when refering to the first century.

I got started reading and literally couldn't put the book down. Marvin and I disembarked at Kusadasi when sailing from Italy to Israel in 1972.
That's really the only "connection" to SA that we have, except for being
in Israel for 6 weeks, but the memories came back vividly while
reading. Prompts me to pull out our old slides and spend the
evening, sometime soon, re-living and arguing with Marvin over
where we were and what actually happened! Reading the book was almost like being there, and since we have known one another for so many years, I especially enjoyed the descriptions of Lin and Janet's interpersonal .......um........"discussions" (smile). I felt like a fly on the wall!!! The most profound impact of the book was the dawning of the idea of just how passionate Paul was about the good news he preached, and to what lengths he was willing to go to preach it. It truly brought Acts alive to me in a way I've never experienced before.

Having traveled to some of the places spoken of in this book, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It is best read with a Bible in hand in order to follow Paul's account of his journeys. I would commend it to anyone.

The author did a wonderful blending of visiting current locations of Paul's travels with discriptions of how locations looked and what took place in Paul's time.

This book follows an American couple sailing the Mediterranean sea as they retrace some of the Apostle Paul's journeys by sea. The premise is a good one and there are lots of colour photographs to help with the storytelling which switches between discussions of the boat, visiting various sites by foot or moped, talking with local people about their knowledge of St Paul, overwintering in Israel and other musings. The book starts with his purchase of a boat, a British-built Westerly 33 ketch, with the inevitable difficulties with language and registration for an American buying a boat in Greece and registering it as a US boat. However the book soon moves on to the actual journeys in the newly-christened yacht SailingActs.

The travels of the author were always interesting and for an armchair sailor or tourist they evoked wonderful images of sun, sea, ancient ruins and exploration. The links to the journeys of Paul sometimes seemed rather tenuous - for example "Today is my birthday. I have a feeling I will not forget this one for a while. Paul had a number of birthdays in the Aegean. Who knows, maybe even his 54th." It felt like he had to mention Paul whenever possible because that was the purpose of the book and his Sabbatical, even when it seemed rather contrived. However there are lots of interesting comments where he talks to the local Greek and Turkish people about the journeys of Paul and whether they knew of the Apostle; it's clear that the Greeks are very proud of Paul's part in their history and heritage although the Turkish people were generally unfamiliar with Paul, which is not too surprising for a Muslim country.

There isn't that much about the actual sailing in this book, although the author does include information about the various maintenance headaches consistent with an older boat such as this, so this isn't a book that would appeal to a sailor who had no interest in Paul. Equally there wasn't any great theological exploration or biblical insight but I did find his discussions with local people about the position of Paul in their culture illuminating. The book wasn't even a real travelogue, not giving very much detail about the individual places he visited on land, most of the Greek and Turkish villages merging into one another within the narrative. It worked more as a general book for those interested in both Paul and in sailing and who enjoy imagining life on a boat, then and now.

This book would have benefited from more stringent copy editing. In the first few chapters the boat manufacturer Beneteau is spelled Benentau, the CQR anchor is called CRQ throughout, a British person says a sentence using American English, the Areopagus is spelled Aeropogus in some places but correctly elsewhere, and there are several more errors of this kind that were rather irritating. However I was impressed by the author's cosmopolitan and broadminded attitude, one not often found in American travellers to Europe; he was able to put aside (most of the time at least) his American worldview and culture and to try to understand the cultures in which he was travelling and appreciate the good things in the different countries. This is a book that would appeal to sailors who also have an interest in Greece or in the journeys of Paul but it doesn't work entirely well for those who are just interested in one of those items; overall, however, it showed how tempting it is to voyage in the Med and made me wonder if one day we'd take our boat down there.

Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book © Helen Hancox 2007