Customer Reviews

Small Footprint, Big Handprint: How to Live Simply and Love Extravagantly

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Tri Robinson pastors a Vineyard church in Idaho, which creatively provides a place for the community recycling and wildland renovation. How did this church come to embody the green movement in a religious culture seen from without as politically conservative? It started with a personal journey to live simply, consuming less. The result was a lifestyle with room enough to share, with time & resources to impact more. Love is the most extravagant gift one can give, a cluttered life can choke it's flow. Tri Robinson made personal life changes to recapture his spiritual roots, his faith community embodies these changes through revitalized community service.

It's refreshing to read about a church leader who is taking seriously the situation of the world and doing something about it. Tri Robinson's refreshing call to action not invites readers to decrease so they can increase their reach and impact. In a world of consumers consumed with themselves, Robinson's book is a like a blast of cold water for a wakeup call, urging people to get their lives under control by living on less so they can spend more time doing things that count long after they're gone.

If you're looking for a book with both practical insights and engaging story telling about those who have embraced this radical Christian lifestyle, this book will leave an unforgettable mark on you.

Tri Robinson felt that his life has gotten too chaotic and complex. He was overcommitted. He was stretched in too many directions. He wanted his life to count - to leave a big handprint on the world. He was the pastor of a rapidly growing church and served as regional director of a hundred churches in nine states. He was traveling the world, teaching seminars and conferences. He owned a country home and ranch, a mountain cabin, and two rental houses.

To be more faithful to God's call, he simplified. He reoriented his life to be an adventure. He hiked through the backcountry of Burma on missions expeditions. He preached to the Karen people of Thailand. He smuggled Bibles into China. He went through the Amazon River basin on a riverboat planting churches. He served Christ in "practical" ways, and he urges us to do the same. He also practices disciplines like spending the first hour of every day in complete silence, raising chickens for eggs, and planting orchards.

As a middle class pastor in the Bible belt, I simply could not connect with Robinson's story. I struggle to make ends meet. I'm raising two small children and am just trying to get a good night's sleep. Neither I - nor anyone else I know - is burdened with the author's affliction of ridiculous prosperity! Those in my sphere of influence are living hand to mouth. I am glad that Mr. Robinson was able to turn his life into an adventure of faith, and I appreciate his encouragement to make my life matter. But I could not think of one person to whom I could recommend this book.

While we need Christians to step up to the plate and speak out meaningfully about climate change, Tri Robinson is not the man for the job. Though he has taken heat for his position as an environmental Evangelical, his approach comes across as disingenuous. Rather than promote true solutions that would cross over to other religions, as global warming is a universal issue, he believes that the Bible, superior to all religious texts, will ultimately bring people together to make change. This position is both naive and potentially harmful, as it concentrates the "solutions" into the hands of a few. (Only a third of the world is Christian.)

The example he cites about helping out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina painted rosy picture of courageous, active Christians, reaching out to a larger community faced with climate crisis, but he fails to address the problem church leaders will have when they draw attention to the end times scenario that global warming poses without putting forth real analysis and preventative strategies. The result is that climate crisis, if left unabated, will draw more people, panicked by the looming disaster, to the Church. Rather than calling for real structural change and actively speaking with people of all beliefs as a peer rather than a converter, Robinson will be reaping the rewards of an enlarged flock who have heard him drawing attention to the situation but have collectively failed to do anything real about it.

Another kind of change he should have emphasized in his book is the need for Christians to cultivate a personal relationship with Christ, as opposed to one that is mediated through a so called expert who speaks for God. He fails to discuss the dangers of that sort of hierarchy, which can allow masses of people to be misled and taken advantage of by those who financially profit from a crisis that they have subtly worked to create/allow and then veiled their profit with good intentions.

His organization worked with FEMA in post Katrina New Orleans, and as he has said, at that time, there was "no church and state," meaning that boundaries were being crossed in the name of humanity, but also, in a more sinister light, it implies that there is a subtle advocacy for governments and Evangelical groups to work together in times of crisis as a means to control populations, increase influence, and further their own agendas.

I had hoped for some sane discourse coming from the Evangelical movement, but Robinson's message is dangerously self serving in spite of all the "good deeds."