I know a church pastor who sometimes encourages his staff to pretend they are visitors during a Sunday morning service. "Walk into this place like it is the very first time. Don't take anything for granted. Look for proper signage, décor and whether or not the bathrooms are clean, consider how the greeters treat you, and observe how difficult it is to find your children's Sunday School Class." The goal is to discover the issues that the church is ignoring because of familiarity, to take care of family dysfunctions obvious to outsiders that perhaps the church has grown tolerant, if not strangely comfortable with.
Sometimes it is very helpful to have a new pair of unbiased eyes catch what you may be missing. Organizations and businesses hire people to critique their services or their products. But when a company knows that a consultant is showing up they put their best foot forward. When a restaurant is expecting a food critique for dinner the chef and wait staff perform to a different standard than normal. The best case for unbiased feedback is when you don't know that it is coming. That is why Liberty University should be so appreciative of Kevin Roose's book, "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University."
Kevin, on his own (crazy) initiative, took a semester off from college at (liberal) Brown University to experience an extremely different lifestyle than he'd ever known-right at the heart of fundamentalism- Jerry's Falwell's flagship megachurch, Thomas Road Baptist, and its accompanying university. Instead of viewing evangelical Christianity from the outside the glass, Kevin decided to jump into the fish bowl himself. He actually found that swimming with the fishes didn't kill him. He even discovered, with the discipline the Christians called prayer, that he could breathe.
This isn't to say that Kevin went to Liberty without an agenda. From the beginning this was a writing project- a daring, potentially life altering writing project. Yet I didn't experience the story as one that had a pre-scripted concept like a Michael Moore documentary. Kevin knew that he would have to act the part of a born-again believer in order to blend into life on campus, yet he didn't go about this as a cold war spy. He went to Liberty "to learn with an open mind, not to mock Liberty students or the evangelical world." And learn he did- pouring himself into his classes, clubs, dorm life, church attendance, and real, meaningful relationships with both staff and peers. He even faced his own concepts about God, Jesus, scripture and sin, realizing that he was on a personal quest as well. He is honest with his own journey, and the book is worth reading just with that in mind.
What did he find? It would spoil it to share here in a review. This is a story that is best read cover to cover, from the day that he pulls up to Liberty with a new, silver, Jesus fish on his bumper, to the day that he leaves, right after Reverend Falwell's funeral. I found myself cheering and hoping, grimacing and pondering throughout.
Who should read, The Unlikely Disciple?
* Any Christian who wonders how the un-indoctrinated view believers and their practices
* Anyone preparing to be an pastor, evangelist, missionary, or Christian educator - especially in a post-modern society
* Anyone planning to go to a Christian university (you'll understand the pros and cons of these institutions better after reading Kevin's book)
* Anyone on staff at Liberty University
* Liberals who have made sweeping generalizations about fundamentalist Christianity without honestly investigating it themselves.
* Anyone who wants to read a tremendously thought provoking and highly entertaining story.
Will you agree with it all? Of course not. Will you find many answers? Kevin doesn't even try to figure them all himself. But if you read his journey with an open heart you will undoubtedly wince a few times, have your feelings rattled, and come to better, more compassionate understanding of other people, especially those on the other side of the fish bowl from you.
P.S. I can't wait for the sequel when Kevin becomes part of the Focus on the Family staff in Colorado Springs.
