Help me pick a subtitle for my book

I’ve been experimenting with different subtitles for my book Mercy not Sacrificeand I’m very interested in your opinion. I think I’ve narrowed the focus to critiquing and offering suggested alternatives for the “getting saved” phenomenon that predominates evangelicalism. So my audience is going to primarily be “Blue like Jazz” type evangelicals. But I’d love to package it in such a way so that mainliners or non-believers could get something out of it. I realize the subtitle isn’t that big a deal but I’m going to keep on mulling it over until I pick one so help me by choosing one of the following or proposing your own. Continue reading

Salvation from “getting saved”: the first 6000 words

Getting saved. These two words describe the best-selling product of one of the most successful industries of the last half-century: the American evangelical church. If it were a publicly traded company, investors who bought shares in the early 1970’s would be looking at capital gains of some thousand-fold at this point. Mainline Christians and Catholics get confirmed; Orthodox do whatever they do; but evangelicals, we get saved. And some of us, at least according to twitter, get #oversaved (look it up). The way that you prove you’ve been saved is through your zeal to get other people saved. It’s a genius business model, if that’s your goal. I happen to think that the mystery of Christ we are called to embody has been painted over by a man-made commodity we’ve been given to consume. Continue reading