Jonathan Martin’s Prototype: Salvation as the Restoration of Humanity

It’s a strange and beautiful thing to hear someone preaching your own thoughts in a sermon. That’s what happened for me last summer when I heard Pentecostal preacher Jonathan Martin‘s sermon series “The Songs of Ascent” about King David and the Psalms. My whole life, I have been on a journey of trying to understand the nature of worship. Growing up Baptist, I was instilled with a zeal for sincerity in worship. What is the difference between truly worshiping God and putting on a performance? In one sermon last summer, Jonathan said that King David’s worship was to delight in the discovery of God’s delight in him. This beautiful way of framing things is at the heart of Jonathan’s new book Prototype, which I would buy and ship to every Christian who has been wounded or disillusioned by the church if I had the money.

Review: The Awakening of Hope by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

The Awakening of Hope, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s new book, is a breath of fresh air in a time when American Christians are in need of hope. We’ve been through a bitter election season. War continues to rage in the Middle East. The problems of our government seem intractable. Wilson-Hartgrove’s book offers what I would call an incarnational catechesis to tell us how to live as people of hope. Rather than talking about Christian doctrine in the abstract, he organizes his catechesis as the explanation of different spiritual disciplines, offering a “corrective to our belief-only Christianity,” as Shane Claiborne writes in the foreword.