10 Books for Christians in Deconstruction and Doubt
When I was seventeen, I started growing in my Christian faith. I went back to church with my girlfriend (now wife) and I was welcomed by her very loving family and her very loving church.
I visited a Christian bookstore at the mall for the first time in my life when I’d only been back in church for a few weeks, and I didn’t know a single author. I just happened to pick up two of the best books I’ve ever read about the Bible — Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods and Howard Hendricks’ Living By the Book. Though I had no idea who the authors were, both men were well-known evangelical leaders. One was a pastor and the other a seminary professor, and twenty years later I would get to serve as a Pastor at Saddleback Church under Pastor Rick’s leadership.
I felt a calling to pastoral ministry when I was still a teenager and started preaching when I was eighteen. By age nineteen, I was serving as the Pastor of a small Baptist church in rural Arkansas, and Angie and I were married and starting our adult lives together. For the next decade and a half, I would be immersed in conservative evangelical culture. I listened to sermons, read books, took classes, and participated in discussions all grounded in fundamentalist thinking.
Transversely, I rarely ever read anything from a source outside the conservative…
