I finished Jen Hatmaker’s book, Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity this morning. Her writing style seems similar to mine – a little sarcastic, a little crazy. It’s one of those books that you want to buy a whole case of and hand out to people. At least it was for me.

Jen’s name started showing up first when a friend mentioned her blog, www.jenhatmaker.com, then I saw an ad for their HGTV show, My Big Family Renovation, and then someone mentioned her books and even last week an excellent post about raising brave children from Women of Faith showed up in my Inbox. So I’m considering this Divine Suggestion.

Jen’s not the regular pastor’s wife-again that voice is a bit sarcastic-but you cannot fault her heart for Jesus and her obvious love for “poor people”. Even Jen recommends this book over some of her others (which I’ll be reading) as the “most relevant and vital to my generation”. Interrupted broke my heart with some statistics about where today’s church looks to be headed: “…roughly 62 percent of all unchurched adults were formerly churched…approximately half of all American churches did not add one new person through conversion growth last year…94  percent of churches either were not growing or were losing ground in the communities they serve…most outsiders are not anti-church (our gospel isn’t provocative enough to incite backlash anymore); they simply dismiss the church as irrelevant to their real lives since it seems mostly irrelevant to the people who go there” (emphasis added).

Don’t assume this is a “preachy” book. It so is not. It’s her journey, not only of a conviction, but of her heart. I highly recommend it. But be prepared. It may interrupt your life too.

P.S. I’ll find something written by Shane Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution) too. Anyone who can preach a sermon that convicts 2 Texans to give up their relatively new cowboy boots to put shoes on the feet of Austin’s homeless and walk barefoot out of church one Easter…well, I want to read something he wrote.