This week, I had a new experience as I began reading one of the texts assigned for a class I’m taking at Sewanee. I had ordered the book Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art many weeks ago when the professor’s reading list was shared, put it on the stack of books for summer studies, and didn’t think much about it. I opened it up this week and dutifully started reading chapter one, entitled The Twentieth Century: Challenges and Failures in the West. Ok, I thought to myself, the style of preaching this writer addresses springs from a need to address the challenges Christianity has faced over the last Century. Whatever. I enjoyed reading, but as I finished the chapter, I realized it contained nothing about preaching – no reference to the homiletical endeavor or an attempt to chart a course for the text that would get me there. It seemed odd, so I double-checked the front and back cover to ensure my expectations weren’t misaligned. I verified that this was very much a book on preaching. Nonetheless, it didn’t feel right, so I glanced at the front materials and immediately saw a problem. The Copyright was to a different author. The citation was a different title. I flipped back a couple of pages – the title page was for a different book by a different author. I looked at the contents page and did not see anything about preaching. I was in such studying mode that I dove right into the book without looking at those parts. (Plus, many academic texts we read for these classes contain prefaces that tell me what each chapter will contain; I generally don’t need to spend time on the preview if I’m about to read the whole book!) It turns out the book’s cover, a brand new book, had been put over and around the contents of an entirely different book from an altogether different publisher that doesn’t seem to be affiliated with the one stated on the cover. I have no idea how that happened. Fortunately, I downloaded the original book to my Kindle and read it anyway.

I’ve had books with printing errors, and I once bought a novel that was missing the last 150 pages or so, where the publisher had simply reprinted the preceding 150 pages. But to have a complete misalignment of book and cover seems strange. No doubt the printer is the common thread between the two publishers, and I wonder if there are readers who bought Alister McGrath’s The Future of Christianity only to be surprised why a Presbyterian professor seems to be writing about exegeting (translating or expounding upon) the sub-cultures of a congregation?!?!I was going to return the book to Amazon, but it’s past the return window, and now that I read the first chapter, I want to keep reading McGrath’s text. In his first chapter, he details a series of 20th-century events that presented significant challenges to the faith as humans were forced to wrestle with events, moments, or seasons that did not align with our Christian expectations or understandings. They include the Armenian Genocide of 1915 the death of over 1.5 million Armenian Christians, which many Churches were (and still are) silent about. He covers the forceful imposition of atheism in Stalinist Russia in the decades before WWII. He details the failure of cultural Protestantism in Nazi Germany, where the power of political alignment took a primary place of importance for so many faithful Christians over and above a commitment to faith in Jesus Christ and his gospel. His final element, which stands apart from the others in some ways, is simply “The 1960’s.” The cultural upheaval of those years, the end of the traditional forms of translating faith from one generation to the next, and the fear that Christianity was dying and must, therefore, reinvent itself reshaped Western Christianity in ways we’re still dealing with. According to some theologians and Christian thinkers of the 19th Century, the 20th Century was expected to be a time of tremendous growth and flourishing in Christianity. It wasn’t. As we enter the 21st Century, we see the opposite in many ways. The last thought in that first chapter notes the need to look outside the Western experience and investigate what’s going on in global Christianity – where the faith has, in fact, flourished in some places. McGrath notes one theologian who wrote thirty years ago suggesting that Pentecostalism seemed to be the future of Christianity. That fits with everything I’ve heard and read, too, including all of the international homiletics professors who spoke to us in one of last year’s classes at Sewanee. When I finally get around to exegeting Christ Church for this year’s class, there won’t be a lot of Pentecostalism in the final report, to be sure. I must put McGrath aside for now; I have too many other texts to get through in the coming days. The rest of them do have matching covers, though – I checked - and will probably check every book from now on, as unlikely as it may be that there would be a similar error. So, books aren’t always what we expect, and historical expectations aren’t always what we expect. Come to think of it, God isn’t always what we expect, either. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere. I just don’t have time to ponder it at the moment. It’s time to start reading another book. We’ll see where that one takes me.Tom+Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.Photo Credits: Book cover via Amazon.com; Books via Dreamstime.com subscription.