Fire of Love: Encountering the Holy Spirit Book

Jesus Driven Ministry is one of those books that seems like it should be a good read. Looking at the title and even looking at the chapters I would not see anything I disagreed with. There are plenty of good ideas that Ajith Fernando is building off of here. How he builds off of those foundations I found much more mixed. He still does have good insights off of these foundations, but there is also much that I didn't really agree with.

The main flaw of the book that sends it down the wrong direction, in my opinion, is that it takes the idea of ministry and only really connects it with professional clergy. This to me is a rather large mistake and I think is cause for a lot of my disagreement with him in other places in the book. Good leadership is important, but a Jesus driven ministry isn't only about leaders.

Another thing I didn't really like about the book is the tone of the book. It one of those books where you feel like the author is giving you a lecture. This is what you should do. He does in some places try to lower himself into the mess of life, but these attempts just never wind up feeling very convincing and don't last all that long.

I also wasn't a big fan of how he handled the Holy Spirit. While I liked that he positioned the chapter early on in the book, he focuses only on the Spirit as giver of power and boldness. He misses a major chance to talk about the Spirit as shaping our character and how we interact with the world. You know the Fruit of the Spirit? That's not really mentioned at all, which I find strange because in a later chapter he talks about how power isn't all that's needed, but then expounds it again in a later chapter. It seems that he has a great focus on power, but I'm not sure that it is a good focus.

There are other little things that I just found off about the book. He tends to focus on postmodernism as the cause of negativity rather than the human sin that has been around for much longer than that. He also criticizes practical books on ministry in chapter 6, but fails to realize he's writing one. The worst was probably his one story about the Bible. He talks about how he was preoccupied with war that was going on in his country and maybe a little grumpy. He then recalls how his wife told their kids rather passive-aggressively that maybe Daddy needed to read his Bible because he was grumpy.

This to me is just not a good story to tell about the importance of the Bible. The Bible isn't this magic salve that makes us not grumpy. The Bible is full of laments and times when people were preoccupied about war, the state of their country, being exiled from their country and while most of those do ultimately show trust in the Lord the emotions aren't dismissed either. You never see someone being told they need to read the Bible to not feel a certain way.

Now that I've mentioned some of the things that bothered me about the book, I want to give some of the positives as well. Now admittedly all of these are a little flawed in my mind because of his focus only on leadership, but they're still useful for a wider audience as well. One of the insights that I found good was that a leader saying "I don't know" or "I was wrong" is a good and healthy thing, not a weakness or a way of losing their authority. I think this is super important today. We need to be able to admit our limits and that we may be wrong. In a day where so many people seem willing to double-down on their errors, this advice is gold.

I also found his insights on visiting other people's homes useful. While I wasn't sure about all of this points in it. I think that he is right in saying that doing this develops important connections. I wouldn't necessarily put that all in the lap of the pastor, but I think as the community of faith visiting and investing in others is an important way to help each other build and develop our faith.

Also as I said at the beginning I found all of the ideas that he builds off of to be fairly good. I wouldn't be able to read a chapter title and say that's a bad idea. So he is clearly going in some good directions, the details are just a little more shaky.

Overall, I must say I didn't particularly enjoy this book. In part because I had some high hopes for it, but the book fell short of those expectations. I'm sure that not everyone will have the critiques I have for the book and it may be worth checking it out for yourself. However, if my critiques resonate than you may want to pass this book by. I don't think it will be a book I am keeping in my collection.