Seven Stories to Live By Book

This book combines three very disparate strains of Christianity (Pentecostalism, academic theology, A New Christian Manifesto is a fascinating combination of academic theology, Pentecostal theology, and a commitment to serving the downtrodden and social justice. Bob Ekblad has his hands deep into all three of those areas, and represents each of them well. I have rarely seen any two of those covered well by the same person before, and certainly not all three. That alone makes the book worth reading.

The second thing that makes the book worth reading is Bob Ekblad's utter commitment to God and to the truth. You get the very clear impression that Ekblad is chasing after a faith that is real to God, a faith with power, a faith that saves. He is honest about his journey and pursues it in integrity and passion. There is no doubt that he has given his life over to what he believes.

Unfortunately, it's quite a difficult book to read. I'm not sure what it was, but a lot of the parts of the book felt like quite a slog. There's a certain degree of theological abstraction, or perhaps analogy-making, which Ekblad gets into that makes it not exactly an easy read. This may have contributed to the fact that many of the chapters felt the same to me - while each chapter had a clear theme, the actual working-out of that theme had enough similarities that the chapters felt like melding into each other and afterwards I couldn't have told you want the theme of each was or what stories had appeared in each chapter.