Apocalypse How: Baptist Movements During the English Revolution Book

I enjoyed this book, but it wasn't life changing on the whole, some chapters I felt like skipping thorough. However, there were one or two chapters that really spoke to me.

I love the fact though that that the book is about a personal Jesus, one who wants a deep relationship with us.

Hall writes near the beginning of a conversation with a youth group member who had been in college for a few months:

" "Man, I need help," he said, his voice almost a quiver. "These professors are pounding me. The entire culture here is mocking everything I heard you say."

He spent the next several minutes asking questions, though one unsettled me more than any of the others. He told the story of an assertion someone made in class that left him too befuddled to reply, which is why he had called me for help.

"Now, what do I believe about that again?" he asked.

Less than a year after leaving the cosy spiritual nest of our church group, where everyone shared the same beliefs and lingo, he was facing the white-hot furnace of a hostile universe and its ungodly worldviews. And he folded like paper in fire.

He didn't have his own Jesus. "

This part resonated with me because it is a fear that my children will be able to parrot their handed-down beliefs, but when they step out into the big wide world they may find that you cannot live off someone else's beliefs. But, it is good to have that fear - my children need Jesus, not me (as Mark Hall puts in one of his songs, "We can't strap ourselves to the gospel because we are slowing it down"). This also fitted in with the parts of the other book I've just read 'Why Christian Kids Rebel'.

I need this for me too. I need my own relationship with Jesus. Not a predigested relationship given to me from the pulpit. I need to know him for myself, I need to walk with him and to know him. He isn't a theory, a philosophy, he is real.