In my last book review, I was checking out Kevin Roose’s breakout book, The Unlikely Disciple (read it here) after meeting with him on his turf at Brown University. Kevin then turned around and sent me a book that comes out later this month from his friend, Austin Carty who was a contestant on CBS reality t.v. – Survivor: Panama — Exile Island in 2006.

Although Austin is a Christian author/speaker, I had never heard of him and I have never seen Survivor. I decided to check Google for some videos on Survivor and found a few with small clips with him in them. I would have preferred to rent the season and see what all the hype is all about but since Netflix isn’t carrying it, I figured it’s more trouble than it’s worth to get my hands on it. I settled for an under five minute recap of the entire season that I found on Youtube. It wasn’t particularly enlightening to my research for this post, but you can watch it too if you want a little bit of context.

Austin is from High Point, North Carolina – pretty clever for working that in to his title. His book is a collection of essays that are in no particular chronological order and highlight different times of his life where he was wrestling with life and faith issues. Plume published it, which interestingly enough is a subdivision of Penguin, where my friend Rhiannon was working in London. Penguin’s offices overlook the river Thames, Big Ben and the Eye of London and I got some great photos from a balcony at the top of the building last January.

I have to admit, Austin’s opening chapters really irritated me. In the first chapter, Austin opens by revealing that his journey has been a combination of partying hard and then having seasons of pursuing the Christian lifestyle fairly intensely. That in itself doesn’t really bother me. Many people who have grown up in the church go through those times. I went through my seasons too. He then makes his point that nowadays when he is in a place that serves alcohol, instead of ordering water so that people can see that he’s not drinking, he orders Coca-Cola. He doesn’t want people to know what’s in his glass because it’s between God and him. He also doesn’t want to make a show of the fact that he’s not drinking. Fair enough. However, the question that continues to force it’s way in to my mind is, “Why is he telling me this?” Is it so that I won’t be religious about what I drink? Where I drink? Who I drink with? Or has Austin found a way to be a Christian party boy and be around the same crowd he has always hung out with without having his conscience disturbed by what’s in his glass. I don’t know the answer to these questions because I don’t know Austin. Not having developed himself as a character for his own book, I just think it was a rough way to start a book. Maybe if this chapter were somewhere else in the book, I would feel differently.

All that aside, chapter 2 really irritated me. He talks about evangelistic outreach in a very general way that in my opinion is reckless. For me, this did not improve my impression of his book. Yes, there are some of us out there that have done a bad job representing Christ. However, poking fun at individual evangelists was not his aim. Austin talks about his experience sitting in an evangelistic meeting and feeling the need to respond after the message. He basically says it did nothing for him. He thinks it was not a valid response. I would say — don’t throw the baby out with the bath water! Just because he was confused about his response does not mean that others aren’t reached through traditional evangelistic methods.

Austin criticizes the fact that someone was counting responses. Maybe he doesn’t have a knowledge about how event evangelism is put together, but let me share how we make it happen:

1. Numbers are important to keep track of because it’s diligence in our field. As a member of Luis Palau’s Next Generation Alliance, it is f2fmi’s responsibility to keep our ministry’s statistics. At the end of each year, these numbers get reported back to head office and then we have a snapshot of what evangelists all over the country are doing to reach people for Christ. Since it’s impossible to measure the heart, responses are what we track.
2. It is how our organization gathers resources. Without numbers, there is nothing to show donors as far as results. f2fmi’s donors are excited and engaged by our diligence in keeping track of what we are doing.
3. Finally, numbers are key in retelling the story of salvation as we encourage the church. Nehemiah did it (read the book). The Lord moved him for a cause. Nehemiah asked the king for support and then carried on with his mission. Along the way, he was diligent to record exactly what happened and and reported numbers of people, livestock and even financials. Many times in the Bible you see this model recorded. It’s very Biblical to do our homework

Moving on to the rest of the book, Austin does some great things in some of his other chapters. I enjoyed reading about his awkward years, his relationships with girls and even his ministry experiences. Austin makes some valid points about what it means to live the Christian faith like — pray as if God is a real person without using special religious language, and growing in faith through adversity and loss. These points make the book a decent read.

The book comes out nationally on Jan 26th. You can buy it from Penguin here.

Last month, Nathanael and I drove to Brown University to meet Kevin Roose, the author of The Unlikely Disciple. Kevin’s book chronicled his tell-all journey at Liberty University as an undercover journalist pretending to be “born-again.” The book is just as wild as it sounds.

I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when I traveled to Providence to meet him. I just knew I had to after one of our ministry friends posted an article about the book on her Facebook page. A few months later, when I hung out with my friend Greg Johnson (Intervarsity @Brown University), he said he could probably get a meeting to happen. When he actually called me back with the meeting nailed down, I gotta say that I was impressed.

Relevant Magazine did a feature with Kevin Roose that I used to prepare for my time getting together with him. In it, Kevin summarized five things he learned from being around conservative evangelicals (Issue #41, September/October 2009).

1. The Roman Road is a terrible pick up line. Kevin went on a spring break mission and tried to evangelize students using popular Christian witnessing techniques. Needless to say, he struggled with it and found it wasn’t helping him with the ladies.

2. The physical stuff can wait. Kevin found that by following Liberty’s PDA rules (Public Displays of Affection) he found that he could concentrate more on getting to know someone rather than meeting physical expectations while dating a young woman.

3. All’s fair in self-love and war. Kevin joined a Christian AA group for men who struggled with masturbation on campus called, “Every Man’s Battle.” Kevin was given an accountability partner and tried to live up to the group’s standard. Kevin was conflicted that personal sexuality was given more emphasis than on helping the poor or living a life of service. However, he recognized that the young men in the group were committed to helping each other through their struggles and that equated to Jesus’ commandment to, “love your neighbor as your self…”

4. An unlikely friend. Kevin was able to get the last written interview with Jerry Falwell before he died for the school newspaper. Before coming to Liberty, Kevin and his family were put off by political remarks Falwell has made over the years representing the moral majority. Through his experience, Kevin was able to humanize a guy that he adamantly disagrees with and realize that it is possible to find good qualities in people who are diametrically opposed to our worldview.

5. The God Divide is overrated. Kevin found that Liberty students were just as friend-worthy as his friends at Brown. When returning to Liberty to visit after the book was published, he was worried about how his friends would react to the truth about who he was and why he was at liberty. He found his Christian friends to be forgiving and that, “the American culture gap isn’t nearly as big and forbidding as I once thought…”

I read the book before we went up. I have to say, I loved it! Kevin’s story telling ability and his creativity in finding a story make for a good read – whether you’re a Christian or not. Was I uncomfortable with parts of it? Absolutely. Were conclusions that he made that I wished had come out differently? Sure. However, Kevin’s book did all the things that a good book should do: I laughed, felt suspense, was saddened and was excited with him in his successes. I am impressed with his intellect and his ambition.

Kevin, a senior at Brown, is a pretty carefree guy. We met up at a little cafe too crowded by students to hang around and walked down to a little Mexican restaurant, got some food and sat. We talked a little about the book, but more importantly, we got to know each other. I learned Kevin is a pacifist. He has been overwhelmed with the Christian response to his book and not sure he meant for it to get as much evangelical attention as it has done. He is also serious about his writing and is eagerly looking for what to write about next.

Kevin sent me a book this month by a guy he’s planning on touring with next year. Look for it in my next book report…