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.