Here on the Christian Book Club we are finishing up our reading of “Velvet Elvis”. I think it has been an interesting book. Some of the reviews on the book were a little rough. I never felt threatened by the ideas that Bell tossed out. I appreciated his willingness to discuss and talk through the ideas presented in scripture. I also really enjoyed how he related things back to Jewish culture. We miss so much of the meaning of the Bible because we don’t have an understanding of the culture in which most of the Bible was written.
I also enjoyed his discussion of the church on page 165. I agree with Bell that the church is at its best when it is giving itself away. When the church becomes a blessing to the world by serving the world it has a great potential to impact the world. I look forward to your comments as you wrap up your reading of the book.
I have decided to make a change in the order of our reading. I have had a lot of requests for us to read “The Shack”. The book has really stirred up some excitement so we are going to push the book up from February to November. We will just push the other books back one month. People either seem to love “The Shack” or really not love it. If you don’t have a copy of “The Shack” go ahead and get it ordered. It has been so popular you can probably borrow a copy from someone. Tell them about the Christian Book Club and maybe they will join us for the discussion. I will put a link for “The Shack” on this page for your convenience.
We are writing a quick site maintenance post to update you about some progress on the Google search engine for the keywords Christian Book Club. After months of being a page 15 result on Google, we finally moved up to page six. Our hope now is that it will continue to make progress toward page 1. While this is a fairly competitive keyword, we believe the site has what it takes to be a page 1 return. At one point the site was showing up on page 1 but then it got tossed out for a while and finally re-emerged on page 15. Now we are on page 6 in position 51.
We will be adding some very regular content for a while to see if we can keep the site moving up. The site has continued to show up as a page 1 MSN result, but the traffic levels from MSN are very small compared to Google. If the site gets to page 1 the traffic increase will be significant. It has been our hope and prayer that we would be able to have people join us in our monthly book club reading from the time we started this site. Our hope now is that we are on the way to achieving that goal.
On Christian Book Club we are continuing our reading of “Velvet Elvis”. I think that this is a very interesting read. I get why it has some people stirred up. There have already been a couple of times when I could feel myself getting a little defensive as I read the book. One example was when he wrote about the virgin birth. He certainly affirms his belief in the orthodoxy of the Christian faith, but when he is submitting the questions is still gets me a little excited. Ultimately, I think it is a very positive experience to be challenged. I don’t want to be stuck in “brickianity”. Let me know if any of Bells ideas have got you thinking. I look forward to your comments as we continue our reading. This week you should be well in into Movements 5 and 6.
