Real Church - Larry Crabb

My prompting for reading this book involved my daughters, and, to a smaller degree, my wife and me. My daughters are hungry for a place that talks to and feeds them, spiritually. They also need a place to worship and commune with folks of their own age. Therefore, when I saw this book, I felt it would be beneficial. The sub-title also led me in this path, which reads "Does it exist?" and "Can I find it?". So I got the book.

Personally, this was a very hard book for me to read and finish. I put it down numerous times with the the thought being that I would not/could not finish it.

I had a very difficult time getting past the "I don't want to go to church" statement at the beginning of this book. That correctly led me to the conclusion that this book would be another church bashing exercise, and sadly, I was right.

I felt that Larry Crabb spent a lot of time talking down church in general. I felt that the author made too many assumptions on the past iterations of the church. I felt that his impressions of what the church should be was not really documented as it should have been in his writing. His scriptural references were not solid, and were too sparse to be of consequence. For the most part, his references during what could be controversial sections were absent.

I also had difficulty with his parenthetical comments. To me, it was almost as if he should have melded his parenthetical comments with his actual comments to arrive at a better statement. Instead, they were divergent and therefore made the reading more difficult.

Honestly, I feel that that while Satan can influence a church to be quite off with respect to the Bible, I feel that the driving decision point for a person attending or not attending a church (defined in the classic sense: a body of believers meeting as one in a certain location) should be doctrine. Larry Crabb does not teach this.

This book was a complete disappointment and I cannot recommend that anyone read it, especially new believers. It may be only the second book I discard. The other book would be the Book of Mormon.