A weird thing is happening.
Chris Rock was right.
I once read an article where the famous comedian discussed why humor is such a powerful vehicle for life change. Rock essentially said that humor allows you to say things that people wouldn’t otherwise listen to unless they were laughing at the same time.
And in a weird way, that’s starting to happen with the Stuff Christians Like book. I don’t know about you, but I am usually pretty apprehensive to give a friend who isn’t a Christian a book about Christ. It’s not that I am ashamed of the gospel or terrified of witnessing it’s just I fear that in one of the chapters I missed in the book there’s going to be a paragraph about the myriad benefits of snake handling.
As if even though I’ve read it, there’s a chapter in the book that starts with the sentence, “Here’s the thing you need to remember about handling burlap sacks full of pit vipers …”
That’s dumb, I agree, but for a while I haven’t had a book I felt good giving out like bits of small pocket candy. But something weird is happening with the Stuff Christians Like book. For some reason, since it’s a satire, people are willing to talk to me about Christ and the church. I get into very honest, open conversations that I wouldn’t otherwise be in if it weren’t for humor.
Just last night I told a table of 8 coworkers about booty, God, booty and what it means to not live a consistent life of faith. It was crazy and in some unexpected ways, the book is actually a good conversation starter. And I honestly didn’t intend that as some sort of master witnessing plan, I just tried to write a book that was faithful to the flow of the site and what God’s doing in my own life.
It’s not magic. Despite the introduction promising, “If you buy this book, God will make you rich,” I don’t think the Gideons will ever place it in hotel night stands to spoon with the Bible. (For the record, my book would prefer to be “little spoon” in that scenario.) But my hope is that if you read Stuff Christians Like and dig it you’ll have a chance to share it with someone who doesn’t know the Lord.
Why? I think Relevant Magazine’s recent review summed up the book and it’s real purpose better than I can. In the Stuff Christians Like book, “all of the inside jokes and coined phrases add up to a message for the Church to give themselves some slack, because we worship a God who “came for us, the broken, the beaten, the severely messed up.”
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