Thanks for stopping by! I'm Cori and I'm happy you've found your way here. If you're wondering why my blog is called "Let's Eat Grandpa," it's an old grammar joke: Let's eat, grandpa! Let's eat grandpa! (Punctuation saves lives.) 
This can’t really be qualified as a book review because I haven’t come anywhere close to finishing this book. I joined an online community called The Ooze Viral Bloggers. Each month, you can select one book, generally related to the more progressive end of Christianity, and they’ll send it to you for free if you blog about it within thirty days. Sounds awesome, right? I thought so, so I signed up.
I chose So Beautiful by Leonard Sweet:
More than 50 years ago scientists made a remarkable discovery, proclaiming, “We have found the secret of life – and it’s so pretty!” The secret? That life’s biological code is helixical, two strands surrounding a single axis-the foundation for DNA. This design, Sweet proposes, points to an even deeper – and more poignant – secret.
Just as DNA’s three strands make life possible, three other elements work in harmony to make life not just pretty, but beautiful. And it’s in the church where we find the greatest expression, and ultimate fulfillment, of these three components to a beautiful life.
The Good Doctor Sweet presents an extraordinary look at life as it was intended to be lived, sharing secrets of God’s design for God’s people in three interwoven elements that form the heart, soul and calling of the apprenticed-to-Jesus life. In the spirit of radical inquiry – from radix, going to the root –So Beautiful unearths God’s deep-rooted dreams for the church after his own heart. Recommended for missional, organic, and house church provocateurs, as well as open-minded emerging church folks.
I’ve had Sweet’s book for a while now, and I’ve picked it up several times to read it — I’m about fifty pages in now. The other reviews of it have been fabulous, but I can’t seem to get into the meat of it. I think it’s because I haven’t read a lot about “church theory” so there is a lot of language and structure I’m struggling through. It feels very academic, and I’m not sure I ever learned to speak “church academic.” As you can see from my blog, I read a lot, so I’m struggling because I can’t make this work in my brain. I find myself reading and rereading sentences to try and get what Sweet is trying to say and wondering if I’m missing something huge. I know that there is some good stuff in there. I come across nuggets like these, and they make me want to understand further:
“And the church that is incarnational prays every day a colonizing prayer: ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ Every Christian is a colonizer: We are colonizing earth with heaven. We are creating ‘colonies’ of heaven not Christian-coated mirror cities.”
In reference to evangelism: “[stop] thinking of bringing Christ to India . . . but rather [start] thinking about finding Christ alraedy there.”
“There is no spiritual life. There is only life. One life where the spiritual is not separate but the whole.”
I wanted to post about this before my thirty days was up. I’m going to keep going through it, hoping that God will make Sweet’s writing more clear to me, because I can feel there is some real truth in there and I’d like to dig it out. I’ll write a complete review when I’ve finished it up and can take a step back and view it as a whole.
