I’m not sure if we ever fully know ourselves. Sometimes when we think we are strong, we have a moment of weakness and humiliation that catches us totally by surprise. But if there is one thing that I have come to learn about myself, and I learn it all the more the older I get, it is that my heart is utterly untameable. I have these moments sometimes, when I’m not sure what I’m capable of, and I wonder if I’d ever have the courage (or audacity is more likely) to follow the wildness where it would take me. Maybe you’ve had this feeling before, like I have so many times: you’re on your way to work, to plow through the mundaneness of another day, driving down a long stretch of highway, with the crystal clear blue sky above and the sun at your back, and you become overwhelmed with a mad desire to keep going and not look back. You really wonder what it would be like to disappear, leaving all of your worries behind in a cloud of dust. If you read this scenario and you have no clue what I’m talking about, then I am not writing to you. You won’t understand a word of what I’m saying. Perhaps you were like me once, but you have sufficiently tamed your heart and beat it into submission so that these feelings can’t surface anymore. Or maybe you are like me, but instead of guiding your heart with reason, you followed your heart wherever it wanted to go and you found yourself even more unhappy than before. I always fall somewhere in the middle, and I find myself punching the time clock for another day, quickly and quietly stuffing inside the feelings of unpredictability, even scolding myself for stirring up my own emotions of discontent.

One of my dear friends and fellow writers started a blog about two years ago for a closely knit community of women whose hearts all share a common dream for the body of Christ. For some time, many of us have been unsettled about the structure of the Modern Church with its lack of community, vulnerability, discipleship and accountability. We’re part of a generation that has become restless and resistant toward the status quo of Church. We feel called to be a part of a movement that is slowly and steadily pushing the pendulum back toward its equilibrium, a middle ground that attempts to avoid extremes, ignorance and exclusion. The Modern Church is quickly losing resonance with the contemporary culture, and we see that as a problem rather than a healthy result of being separate from the world. We’ve begun our own conversation, our own pursuit of Truth, joining the hands with other believers that have already begun to pave the road ahead of us, like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell.

If there is only one point that you might glean from this book, it is that Christianity is so much more than just a religion. In fact, one could argue that Christianity was never meant to be an organized religion at all. Christ defied all the boundaries of the current religion of his day, so it’s unlikely that he meant for us to replace the religion that he defied with a new religion containing the same old problems. The problem with religion in particular is that it tends to create blinders, blinders that prevent us from seeing Truth as a whole, as an integrated concept that pervades every area of our lives. Religion creates a dichotomy between the heart and mind, between the sacred and the secular, or in Modern America, between what is Christian and what is not.