Extraordinary: The Good. The Bad. And the Ugly.

For this book John Bevere should have heeded some wise words from my first Camp Director. He said…

"At this camp we do two things. We have fun and we make disciples. If you mess up, then mess up on making disciples. Have fun. At least then the campers will come back next year and someone else can introduce them to Christ. If you try to make disciples at camp and have no fun, you won't succeed at either."

The Good:
Extraordinary focuses on making disciples. There is some great truth hidden in here. His emphasis on God's grace giving us the power to live life differently was well done. I'll steal some for future sermons myself – for sure.

The Bad:
John seems to be a bit hyper-dispensational, seeing Old Testament believers as unable to live the life God now calls us to live. He sees Jesus as raising the bar in the New Testament when He calls us to live a "perfect/holy" life. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what John was teaching, but it seems to me Jesus was not raising the bar, but clarifying where the bar was set. The Pharisees moved it, Christ re-set it.

The Ugly:
Extraordinary reads to me like a collection of poorly organized sermons. With better editing, maybe 25% shorter, this could have been a fun, exciting encouragement of dying to self and allowing Christ to live through you. Instead it was dull.  I kept putting it down, waiting a week, telling myself it couldn't be that bad, trying again, putting it down… There were always paragraphs to mark, good content hidden in the chapters, but getting there was work. John is a better author than this – don't let this sour you on his other books.

I received this book free from Multnomah Books for review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. DanielCooley.com