Crazy Love
by Francis Chan
David C Cook, Colorado Springs, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4347-6851-3

Francis Chan is the pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, California and Crazy Love is his first book. He has since published a second book titled Forgotten God; Reversing Our Tragic Neglect Of The Holy Spirit. Chan has quickly become one of my favourite authors. Look for a review of his second book soon but, for now, back to Crazy Love. The book is something of a critique on church life in North America today, but don’t let that put you off because the life of the church, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses, is a pretty universal picture which certainly applies in large measure in our own country as well. In any event, the book is not so much a critique on ‘the church’ per-se, as it is a critique on the life of churchgoers.

I know that there is a certain ‘recoil factor’ when one mentions a critique of the church or of church life. After all, we don’t like to be critiqued, but when Chan does it in Crazy Love, it is clear that he does it in Christian love; that he is not about ‘church-bashing’ but rather about church building. In a recent interview Chan said “I hear a lot of emergent leaders talk about what is wrong with the church. It comes across as someone who doesn’t love the church. I’m a pastor first and foremost, and I’m trying to offer a solution or a model of what church should look like. I’m going back to scripture and seeing what the church was in its simplest form and trying to recreate that in my own church. I’m not coming up with anything new. I’m calling people to go back to the way it was. I’m not bashing the church. I love it.”

Chan’s message is that for the vast majority of believers, but for the brief moments we spend at church each week, we are practically indistinguishable from most of the unbelievers around us. This, says Chan, makes us ‘lukewarm’ for God, and it is not the way it is meant to be. His book is meant to change the way that Christians live their lives.  It is a book for those who don’t want to plateau, for those who would rather die before their convictions do. Chan challenges us to do things that the rest of the world would consider crazy. He wants us to use the days that God has given us. He wants us to live outside the realm of what is comfortable to us and to focus instead on what he calls ‘radical obedience’. “Get out there”, he says. “Make a difference, take risks, and if you fall, get up again.” He wants us to get out there and do things for God which will make our rather serious and sober neighbours say “What on earth are you guys on about? Why are you doing that? That is crazy!” (Hence the title, Crazy Love).

By way of example he speaks about the incident in 2006 when a crazed gunman stormed into an Amish school in Pennsylvania and shot dead several children. The next day some of the Amish parents visited the shooter’s family to say they had forgiven him. That sort of forgiveness is incomprehensible to the world. Chan says “It is just this sort of love that is crazy to the world: true love, a kind found nowhere but through Christ.” 

Chan calls us to live intensely and radically for Jesus, to hold nothing back. “Why is it,” he asks, “that the story of someone who has actually done what Jesus commands resonates deeply within us, but we then assume we could never do anything so radical or intense? Or why do we call it radical when, to Jesus, it is simply the way it is, the way it should be?”

This is an inspiring book. It may shake you out of your comfort zone. It may fire you up and cause you to search prayerfully within yourself to find out what it is that God wants you to do for Him. It has already been at least partly responsible for doing that in the lives of some LBCers. I am sure that Chan would be very pleased about that.
It is a book which I highly recommend for all believers. As a ‘teaser’, you might like to take a look at a short video clip of Chan speaking and exhorting people to live radically active lives for God. Click on the link below to view the video clip, then read the book.

http://www.lesmurdiechurch.com.au/uploads/Media/Chan.wmv

(Ian White)