Pat Brooks writes: The Shack is a new novel, which is on sale in all the Kingston bookshops (and online at Amazon here). It is well worth reading for us as Christians. It poses many of the questions that we are faced with in everyday living as Christians and gives some interesting and thought provoking answers. You may not agree with all the author says, but I guarantee that you will be left with much to think about.
Here’s what we would like you to do now.
1. Read the book The Shack
2. Each week on we will be pulling a particular theme from the book and putting it on the web site.
3. You can respond by leaving a comment on the article.
4. Through these comments you will be able to converse with others about the book.
Here are a few thoughts to get you going:
The main character in the story is Mack, a middle-aged man with a wife and family. He has been a nominal Christian all his life, but after the kidnap and killing of his youngest daughter is left depressed and angry with God. He receives a strange invitation to meet with God and when he takes the risk and goes to the appointed place he finds God as three people living for the weekend in the shack.
My first invitation is for you to think about and explore the author’s concept that, for Mack, God appears as creator God in the form of a black woman; stout and good-natured. She provides him with interesting food and a chance to talk. Jesus is a man of course, but not as Mack (and we I suspect) expects.
He is Jewish with the Roman nose and neither handsome or particularly charismatic. Like many of us he finds that he can relate to Jesus more easily than with the other two. The Holy Spirit is an Asian woman. She is both ethereal and mercurial arriving and disappearing in disconcerting ways.
The relationship between them is close and loving. Mack is surprised by the way they relate in perfect harmony with no thought for hierarchy.
God the creator is presented as a woman because Mack has had a drunken father who was both cruel and vicious. Later in the story God presents herself as a father because at that point in the story that is what is needed.
This opens up the whole question of how we think of and address God. Do you think of him/her as male, female or genderless? Jesus invited us to think of him as a father figure. Probably because Jewish society was male orientated at the time. For those who have had difficult fathers this is a problem I know.
For me a genderless God is difficult. How do you feel? I think that in his tender love for us all God invites us to think of him and address him in the way that is easiest for each individual. I suspect that it is more important for God that we approach and know God than how we address him. Surely he meets us where we are and draws us on towards a relationship.
• 10.00am: A traditional service in the traditional Reformed style.
