Audio Book: Religion Saves: and nine other misconceptions
Mark Driscoll is the lead pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, and this book was based on a sermon series that Mark preached at his church. Each chapter is devoted to answering a question that was crowd-sourced from visitors to the Mars Hill Church website.
Topics covered are: birth control, humour, predestination, grace, sexual sin, faith and works, dating, the emerging church and the “regulative principle” (what should a Christian do, as far as things that aren’t mentioned in the bible).
Driscoll cites a range of outside authors, and is always practical in his engagement with the questions: he certainly has a particular way that he things Christianity should be practiced, and is not shy in explaining that stance. If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about with regard to Mars Hill Church, this book is as good a place to start as any.
I’ve managed to make it through the book (which you can download for free in February 2010) in my spare moments in the last couple of weks: as an audio book, it just goes onto my iPhone, I can turn up the reading speed to “2x”, and get through it in about 4-5 hours. This wasn’t just my own impatience, I found that the audio itself was a bit odd: it seems that rather than recording the whole book, for a lot of the book, the individual words have been read out, and just stitched together. At twice normal speed, this is smoothed out, and becomes easier to listen to.
My one complaint with audiobook as a format for a book like this is that it makes it far more difficult to take notes, or to determine at what point in the book was something said. That’s not a criticism of the audiobook, though, just in my approach to listening.