More on NKOC …
Here’s a note I recently received about NKOC from someone who describes his background as “zealous evangelical, and probably fundamentalist.”
Hi, my name is XXX. … I’ve been on the road several weeks this summer, and I came across A New Kind of Christian.
I used to be a zealous evangelical, and probably a fundamentalist. Went to Bible College in Dallas, was always in church. Then at some point I started going through a lot of changes mentally and spiritually. It was really an awakening to the concept and the reality of grace. But, something in me was being pulled away from the church more and more as I started falling more and more in love with Jesus. It was a very weird and scary and a lot of the times exciting adventure. An adventure, that among other things has led up to me being judged (I don’t know if ‘judged’ is a good word, the ones I keep in contact with are “worried” about me though) by my fellow Bible College grads, etc…
(more after the jump)
All that said, this has been an constant growing and stirring inside of me for quite some time, There were a great deal of things I have been contemplating and learning, and some that just by the sheer momentum of my changing thought process that I have just started believing, and haven’t been able to organize into succinct thoughts.
I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into when I bought A New Kind of Christian. It was a book that I had seen sold at the christian book store I worked at when I was a fundamentalist, and I had even seen scoffed at by my fellow workers. But your book (late as I may have been coming across it again), laid out in a very succinct way things I have been coming to believe, and have felt inside of me for the past few years but could never put into words in an effective manner. There were times, sitting in our … van, that I would be in tears from what I was reading because it rang so true with where my spirit and mind have been the past few years. I just wanted to drop a line and say thank you!
R: Thanks so much for your note. Not only does it encourage me, but I’m quite sure there are others who will be encouraged by it as they surf through this site. There are a lot of “zealous evangelical/fundamentalist” folks like you who have such good hearts, on fire with love for God and neighbor, who just don’t feel like they fit anymore in the very communities that originally lit the fire inside them. Thanks again for writing.