199 0
Occasionally a new book surprises the publishing world. Some upstart company puts out a best-seller, or perhaps it s self-published. There's no great budget behind the book's sue-cess—no TV ads, store displays, talk show appearances. The book succeeds through word of mouth because it meets a need. And the executives in the major publishing houses are left shaking their heads, wondering, Why didn't we see that coming? (And they scramble to produce their own books to meet the newly recognized need.)
The modern craze for Christian fiction started that way, when Peretti's This Present Darkness struck gold. In the last few years of the century, we've seen another low-key book gain popularity: Experiencing God by Blackaby and King. Church Bible studies are using it as a curriculum and passing it throughout their churches, and to other churches. The Southern Baptist Convention was the incubator for this book (Blackaby and King both work with the SBC), but Experiencing God has crossed many denominational borders. (We have seen it used broadly in our Methodist and Presbyterian churches.)
What's the appeal? Experiencing God covers a subject that (amazingly) keeps getting lost in our ecclesiastical shuffles. We all want to experience God, don't we? But how quickly we forget about that as we hurry from our potluck suppers to our protest marches. Some churches emphasize knowledge about God and about the Bible. Some want to fight for God and redeem our society. Some want to draw new believers toward God and communicate effectively with seekers. There's nothing wrong with any of that, except it all leaves us hungering for something more basic: experiencing God's presence in our lives. That's the hunger that Blackaby and King have addressed.
Critics have panned the book for several reasons. Sure, it's simplistic and it uses too many stories about church buildings and ministries and finances. But somehow its readers have been getting past all those problems. They've been learning how to experience God in their own lives—and in their own churches.
Experiencing God is systematic and practical, offering seven principles and ways of applying them. "God is always at work around you" is the first principle. Blackaby and King go on to talk about how God invites us to work with him, how he speaks to us, and how we can respond to him. If God has seemed merely like an academic notion to you, or some distant spiritual enLity, this is exciting stuff—you can participate in the work of God! And if your church has too many committee meetings and not enough life-changing events, these ideas are revolutionary.
The book is actually a workbook with assignments for twelve "units" of five days each. Readers are led in the study of Scripture and invited to write down their responses. Publishers will tell you that workbooks don't sell, that no one wants to go back to school. Guess again. Often a book will be so successful that a workbook will be published later. In this case the workbook came, first (1990), and the book with the same title followed (1994); both achieved best-seller status.
We know it's iffy to put such a recent book in our list of the most important Christian books of the century. Usually you need time to sift out the trivial from the tried and true. But we include Experiencing God not only on its own merits, but as a representative of all the "little" books that bring Christian publishing back to its basic principles—authors with ideas to share with readers, ideas that just might change some lives.