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Hooked by a good story
Jenny Francis is moved by tales of God at work in human lives
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Encounters: Authentic experiences of God
Monarch Ł7.99 (978-1-85424-770-4) Church Times Bookshop Ł7.20 JOHN WOOLMER is a retired anglican cleric in Leicester, with extensive experience of mission, renewal, and the healing and deliverance ministries. He believes those searching for evidence of belief find personal accounts of encounters with God more credible and authentic than reasoned intellectual arguments in defence of faith. Consequently, he invited more than 50 people to describe their experiences of meeting God, and to explain how that proved to be a turning-point in their lives. In his introduction, John Woolmer tells something of his own early life, as well as referring to Professor Richard Dawkins’s robust, dismissive attitudes to the study of personal experience. Woolmer states that it is currently academically respectable to consider “story” as valid, though Dawkins rejects such potentially subjective material. He also, says Woolmer, argues from a position of relative ignorance about Christianity, and “appears to ignore a number of inconvenient (for him) facts”. Woolmer holds that genuine personal encounters can be tested against the authority of scripture; and that most people, as a result of their experiences, “devote themselves unselfishly to the service of others”. The accounts have been selected to show incidences of God at work in a wide variety of circumstances. They are sometimes deeply moving. The chapters are arranged to illustrate how people respond to God’s grace, to his “sovereign call”, to God in prayer, or in reading the Bible. Several instances are given of people rescued from great danger or crises when physically or mentally ill, as well as experiencing directly the results of the healing or deliverance ministries. Woolmer uses all this evidence to show how people can change and grow when set free from the inhibitions caused by past wounds. Most contributions are fresh, though he has published a few of them before. This book is exactly what one might expect from the pen of a wise and experienced minister seeking to show how amazing changes can result from God’s direct intervention in human life. Those more comfortable with intellectual rigour may find this book a little repetitive, and superficial in its lack of discursive argument. But if you like reading personal accounts of God at work in people’s lives, this is the book for you. The Revd Jenny Francis is Assistant Curate of St Edward’s, Stow-in-the-Wold, and is a psychotherapist. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
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