Loving God When You Don't Love the Church

Loving God When You Don't Love the Church is pastor and author Chris Jackson's effort to help those who have been hurt in and by the church find healing and restoration. It is an honest, humble, and helpful approach that not only asks "Why do church wounds go so deep and take so long to heal?" but also suggests thorough, practical steps toward healing.

Jackson's approach is always sensitive, but I thought it was much too long and its focus diffuse to be helpful to someone who is truly hurting. It's hard to write a book for hurting people, because the pain makes it hard to read, to focus, and to persevere. At times, I wondered where the author was going and why he was saying this or that. Perhaps in the course of being thorough the book lost some of its effectiveness.

While I think Stephen Mansfield's Healing Your Church Hurt is much more likely to be helpful to someone who has experienced a recent church-inflicted or church-related hurt, Loving God When You Don't Love the Church can still be quite helpful, perhaps most for those in church leadership, like Jackson, who want to understand the topic more thoroughly, as a topic. But for those who are walking through a hurtful experience themselves, I recommend Healing Your Church Hurt instead.