Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links, where I earn a small commission if you choose to purchase from them. This helps to support and maintain my blog. Thank you!
I just finished the book Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity by Alisa Childers this afternoon. I have been reading it off and on for the last couple of weeks, but the further into it I got, the harder it was to put it down. I was introduced to this book by my mother, and it was recommended to her by my aunt. I genuinely enjoyed this book and the insights it gave me into the new “Progressive Christianity” movement and its dangers to the Christian faith. I read it as a digital copy, but it is also available as a paper copy.
Here is the synapsis of the book, found on Amazon: “A Movement Seeks to Redefine Christianity. Some Think that It Is a Much-Needed Progressive Reformation. Others Believe that It Is an Attack on Historic Christianity.
Alisa Childers never thought she would question her Christian faith. She was raised in a Christian home, where she had seen her mom and dad feed the hungry, clothe the homeless, and love the outcast. She had witnessed God at work and then had dedicated her own life to leading worship, as part of the popular Christian band ZOEgirl. All that was deeply challenged when she met a progressive pastor, who called himself a hopeful agnostic.
Another Gospel? describes the intellectual journey Alisa took over several years as she wrestled with a series of questions that struck at the core of the Christian faith. After everything she had ever believed about God, Jesus, and the Bible had been picked apart, she found herself at the brink of despair . . . until God rescued her, helping her to rebuild her faith, one solid brick at a time.
In a culture of endless questions, you need solid answers. If you or someone you love has encountered the ideas of progressive Christianity and aren’t sure how to respond, Alisa’s journey will show you how to determine―and rest in―what’s unmistakably true” (end of synapsis).
We live in a time in history where everything is questioned and put under a spotlight. And Christianity is one of the favorites of those who are skeptical or downright dismissive of its intensity and pure devotion to the Word of God found in the Bible as Gospel and Truth. Through this scrutiny, many Christians have been led astray into another religion entirely, masked by the same name, just with an added word to the title.
What is being called in today’s society “Progressive Christianity” is taking the church community by storm and luring long-standing believers into a false promise of more love, more acceptance, and more salvation for everyone. It disregards the importance of Jesus’ sacrificial death for our sins, states that anyone and everyone can be saved, even if they do not believe in Jesus, and that it is okay to bend and mold our faith to the whims and desires of our present cultural moment.
This view of faith is so completely destructive. It is not faith at all, really. It is the abandonment of all that is good about God, Jesus, and final salvation. It is dangerous, and it is wrong. Alisa Childers explains this so clearly and proficiently in her book Another Gospel, and even her subtitle alludes to what the entire book is about: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity. When her faith was under attack, she turned to numerous resources to find answers, and this book is the culmination of her findings.
Childers begins the book with her experience in a class that her pastor at the time invited her to as an open forum-style class, where she and a handful of other church members could safely question their faith with the guidance and facilitation of the pastor himself. Quickly after joining this class and attending a couple of sessions, Childers realized that this class was not meant to strengthen their Christian faith, but rather to deconstruct it in the most harmful way. She describes discussions that questioned the true deity of Christ, whether the Bible is divinely inspired at all, the Virgin Birth, the necessity of Jesus’ death on the cross, and so many other crucial points of the Christian faith. All of this scrutinized under the pastor’s new view of what is commonly called “Progressive Christianity.”
The pastor of the group deemed himself a “hopeful agnostic,” and continued to devastate Childers’ faith and to sow doubts into her mind and heart that bothered her down to her core. She described this feeling in the book as having “rocks in her shoes.” Throughout her book, Childers explains and illustrates the effort she put into both research and prayer to determine the reason behind her faith, and to provide upstanding proof as to the reliability of the Gospels and the whole of the Bible as the inspired Word of God.
In her book, Childers encourages readers to do extensive research in order to back up one’s faith. She writes, “biblical faith is trust – and that trust is based on good evidence” (50). Childers did her research, and a lot of it, in preparation for this book. It is well thought out, expertly written, and easy to comprehend. She draws from countless theological resources, from both traditional Christian writers, and new Progressive Christian authors as well. She debates the difference between the two religions (in her book she explains and confirms why the two are different religions entirely), and she provides sufficient evidence to back up her claims. Childers gives decent logic as to why Progressive Christianity is not Christianity at all, but rather a cheap knock-off version with no promise of redemption.
Childers discusses the reliability and truth of the Bible, telling stories of experiences she has had with youth in her church community on the subject. She questions them as to the believability of the Gospels and the Bible as a whole, and boils her findings down to this one quote: “If the gospel was fabricated by a bunch of first-century Jewish men, their tendency would be to simplify, unify, clarify, and beautify Jesus’ sayings – to make Christianity much broader, easier, and more pleasant. But they didn’t because it’s not broad, easy, or pleasant. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s described as a narrow road that few people actually find” (144). Why would anyone risk their own life and well-being to spread a false gospel that they themselves do not believe in? This is one of the main points of Childers’ book that she refers back to again and again throughout its chapters.
In her argument that Progressive Christianity is an entirely different religion to Christianity, Childers deconstructs the new beliefs being discussed in today’s church circles that are not cohesive with what Scripture says.
One such topic that differs between the two faiths is that of the necessity of Jesus’s death on the cross to atone for our sins. I won’t go into too much detail about her argument for the sake of those that wish to read the book for themselves, but here is a quote from the chapter addressing this issue that sums it up quite nicely, “Progressive Christians assume they are painting God in a more tolerant light by denying the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. But in reality, they are simply constructing a codependent and impotent god who is powerless to stop evil. That god is not really good. That god is not the God of the Bible. That god cannot save you” (224).
There are so many other arguments presented in Childers’ book as to the differences between these two religions, and I could go on about this book for a long time, gushing about how much I loved it. But I am going to stop myself here for the sake of letting you discover its golden nuggets of wisdom for yourself, to discern truth from lies on your own.
If you are a Christian wondering what stance to take on the new and improved “Progressive Christianity” of today’s modern world, read this book. If you are not a Christian, and want to understand why it is all that it is cracked up to be, read this book. Even if you believe yourself to be a strong Christian, read this book. I cannot say it enough: READ. THIS. BOOK. You will thank me for it later.
I will leave you with one last quote, one of my favorites from the book: “We don’t get to completely redefine who God is and how he works in the world and call it Christian. We don’t get to make the rules and do what is right in our own eyes and yet claim to be followers of Jesus. Our only option is to do it his way or not at all. He is love. His name is truth. His gospel is bloody. His way is beautiful. For God so loved the world” (239).