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I had been fairly immune and disconnected from all the ranting, raving, and lunacy surrounding The Shack up until a few months ago. I had heard in passing that the author was going to be speaking at my old University and thought very little of it. Even at that point all I heard was that the book “Is a whack on the side of the head.” Not putting any more thought into it, I placed the title of the book into the back shelves of my mind.

Fast forward a month and a half and I had the privilege of attending the Canadian Youth Workers Conference in Toronto where they had invited the author of the Shack W.P. Young to speak. He did a lecture/reading that I did not attend, but then heard him in one of the general sessions. He read a small portion of the book to the audience and I was intrigued. Through out the weekend I over heard several conversations surrounding the book, and had heard various ideas, rumours, nay sayings and endorsements. I appreciate Williams honesty when sharing about some of the controversy surrounding the subject, and then decided to make a decision for myself. Michael Krahn wrote a review of the book mentioning that people made judgment on the book before reading it, that issue is a soapbox issue of mine I won’t get into, but to put it bluntly those people aren’t worth wasting your time on.

So for Christmas I asked for two books, one being The Shack and other being The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne.  Two weeks later on a long plane ride from Charlottetown to Winnipeg, I finished The Shack.  I know understand why the book is so controversial on varying levels.  Young takes God out of our neat and tidy theological boxes, turns the knob to 11 and then lets everything splatter out all over the floor.

To put it mildly, this book is not one you are going to start hanging your theological hat on.  What it does do though, is challenge some of our preconceived notions of what/who God is, and how he interacts with us.  it gets us asking questions, and in my opinion that is always a good thing.  That then leads to searching, which we often do not do enough of.  Too often in my faith, I have heard people say “That’s not God”, or “God doesn’t work that way”.  It is those people who I feel are afraid of The Shack.  With careful articulation we see what it *might* look like if God did come down to meet us, face to face, and how we would be changed by such an experience.

Young’s portrayal of the relationship between the trinity, to me is one the most significant things in the book.  He did an articulate job on showing us what a perfect relationship might look like, one that is centered around love.  It challenged the very core of my relationship with my wife in a very good way.  We as a human race love with condition, even if we don’t think we do, generally it always comes down to condition, even if we don’t like to admit it.

If you haven’t read this book, you really should, Christian or non-Christian alike.  I also think you need to read it with as little preconceived notions as you can.  Try to read this book for what it is, and not for what it isn’t.  I believe it is a compelling story about redemption, love, forgiveness, challenging our view of the world, and dealing with the short comings of our humanness.  It isn’t going to take authority away from the Bible for a theological basis, it isn’t about pagan images replacing the trinity, it’s about God’s love for us, and how that can and does change people.  Read this book, be inspired, challenged, stretched and touched.

As with all my reviews, I like to review with a number.. so here it is.. I rate The Shack 9 Canoe Rides out of 10.

In evangelical circles the emergent movement gets a lot of flack for some of their view points and take on theology.  What I believe most of the fundamentalist miss is that the emergent tend to understand some of Jesus’ principals better than they do.  His compassion, his love for the lost, his desire to help people in their need.  Most of Rob’s detractors lash out, and miss most of his points while yelling as loud as they can with their fingers stuck in their ears.

People have asked me what I think of this book, as it has gotten a fair amount of attention in certain circles.  Well, I think Rob Bell’s theology is a little too loose in some areas.  But his honesty, humbleness, transparency, and view on compassion outshine any problems I have with his theology.  This is a book I feel people need to read, digest, chew on for a bit and take what they great things he does say from it and add it to your world view.

It is a book I recommend, but as Rob states, it is one that you need to read critically, to do so would be an injustice.