Gospel Blimp

I just finished The Gospel Blimp a few days ago. Wow, was that brutal.

My Key takeaways:

  1. If you want to evangelize your city, start with what YOU can do to reach the people you’re in closest proximity to.
  2. Don’t even bother with “1” if Jesus isn’t real to you.
  3. Rationalization and self-delusion are powerful things. Never underestimate the ability of sincere professing Christians to rationalize sin in order to support some specious spiritual “cause.”
  4. Men who love to talk about how much they’ve “sacrificed” for the Kingdom have probably not sacrificed much.
  5. How a man responds to a rebuke from a brother tells you much about his soul. If he returns with accusations or plays the victim, he is likely in the grips of sin.

My only concern with the book is that it seems that many large para-church ministries have mistaken it for a textbook on how to build a ministry. A large organization in the Chicagoland area comes to mind.

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Excellent summary, brother. And about the parachurch ministries taking it as a textbook, a friend who’d been on staff with Cru told me something worse. He said in their staff training they used the Gospel Blimp as a serious example of what to avoid. They thought it was real. turning away shamefacedly…

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