Smart mercy

David Apple’s Not Just a Soup Kitchen: How Mercy Ministry in the Local Church Transforms Us All (CLC, 2014) is a deeply practical guide from a church leader with a quarter-century of urban experience. Through God’s grace Apple survived a childhood skull fracture and sexual abuse, and has shown hundreds of volunteers at ACTS—Active Compassion Through Service, the mercy ministry of Philadelphia’s historic Tenth Presbyterian Church—how to be gracious to others.

Gracious, though, does not mean the faux compassion of getting rid of dollars so as to get rid of importuners. Apple’s list of rules for helping the homeless begins, “1. Do not give money. 2. Do not give money. 3. When in doubt see rule #1.” Another list spells out rules for church deacons, including “model a servant lifestyle … be knowledgeable about local community resources … empower needy nonmembers to make good use of all available community resources.” In other words, deacons don’t have to win battles by themselves, but they should show how to live and should learn to delegate to others.

Apple also provides practical tips for hospital visitation; interacting with those who are blind or deaf or elderly; and helping those grieving the loss of a child or a marriage. He tells how to set limits, how to help some in a family when others are irresponsible, how to respond to requests on the street or at night, how to help adult sons, and more: A common denominator is that “saying YES” for short-term benefits “will only cause more pain and will not help.”

Lots of specific suggestions make this book a good one for deacons and other poverty fighters. Yes, cook a meal for a severely ill mother with three young children, but offer a choice of two courses so she and her family won’t have tuna noodle casserole four nights in a row. No, don’t say, “Call me any time for anything,” because the person in need will probably never call. Yes, make a specific offer, such as “I want to come over Monday at three o’clock to bake cookies and clean your pantry shelf.”

Short stops

Michael Schuman’s Confucius and the World He Created (Basic, 2015) readably gives us basics on the Chinese sage. Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki (Knopf, 2014) helps to explain Japan. Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink, edited by Marc Epstein (Princeton, 2015) is a beautiful book that shows Jewish illuminated manuscripts (from the Middle Ages to today) and explains their interaction with Christian works.

Alix Christie’s Gutenberg’s Apprentice: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2014) brings out the conflict through which printed Bibles emerged in the 1450s. Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans (Knopf, 2014) opens up part of the world of Hispanic immigrants. William Gibson’s The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014) is not as innovative as his trend-setting Neuromancer, but the slow-motion dystopia it details is unpleasant indeed. Fictional worlds without Christ are depressing.

Rejoicing in Lament by J. Todd Billings (Brazos, 2015) eloquently describes the author’s “wrestling with incurable cancer and life in Christ.” He wrestles with questions involving prayer and asks why some Christians think a miracle must mean God working directly rather than through instrumental means such as medical skill and research discoveries. He sees a role for lamenting and proposes humility as we attempt to discern the mystery of divine providence.

John Piper’s Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully (Crossway, 2014) examines how George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C.S. Lewis used words for God’s glory. Josh Kelley’s Radically Normal (Harvest House, 2014) sees the heroism in everyday activity. John Lennox’s Against the Flow (Monarch, 2015) is a readable look at the book of Daniel. A Star in the East, by Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang (Templeton, 2015) is a quick introduction to Christianity in China, but it’s marred by an assumption that change comes through natural sociological means rather than through God’s mercy. —M.O.