Reflections on Magolda & Gross's It's All About Jesus!

I have to make a confession. I did not attempt to buy this book before I got back to China and when I got here I realized that it did not have a Kindle edition. Shipping books to Zhengzhou can be a lengthy and uncertain process. I'm not sure I would even receive the book before the end of the semester. However, I did read the excerpts that were available on Amazon, and I do have some things to say about it.

First of all, I really wish I could buy it and read it this semester. Even the parts that I did get to read were fascinating. I love the way the authors describe a group that is very familiar to me from an outside perspective.

What struck me most was their generous treatment of their subject. I don't think I have seen a Evangelical Christian group portrayed with such sympathy from outsiders. To be honest, when I first started reading the book, I expected the researchers to be critical and even mocking. This is my experience of "non-believers'" observations of the Christian tradition that I come from. I think I have been trained to be rather stoic about this. Jesus did warn us that the world hated him and they will hate us. There is no way to say for certain, but maybe one reason that the researchers were fairly sympathetic is that they were Catholic, so that, while they may not agree with specific approaches or mentalities, they still agree and affirm the importance of Christ and the Bible.

It was very cool to have the "strange" aspects of that Christian group described from an outsider perspective because when one is in such a group, one forgets which parts of it are strange. Also, the uncritical nature of it gave me a new sympathy for my tradition. It made me think of those types of ministries as peopled, not by narrow minded zealots, but by sheep. Jesus compares us to sheep and tells us that he is sending us out among wolves, but I didn't really see that analogy until I read this study. From it, I got the impression that Christians really do love God and each other and are generally careful and inoffensive in the way they reach out to others.

I also thought it was cool that the researchers acknowledged that the members of the group failed in their mission where the researchers were concerned--that they failed to convert them. This made me smile because as an Evangelical Christian with perhaps a little less categorical beliefs, I do believe the group achieved their goal in that they were faithful to be who God had called them to be in front of these researchers and therefor showed them Christ. God's work isn't encapsulated in a two year research project. I like how the researchers maintained their autonomy, though, and never quite identified themselves with those they studied. I wonder if this would have been different if the researchers had just been their as participants instead of investigators.