Musings of a Snickerdoodle

Tales of the Kingdom by David & Karen Mains is an allegorical story about characters who live in a magical world with bad guys  and good guys .  I have vague memories of hearing this book as a child, and I  I recall thinking it was rather interesting, though I didn't remember a lot about it. As a story it is an interesting tale of girls and boys who find refuge in the forest with the exiled King.   Different lessons are learned by various unique characters, who all find a place in the Kingdom. There are creepy bad guys, like the Enchanter and the Burners and Naysayers.   The book tells stories    about individual people in the various chapters, switching back and forth between some, and introducing new characters in others.   They ultimately fit together very well as an overall story. There is the girl named Dirty, who loved being dirty and lived with the pigs, but comes to realize her horrible situation and wants to be clean. ...

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church by Roland Allen is a rather short but very thought provoking book.  In it, he somewhat implicitly asks the question, Who builds the Church? Leading to that thought, he critiques our method of Evangelization, are we doing it right? Do we need to organize the expansion of the church?  Do we need to establish mission stations, do we need missionaries who depend upon appeals for money for their support.  Will the Gospel spread if we don't purposefully come up with a plan to spread it? Allen warns that what we are trying to do in our methods is to organize the work of God, to dictate where people will get saved and a time period in which their salvation must happen.   But as Allen points out, " For spiritual work spiritual organization is necessary; but can we create a spiritual organization of spiritual forces?   Only a divine intelligence can do that.   But we attempt to do the work of that divine intelligence;...