Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People - Book Review

God seems to sometimes show up in the least likely places.  In the midst of our crap, God reveals Himself and His ways to us, and if we choose to search and see it, it can be transformative.  This is the premise of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. 

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran and founding pastor of the church House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, has a depth of understanding of living in this messed up world as a messed up person.  She writes from the vulnerable places in her heart, and her personality in all its unstereotypical beauty and rawness shines through. 

She acknowledges that we live in a world that admires only the strong, but God blesses the weak, and in those He may give us our greatest lessons, especially if we can count ourselves among them.  Through the stories of the least likely people whom she expects to hear from God, she shows how God reveals His grace, not so much in a warm fuzzy blanket but more like painfully being knocked to the ground.  We must be willing to look beyond the surface of people and our assumptions about them and see that they, too, are a child of God for whom Christ’s  body was broken.  She expresses the true meaning of living in Christian community with one another, sharing of the bread and wine among people who are very different but share the common bond of faith, and thus struggling through life together while displaying and receiving God’s grace and mercy.

Sometimes I am frustrated by my lack of gradual transformation.  Nadia shows us that it is not necessarily about trying to grow or seeking growth through spiritual disciplines, but rather, it’s about seeking God and seeing Him in others as well as in our weaknesses.  It’s about grace, love, and mercy – giving it and receiving it.  People are drawn to freedom and are hungry for freedom, not the “Christian lifestyle”.  Christian community is a coming together to live and tell and be made into the story of Jesus together, a melting and being re-formed.  While I struggled with some of her descriptive word choices (aka profanity), I absolutely loved this book.

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Book Info



I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books (Convergent Publishing) in exchange for my honest review.