New Book Idea

I’ve been thinking about the pizza joint I checked out yesterday. It’s an interesting deal, but I doubt it will get any takers. It will probably be available a month from now, for nothing, to anyone who will take over the lease.

The place is so small, the number of pizzas it can produce is limited. The owner said a really good daily gross was a thousand dollars. So if it ran full-tilt every day, it would bring in, what, three hundred grand? It has been suggested to me that I might net 10%, and if that’s true, I’m looking at $30K per year. Yow.

If I had a college-age son, this would be a great project. I could turn him loose with this place and tell him he had a year to make it work. I think that would be a better education (and cheaper) than ten years at a university. But for a middle-aged guy with other fish to fry, it’s not a great move.

I have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe I should put this pizza thing on the shelf for a while. It has occurred to me that one of the biggest problems with Christian books is that they’re extremely vague. They say things like, “Stand on God’s word!”, and, “God is holy, so you be holy!” What do these things MEAN? Imagine yourself as a beginning Christian. The stuff you would find in many Christian books would sound like gibberish.

What if someone wrote a book that was clearer and better organized, without strange Christianese phrases obfuscating the meaning? “This is the story the Bible presents, reduced to basics.” “These are the things you need to do, in order to live a blessed life and experience God’s power.” Nobody writes that way. Christian authors tend to have the same problem mathematicians and physicists have when they write books. Without realizing it, they write in a way that only works for people who already know what they know. I know people have tried to provide help for new Christians, but they’ve been very ineffective.

I used to dream of writing physics texts in plain English. Understanding the writing of physicists is harder, for bright students, than understanding physics itself. I never fulfilled that dream, but maybe I can do the same thing for Christianity.

You can write five thousand words and give new converts everything they need to know, to put a solid foundation under their efforts. But no one does that. Instead, they write stuff that only makes sense to people who are already knowledgeable.

Of course, some people would disagree with what I wrote. But if that was a problem worthy of consideration, how would it be possible for anyone to write a Christian book?

God has a long history of providing us with knowledge in a non-sequential and encrypted way. Our job has been to understand it through the revelation power of the Holy Spirit, and then to present it to each other in a more digestible way. My project would be a prime example of the way this process works.

I wanted to write books for my church, but they’re just too busy, and I can’t wait any longer. Maybe they’ll eventually find time, but while they’re doing other things, I should get busy with my own work.