Worship Leader September 2011 : Page 88
REFLECT Compiled by Stan Endicott Beacon Hill Press Transcending music style, denomination, generation, and loca-tion, Reflect is a wealth of knowledge and wisdom on the subject of worship. Com-piled by Stan Endicott, Reflect is a collection of 52 stories told by 52 different worship leaders from around the nation. Beginning with a Scripture passage, each chapter is a 2-3 page devotional story closing with a short prayer. The transparency of each author is incredibly apparent throughout the pages. Raw and emotional, the deeply personal nature of every chapter reveals the wisdom in each author’s unique expe-rience. The sincerity of the stories is strik-ingly inspiring; reading a chapter is like taking a tiny peek into the soul of each author. The book is filled with encourage-ment and wisdom and would be a perfect weekly devotional for worship leaders and worshipers in all seasons of life. –Andy Toy beautiful and useful aspects to Frazee’s reading. Primary is the approach: “God wants us to read the Bible as we would view a mural.” Frazee issues a commission to understand God’s story as something so much more than a spiritual prooftexting mine; the Bible is an epic, deeply layered, fully inclusive narrative that must be read as such, otherwise we are in danger los-ing our place in God’s history. He sees two levels of biblical exegesis: one in which we delve into singular stories and allow them to infiltrate our lives, and two, the larger overarching story of God that ulti-mately is the basis of our existence. With the grace and style of a practiced pastor, Frazee picks 31 biblical stories and offers Cliffs Notes on them, including clear in-terpretations, insightful illustrations, and how they fit into the whole. The Heart of the Story is really a solid companion to your Bible reading—the stories come alive in ways you might have missed before. Use it to augment your Bible reading or as a discussion starter for small groups. –Jeremy Armstrong THE WELL Mark Hall Zondervan Mark Hall is more than a pastor and more than the lead singer of Casting Crowns; he is a storyteller. Each chapter of The Well supports this as Hall relates his own ex-periences, retells the journeys of others, and paints a new light on the Bible sto-ries we’ve heard so often. Hall first invites you to dive into the story of the woman at the well, the foundation of the book. We tend to plunge into our own “wells” (control, success, talent, religion), only to find them dry and unsatisfying. So we remain thirsty despite all the resources at our fingertips and avenues for sustenance. The answer Hall continually points to is Jesus—the living water, the quench to our endless thirst. Story after story teaches and encourages us to drink not from our own wells, but from the Well himself, so that we may be truly satisfied. Insightful, THE HEART OF THE STORY Randy Frazee Zondervan With a similar ap-proach to the topic as the ’96 Pulitzer Prize-winning biogra-phy God, The Heart of the Story tells God’s story. In his book, author and pastor Randy Frazee carefully walks through the major moments of the Bible and gives a rundown of the overarching narrative. The difficulty in writing a book that claims to contain “the heart of the story” is that this is really an improbable task, perhaps even impossible. The heart of the greatest literary and spiritual mas-terpiece in existence is too nuanced, too filled with cracks and crevasses and beau-tiful threads of unity and discord to be dis-tilled into 250 pages of interpretation. But The Heart of the Story is the heart of the story according to Frazee, and there are some 88 WORSHIP LEADER
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