don miller has changed my life.
and i’m a lot older than him.

open your hearts, and your minds, please. try try to listen.

but, even if you don’t think you need his message, there are people who do. just because you didn’t get something out of it doesn’t mean that he is not being used greatly by God.

after 30 years of church life and ministry, amidst the increasingly political “christian” America, spouting off memorized answers to other’s questions and leading programs to bait sinners to become seekers…. i finally had the heartbreak of realizing how shallow and contrived so much of this was.

God used Miller to resurrect my faith!

He is showing me that Christ is still alive in this world, beyond my imagination and mind.

i don’t want to write the list of all the things i’m walking away from… though tempted. i don’t want to be another “complainer”.

but i do want to say that i had burnt out on Christianity and was even contemplating giving up on God… but i kept seeking. somehow i ended up with the very two books you mention here. and they have given me a new life. a new chance to be a Christian, with no compromise, to truly sell out, but now for all the right reasons.

perhaps you don’t think he gave answers to the dilemmas you see.

but his example SO! gave me answers to the dilemmas that i faced and continue to face. one of the answers is to just allow the dilemmas, i admit. and coming from the rigid background i ‘ve had, that in and of itself is wonderful freedom.

i wish i were a better writer just so i could more aptly express the new hope and joy i have again in the Lord as a direct result of reading Miller’s stories.

I was a bit bored, and could not finish it, either. However, if it encourages people to see Jesus in a different way, or see him as not the same entity/identity as the foibled church who claims him, I suppose I will bear that cross.

My issues with Blue Like Jazz are a little different. Simply put, the title is one of the best titles ever (not that Star Wars Jesus isn’t close behind), yet the book is not about blue and not about jazz. I would be enthralled with a book that showed Jesus in the blues, in jazz, in the melancholy dirt and lust that is humanity. The blues are not typically seen as having Jesus around, but why not? Is he not besides in the tough times, when we see that girl and oh my those thoughts are so wrong? Course he is. And what about the jazz? We Christians (as a western cultured whole) tend to be either very rigid and all about the systematic theology logic – head oriented side of things, or the flowy Spirit-filled heart oriented side of things. If music were the Christian’s life we are either Bach or Enya. So a book about the difficulty of balancing head and heart in Jazz, or the down-low honesty of Blues, or both, was what I wanted in a book of that title.

As far as the book’s style went, it was overly precious and I never felt any of this quote-unquote authenticity that people seemed to find in him. Unless Miller is authentically overly precious.

By the way, when did authenticity and intentionality become Christian buzzwords? I just want to know so that when we invent a time machine, I can go back in time and rectify that error in superfluousness.

As for whether his new epic life is really authentic or not, I don’t know. But the way you related his experience, it sounded like he just wanted to do a bunch of interesting stuff so he’d have an interesting life story to tell people. Still, he should have listened to Steve Taylor closer. Life stories don’t make good stories. Episodic events from interesting lives tailored in particular ways make interesting stories. There may be an interesting indie film to be told from Donald Miller’s life, but it would certainly be restructured in ways he’s uncomfortable with.

And I mean that with all due respect, Maggs. :0

Well, obviously we disagree on this one guys. I appreciate your feedback so far and simply want to insert a few clarifying statements.

Sure, I liked that book because I identified with Miller but I didn’t hail him as some po-mo messiah. I didn’t agree with every position he took but I wouldn’t turn to a book dubbed “non-religious thoughts on christian spirituality” for serious theological inquiry anyway. The book was less a treatise and more a testimony. Over the span of the book, Don explains the issues he has and by book’s end his understanding has become clearer. Personally, I benefit from reading and reflecting upon someone else’s story. I didn’t think I smelled artifice but there may be some on my shoe.

I think that his attempts to live a better story are akin to intentional living. I don’t think that is contrived.

I read all but the final four pages of Blue Like Jazz (I didn’t have the strength to continue) and found authenticity to be just as lacking in his book as sensibility. Sure, it had moments. But the whole thing smelled of artifice. As I wrote in the way back when:

Donald Miller is wearying. Endlessly self-amused and self-absorbed, he seems to want nothing so much as to be hip, cool, edgy (despite his own protests that hip, edgy, and cool are vanities and wastes of time and energy). And if four years of highschool taught me anything, it is that everyone with a heart is thoroughly and deeply embarrassed when the Very Not Cool Guy walks in and tries to be cool.

I think that’s probably one of the natural difficulties of memoirs written by the youthful. They’re not really yet old enough, experienced enough, to know what’re the important or worthwhile things to draw out of their as yet brief histories. So almost to a T the better of these young person’s memoirs are long on cute stories and short on wisdom.

And that’s essentially the problem with Miller’s book. It’s the complaint of the young. The complaint is valid for what it’s worth, but it strikes as being rather one-note, poorly developed and overly padded with cute stories. I think this is a clue to the book’s popularity with the post-Gen-X crowd (20–30). They see someone who notices many of the things that their generation will notice and they think that he understands them and their plight; it may be that Miller does, but understanding a problem doesn’t get us anywhere if one doesn’t also understand that problem’s solution (which Miller doesn’t).

If Miller has dropped his I’m-Too-Cool-For-School (and for your father’s Christianity) air and has developed some solutions for the problems with the church that he and every other young Christian this side of 1950 have been pointing out since before either of us have been born, then I’m glad he found himself on a more useful vector. But hearing that he’s come full circle doesn’t give me much hope for him as either an author or a voice worth paying heed.