Sheldon's Reviews > The Imitation of Christ

If anyone can claim the credentials to be a "card carrying evangelical", it's me. Born and raised Church of the Nazarene. Saved at grandma's Methodist church camp. Baptized, second-act-of-grace santicfication, Youth for Christ trained, Billy Graham crusade foot soldier. It is a membership that lasted well over forty years. But by the end of the 2004 presidential campaign, if there had been somewhere I could go and turn in my card, I would have gladly done so. By that time the word "evangelical" had pretty much lost any sense of religious identification for me. It had been almost completely co-opted by Republican political operatives and Christian Fundamentalists with whom I had little or no sense of theological community.

In retrospect, my departure from mainstream evangelicalism had starting years earlier, when I discovered the Social Justice wing of the church, which, in my own view, remained Protestant and Wesleyan. But as I grew old and crusty, my faith journey started to take some strange twists and turns. In retropsect, the mile stones in this journey became marked by a reading list that grew ever wider from the boundaries of my Protestant upbringing and education.

This book shelf, "Evangelical Escape Pod" is actually a literary history of books that have brought me to a place that would probably send my Nazarene Sunday School teachers into a frenzy of Wednesday night Prayer Meeting intersession (or possibly intervention). It began with this book, "The Imitation of Christ", which I first read probably sometime in the late 80s. It was the first sharp departure from my Prtotestant Reformation comfort zone, and began a long, slow and still evolving transformation