Henry Stewart has written Good Faith Hunting to help Boomer Christians to process their faith journey and the story they find themselves in. Many Boomers have walked away from church, though not necessarily from their faith. Stewart, a Boomer himself, is an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church. He has undergone his own faith journey and draws heavily on the journey motif in the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible.
Initially I was put off a little by this book’s subtitle: How Baby Boomers Help Recapture a Biblical View of Faith. I have your typical Gen-X cynicism about Baby Boomer Messiah Complexes. Boomers take credit for revolutionizing society, Civil Rights, and just about everything else that they can. Crediting them with recapturing a ‘biblical view of faith’ is a bit much for me. However, the author doesn’t really ever make that claim. Stewart’s D. Min thesis had him researching Baby Boomer spirituality and he discovered that Boomers have made the postmodern turn earlier than is often expected and that generationally they resemble their children’s generation more than their parents.
Stewart’s own research draws heavily on the work of James Fowler’s Stages of Faith and Alan Jamieson’s A Churchless Faith. This gives him a typology for the Spiritual journey of others. In these pages, Stewart weaves the journeys of biblical saints (from Abraham to Paul, everyone who was on a journey) with insights from church history (desert fathers and medieval mystics) with contemporary Boomer journeys. Through his biblical examples, he is able to demonstrate the journey motif throughout scripture. The historical examples were also instructive as they show how writers of the Spiritual life have made use of the ‘journey’ to demonstrate the realities of growing in faith. If you like to read people’s stories, you will appreciate the vignettes of spiritual journeys throughout the book.
Not being a Boomer, this book wasn’t written about me or for me; however I think that journey is an apt description of the spiritual life and that it speaks trans-generationally. The Spiritual lives of people (Boomers and everyone else) has peaks and valleys and a movement from ‘easy faith’ to a faith that wrestles with life-difficulties (or capitulate under their weight).
I recommend this book to Boomers who are processing their own spiritual journey. Others like me will also find resonance with your own faith journey.
I recieved this book from Speakeasy in exchange for my honest review.
thoughts, prayers & songs: 