Church is uncomfortable. Especially having been seasoned since birth in our consumeristic culture, church community can feel extremely weird and odd. Why? Because to do church well means to look not at yourself, but to look at God and others. In fact, embracing the “uncomfortability” of church can really help you love God and others more. But the reality is, many of us struggle with church community. Brett McCracken, an author and journalist, has just written a book that tackles this issue called Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He joins us on indoubt this week to talk about church and how we can better place ourselves in this wonderfully uncomfortable body of people.

 

Who’s Our Guest?

Brett McCracken is a senior editor at The Gospel Coalition and author of Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community, Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, and Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. Brett and his wife, Kira, live in Santa Ana, California. They belong to Southlands Church, where Brett serves as an elder. You can follow him on Twitter.

Episode Links

Be sure to check out Brett’s new book.

 

You should also check out Brett’s blog at brettmccracken.com.

 

Read It

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio conversation.

With me today is author and journalist Brett McCracken. Brett is the author of three books that I can see, and the latest one is coming right off the press. Crossway Books has published his book that he’s called Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community.

Anyways, it’s great to have you on the show today, Brett.

Thanks so much, Isaac. It’s great to be here.

The first question that I’m going to ask you is just simply, who are you? There’s probably a lot of people that don’t know the name Brett McCracken, especially up here in Canada.

So, tell us a little bit about who you are, maybe how you met Jesus, what your normal day looks like.

Yeah, for sure. So, I grew up in the Midwest of the US, so Oklahoma, Kansas, kind of born and raised in the church, so I’ve been a Christian pretty much as long as I can remember. I think I was, you know, about five when I made the decision officially to follow Jesus. Yeah.

So, you know, I grew up in a great family, a great Christian family. My dad was super involved in our church, and all of my grandparents and relatives, so looking back I just feel so fortunate for that. And I think it’s such a grace of God that sometimes just the circumstances of where you’re born and the people that God gives you in your family and in your life.

I went to Wheaton College which is a Christian university in the Chicago area, and you know, the way that I tell my story of kind of how I got to where I am today is: faith has always been a big part of my life. And so has, like, culture and the arts and movies and yet growing up in kind of a conservative Baptist upbringing, I often felt those two worlds kind of opposing each other, or far from one another.