I didn’t mean to read A Meal with Jesus. I receive enough books to review that I cannot possibly read them all. Last week I decided I would grab a selection of them and spend half an hour with each—not enough to read them through, but enough to get a bit of a feel for each. It didn’t work too well. A Meal with Jesus was the first book I picked up and once I began reading it I couldn’t stop. It turns out that this is a really good book.

According to its subtitle, A Meal With Jesus is a book about “discovering grace, community and mission around the table.” Tim Chester seeks to show God’s purposes in the sublimely ordinary act of sharing a meal. He shows that this most ordinary of ordinary events offers unique opportunities for grace, community and mission. Can a book about something so ordinary really be compelling and worth the read? Absolutely. And this is particularly true when the book comes from the capable hands of an excellent author.

Chester structures the book around the meals of Jesus as described in the gospel of Luke. It was Luke who quoted Jesus as saying, “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” Jesus was into eating and drinking and he was into it enough that people accused him of doing it to excess. Meals are a constant theme in this gospel. According to another author, “In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.” Chester says that to Jesus meals “represent a new world, a new kingdom, a new outlook. But they give that new reality substance. Jesus’ meals are not just symbols; they’re also application. They’re not just pictures; they’re the real thing in miniature. Food is stuff. It’s not ideas. It’s not theories.” Without simplistically reducing all of church and mission to meals, Chester manages to show that meals can and should be an integral part of our shared life.

Tim Keller’s career as an author has been rather unusual. Ministries of Mercy, his first book, was published in 1997. It was 11 years before he wrote his second book, The Reason for God, a title that rocketed right onto the New York Times list of bestsellers. Since then he has averaged more than a book a year and each of those titles has garnered a lot of acclaim; within just a few years Keller has established himself as one of the most significant Christian authors. New for 2011 is Redeemer, a publishing imprint with Dutton (which in turn is an imprint of Penguin Publishing) and the first book published under that banner: King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus.

This is a book about Jesus—Jesus as he is portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. Keller says, “It is an extended meditation on the historical Christian premise that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection form the central event of cosmic and human history as well as the central organizing principle of the world—and how we fit into it—is most clearly understood through a careful, direct look at the story of Jesus. My purpose here is to try to show, through his words and actions, how beautifully his life makes sense of ours.” Understand Jesus and you will understand the world: that is the central premise of the book.

King’s Cross is based upon a series Keller preached on Mark and the expository tone and structure remains. And yet somehow reading this book does not feel like reading sermons—it feels like meditation upon a text. Its style is pure Keller, probably closest to The Prodigal God, though certainly there are similarities with his other titles as well. This is not an exposition of the entire text of Mark, but rather an exposition of some of the more significant moments. And in that way it reads like a biography of Jesus, an account of his life, his death, his meaning, his purpose. While Keller inevitably turns to the parallel accounts of Jesus in the other gospel, his central focus remains Mark.

Early in George Orwell’s iconic 1984 is a particularly haunting scene. Winston, the hero of the story, is confessing to his diary a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Though Big Brother rigidly controls even sexual union and though sex is viewed as “a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema,” still Big Brother cannot remove from humanity the desire and the need for intimacy. One evening Winston spots a prostitute near a train station. “She had a young face,” he writes, “painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces.” In a society where abject fear and loneliness are the norm, Winston craves the intimacy of sex. But as he goes into this woman’s apartment and lies with her, he turns up a lamp, casting a bright light on her face. And immediately he sees that the appearance of beauty was a lie. “What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.

Michael Wittmer feels trapped in the middle. To one side are conservative Christians demanding lockstep allegiance to narrow doctrinal statements—statements so detailed that they insist on specific theories of the end times or specific understandings of the spiritual gifts. Such people interpret doubts, questions, or appreciation for other viewpoints to be the first signs of an inevitable slide to liberalism. On the other side are postmodern Christians who question many traditional assumptions—or maybe even every traditional assumption—but who go about it in ways that discredit their arguments; they offer new and novel interpretations of key Scripture texts and refuse to state exactly what they believe. To the one side are those who want to believe like Jesus while on the other are those who want to live like Jesus; to the one side are those who love their beliefs while to the other are those who believe in their love.

It is no small thing to take upon oneself the name Christian. Though it was first used as a form of derision when unbelievers mocked the “little Christs,” the name was embraced by the earliest believers. The term, even when used mockingly, nicely encapsulated what they sought to do, namely, to imitate their Lord and Savior. Sadly, in the centuries since then, the word has become far too ambiguous and now refers to any number of faiths that, in one way or another, honor or respect Christ or that have some historical connection to his teachings. Amazingly, some of those called by the name of Christ actually deny him—perhaps not his existence but at least his uniqueness and his divinity. In Christless Christianity Michael Horton argues that such denial of Christ may not be too far from home. More and more evangelical churches, he says, are now essentially Christless.

There are many voices critiquing the North American church today. The voices come from both within and without; from those who love the church and those who hate it. We all know that there is something wrong. But what? In many cases the prescription is the same while the cure varies widely. In his new book Crazy Love, first-time author Francis Chan, pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, California, regular speaker at Passion conferences and other events, and the guy who recorded that "Just Stop and Think" evangelistic video where he walks for miles holding a surfboard, takes his opportunity to challenge the church. "This book," he says, "is written for those who want more Jesus. It is for those who are bored with what American Christianity offers. It is for those who don't want to plateau, who would rather die before their convictions do." It is a book that is meant to change the way Christians live their lives.

Anne Rice has undergone a radical transformation. A bestselling author, whose novels have sold over 100 million copies, she recently returned to the Roman Catholic faith of her youth, and in so doing abandoned her former subject matter (vampires) and turned instead to a series of books dramatizing the life of Jesus Christ. The first book in Rice's series, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (released in the fall of 2005) was critically acclaimed and sold well. The movie rights for the book and its sequels were recently purchased by L.A.-based Good News Holdings which is run by Christian pollster George Barna. He will attempt to bring them to the big screen. Where the first book covered Jesus' childhood, the second volume seeks to find a story in the "lost years" that fall between His birth and the beginning of His public ministry.

Vintage Jesus is the first book published under the banner of Resurgence Literature (Re:Lit) which is a ministry of Resurgence (which is, in turn supported by Mars Hill Church). This is also the first title in a series called "Vintage Jesus" that will build on the themes and doctrines introduced in this book. It is one of six(!) new books we'll see this year from the pen of Mark Driscoll. The book is a collaborative project between friends--Mark Driscoll and Gary Breshears. Describing how this collaboration unfolded, Driscoll writes, "In the chapters of this book you will hear my voice since I crafted the words onto pages, but many of the concepts were shaped and formed by my good friend.

Though many people use the name of Jesus in our day, it often seems that one Jesus bears very little resemblance to another. While almost everyone claims to love Jesus, few seem to know the real Jesus. It is to this problem that Erwin Lutzer, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, addresses his new book Slandering Jesus.

The format is a simple. An opening chapter introduces the problem and the author's rationale for addressing it. "Living as we do at the beginning of a new century, many new Jesuses are being fabricated year by year; this is the age of designer Jesuses." "This book is about a few of the attempts that have been made to remake Jesus of Nazareth into a different kind of Jesus--a Jesus more in tune with the times, or a Jesus who will blend more nicely into the tolerance that our culture prizes so highly." Lutzer introduces six assumptions that give scholars permission to reinvent Jesus according to their own liking:

Stephen Nichols is quite the prolific author. A professor at Lancaster Bible College and Graduate School and a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary, Nichols has written several notable books in the past few years and it seems that he always has at least one title on the “Coming Soon” lists at Crossway or P&R Publishing. Nichols has a gift for presenting church history in a way that is interesting and in a way that appeals to those who may not otherwise know (or care) about the long, storied history of the church. He shows how church history is relevant precisely because the controversies we face today are strikingly similar to ones the church has dealt with long ages ago.