Going on vocation

THE CALL
By Os Guinness
Paternoster/Spring Harvest. 249 pages
ISBN 1 85078 429 9

It goes without saying that any book by Os Guinness is worth reading. This one is no exception.

The author has set himself a difficult task. The book seeks to address both the non-Christian and the Christian simultaneously. The call of Christ comes to us all, 'follow me.' It is God's call to the individual through the gospel of Christ which is the great missing element in the modern world and which makes the non-Christian's life purposeless and allows Christians to be too secularised, too much part of this world.

The book is not a powerful tract with one sustained argument, like the author's brilliant (in my view) Time for Truth, IVP. It is more a whole series of meditations which approach the subject of the call of God from a variety of angles. It addresses issues of courage, responsibility, work, church, spiritual disciplines, death and many more.

The great struggle

It was first published in the US in 1998 and, with Guinness living in America, has that US flavour about it. Also the chapters have pretty much the same structure, starting with an interesting piece of biography or history which moves neatly into a statement of the main theme of the chapter, to be followed by an exposition of the subject in biblical and Christian-philosophical terms. This repeated structure is good for a short book, but this one is a little longer, and some variation would have been helpful.

The great struggle in our day is with secularisation and Guinness has in many ways gone to the root of the problem with this book. It requires a slow, thoughtful read to get the best out of it.

JEB