Mother Kirk by Douglas Wilson

Subtitled; "Essays and Forays into Practical Ecclessiology." And Mother Kirk by Douglas Wilson pastor of Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho is just that. Within these pages are many, many useful ideas and help for Church leaders.

With 30+ years of serving as a pastor Wilson sets out to define who the Church is and then spends the rest of the book explaining what She ought to be doing. I particularly enjoyed reading his thoughts about Parish Churches and also the idea of a church having a publishing ministry. A few of his ideas about publishing seems to be a little dated in that he doesn't mention blogs, etc. but the practices he suggests could be easily be put into those contexts as well. Wilson says the modern Church ought to be ashamed at doing so little with publishing when compared with the shear volume of wrtings of the Puritans and what they did with such little technology. There were several times I had to stop reading and say to myself, "Duh! Why are we not doing that?"

A great read for anyone remotely interested in studying the life of the Church! This is the kind of book which needs to be read multiple times because forgetting who we are and what we ought to be doing is more of a moral problem than anything else. The bibliography found in the footnotes throughout is worth the price of the book!

I would encourage anyone who might be interested in reading this book to do so in conjunction with David Wells' The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World. The former being what we ought to be doing and the latter being what we ought not be doing.