Book Review: “Another Gospel” by Alisa Childers

Last November my wife, Lisa, attended a women’s conference at a Calvary Chapel in Kansas City with a few select ladies from church. When I usually drop her off to be carted away for the weekend, she comes back in a better state than when she leaves, but this time, it was in a much better state. When she came back, she was envigorated, alive with wonder, and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. All she kept saying throughout the car ride home from church was, “Oh my gosh, you have GOT to read this book!”

We got home and without even unpacking her bag, started unpacking what she had learned throughout the weekend. When it comes to books, Lisa loves her old dead guys. The older and deader they are, the more she loves to soak up every word from the pages of the lifeless remnants of their minds. Books like Puritain Author John Owen’s, Mortificaiton of Sin; The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer; or any written work by Andrew Murray. The book she has been passing around church the past few months, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane Ortland, has been a favorite of hers; even though the man is still alive, he quotes her old dead guys throughout the pages, resurrecting all that she loves and cherrishes. So, to love a book from a woman, who is still quite alive, and begging me to read — it was weird.

Back cover

After Lisa read the book, I started in on the pages myself. I read the back cover and had mixed feelings, thinking this was going to be like any other “me story” and how this woman got through it all. A wife, mom, worship leader, and DOVE award winning worship leader from the all-girl CCM group ZOEgirl — she was everything I wasn’t.

I read the sysnopsis: Her journey of being raised in a Christian home with Christian missionary parents knew God from an early age, who got who wrestled with her faith as it was shaken by a Progressive Christian Pastor who challenged the entire bedrock of her faith, only to come out stronger in the end. ”Again, why am I reading this?” I said to myself as I started flipping to chapter one.

Reading the book

From the moment I read the first page I was completely hooked. I started reading on a two-and-a-half-hour plane and by the time I landed in Newark, New Jersey, I was invested in the first four chapters, one-third of the way in. It wasn’t like those other books that blip here and there with things that happened to them, name-dropping their way though the pages looking for filler. No. Every page had meaning. From her story, how she felt, things she witnessed and saw, and events that were happening to her on the inside and out; every part, every page, had a specific meaning to it, which went along with factual information. I was intregued. I coudn’t put it down.

She is a woman and her story is from a woman’s perspective, but Childers doesn’t write to women. Let me be clear — this is not a book for women. As a 51 year-old white guy, I thoroughly enjoyed it and not once thought she was talking to just women. I never got that feeling. Even though she talks about being pregnant, caring for her children and her husband, and doing woman things, I appreciate that those aspects were not the focus of her writing; but at the same time were important to mention, but only for a moment. Men can and will appreciate this book without question. I most certainly did.

With every chapter, she added quotes from Progressives that will make your skin crawl. At the beginning of each chapter, with the exception of the first, she highlights quotes that Progressives have said, and which proves her point that these wolves in sheep’s clothing, are exactly what they are — wolves, who are hungry to feed on the sheep. With every quote you get the sense that this is a spiritual battle in which the forces of hell working though these people to dismantle the very bedrock of the Christian faith in the eyes of unsuspecting children of God. When you read this book, you are thankful to her that she drug herself through the muck and mire of having to read these progressive books so you don’t have to.

Not only does she back everything up with Scripture, but with eleven pages of citations in the back of the book. Every quote, every fact, was elequently noted and detailed so that the reader can check things out for themselves and keep Childers’ honest.

Also in the back of the book are aditional resources and discussion questions highlighted to help the reader even more to gain a foothold against Progressives and a firm foundation in real Biblical Christianity. Books, podcasts, websites, and more that have helped her, she offers the same to her reader. It’s refreshing to know that she shares this information without holding back, where a lot of authors don’t.

Childers doesn’t really get into her thoughts about essential and nonessential beliefs of Christianity. The closest to this that she comes is in the section, Hyperfundamentalism, in chapter four: Fixing What Isn’t Broken. I had to read it several times, and though you get the sense that she believes the nonessentials don’t matter, you start to wonder what the nonessentials are. Though these topics had to be addressed in the book, and one-third of the way in was a good spot, you come away with a sense of being a little lost yourself.

She mentions the age of the earth, but I cannot tell if she feels this is an essential or nonessential belief.

“Many progressive Christians I meet grew up in impossibly strict sects of the faith that believed anyone outside their particular group was at best a nominal Christian and at worst a heretic. Because their faith communities had failed to teach them the difference between essential and nonessential beliefs, their entire foundation was rocked the first time they met a Christian who believed differently about the Ratpure or the age of the earth.”

Childers, Alisa. Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity. Pg 62.

I firmly believe that the age of the earth matters when it comes to Biblical Chrisitanity, and it is essential to the faith, as I shared with this man last year at the Creation Booth at the Iowa State Fair. The Bible says that we can know and understand that we live on a young earth (approximately 6,000 years old), and that everything was created in six litteral twenty-four hour days. Not only this, but science also confirms a young earth. Things like this are essential to the faith, she just makes me wonder if she believes them or not.

To say that the Bible was wrong on how old the earth is, and that it was created in six 24-hour days, is to say the Bible is wrong. God’s perfect Word, breathed out by Him to us (2 Timothy 3:16-17), is wrong, and therefore errant and falible.

Like I said, I don’t know Childers’ position on the age of the earth or the days of creation, but wanted to clarify that it is important.

My recommendation

I thought this was a fantastic book and highly recommend reading it. Worth every penny to buy it, and one that will be a tremendous resource in your library. She has others out and coming out including: Live Your Truth (and Other Lies): Exposing Popular Deceptions That Make Us Anxious, Exhausted, and Self-Obsessed; and The Deconstruction of Christianity: What it is, Why it’s Destructive, and How to Respond, which is brand new and available for preorder.