Aqua Church

Aqua Church by Leonard Sweet
Published by Group Publishing

There aren’t many books that I read that blow me away, but Aqua Church by Leonard Sweet is one such book. In short, I loved this book. I know that some may find a book of this kind hard to read, but I couldn’t put it down. As a reader I love to read stories, metaphors, analogies, and factual insights, and there are plenty on offer within the pages of this book to keep someone like me very happy.

I loved that Sweet has taken the much-used idea of the church as a ship and taken us where no other writer, at least to my knowledge, has taken us. Sweet develops an idea so basic, the church as a ship navigating it’s way through the changing waters of post-modernism, and it works.

I liked that Sweet kept things simple throughout and a major strength of this book is the fact that anyone should be able to pick up this book and understand, to one extent or another, what he is talking about. There are so many writers that focus their ideas and teachings too narrowly making them appeal to a limited reading audience, but Sweet avoids this, and as such his book is easily accessible to a wider audience.

Another strength is the fact that one can open the book to any chapter and gain something from it. Some books are such that one would have to read every chapter in order to be able to even begin to understand what the writer is trying to say. However, I admit to reading this book in a very haphazard way. On obtaining the book I flicked through the pages to see what the overall theme of the book was and found myself reading certain chapters such as Listening for Sonar, Vibrations, and Creativity.

What I liked most about this book was the sheer amount of illustrations used. Like many preachers and pastors I use many illustrations when preaching, and I have marked up many pages in this book for future reference. In fact, I have already used several of the illustrations that Sweet uses in my own messages, and even in Bible study groups.

Although this book is quite basic and understandable to everyone, it may not be everyone’s bag. I first read this book as a student in seminary and during the class sessions I would speak with my fellow students; some revealed that Aqua Church was one of the hardest books they had ever read and that they didn’t like Sweet’s writing style. I must admit that a book of this kind may be a little too fast for many a reader. Again I think that is one of the things I liked about this book, that the book moved along at breakneck speed.

Many critics of the book point out that a major weakness with Aqua Church is that the book doesn’t really give a lot of in-depth teaching on any of the areas presented – Sweet keeps things pretty basic throughout, skimming over stuff that needed expounding upon. However, I see this as a bonus as I prefer to think things through in my own time, but anyone looking for deep insight into the areas that Sweet presents may come away feeling disappointed, and maybe even somewhat frustrated.

As a preacher and full time minister of the Gospel, I am trying more and more to understand the post-modern (and even the post, post-modern) mindset. Another reason I may have liked the book so much is that Sweet seems to know this mindset very well. I have read other books on post-modernism, but many of them have been written, it seems, by people who may understand post-modernism, but by their writings hint to the fact that they don’t quite believe what they are writing. Sweet on the other hand gets it. His ideas, the running theme of the book, even his writing style, are totally post-modern in form and this makes what Sweet writes even more believable. He seems to believe what he is writing and this in turn helps us, the readers, to believe it too.

Christian St John M.Div, BChM, ACS
February, 2009

Purchase Aqua Church by Leonard Sweet by clicking the image below: