Essay On Taking Back Your Faith From The American Dream By David Platt

The Book I chose to review for this project is Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream by David Platt. I chose to review this book for many reasons, I felt that it connected very well to my personal life and was something I was generally interested in from the start. At first I was very skeptical about the title and the images that come along with “radicalism” in today’s society, but I was pleasantly surprised. Platt is a mega-church pastor in brook hills Alabama, once named the fastest growing church in the country. But Platt uses his experience preaching in his home church as a stark comparison to his experiences ministering around the world, in some not so safe places. He uses this book to create a barrage of challenges and to critique our American church lifestyle. While comparing American churches to his worldly experiences he often points our opulent, over-indulgent way of doing things. “I am convinced that we as Christ

“the American dream prizes what people can accomplish when they believe in themselves and trust in themselves” (46) He further goes on to say that what god really wants from us is in direct contradiction to this, god wants us to recognize our inability and our need for him. In chapters four and five he talks about our inability to globalize the word of god and the way Jesus spoke to his followers. He states that in the United States we have an inability to internalize the commandments of Jesus and spread the word. He continues into chapter five by discussing how Jesus’ goal was not to invest his wisdom into the masses but to invest in a small group of individuals who could continue to spread his teachings on their own. Platt even goes as far as saying that the job of every disciple is to continue to make more