Review of Jesus is _____ (#1025)

Meet the Author

Judah Smith and his wife Chelsea serve together as the lead pastors of City Church in Seattle, WA. Previously, Judah served as a youth pastor for ten years at City Church, a congregation that his mother and father led as founding pastors.

Book Basics

Soon after taking over as the City Church’s lead pastor, Smith launched an incredibly successful, creative, and thought provoking marketing campaign designed to reach the city of Seattle: Jesus is _____. The book is a reflection of Judah Smith’s own answers to the question, especially as understood based on his pastoral ministry in the three years since the campaign launched. His attempts to explain who Jesus is are far less compelling and nowhere near as innovative as was his congregation’s campaign. These answers frame the book’s six sections:

Jesus is Your Friend,
Jesus is Grace,
Jesus is the Point,
Jesus is Happy,
Jesus is Here, and
Jesus is Alive.

I can’t recommend Jesus is _____: Find a New Way to Be Human. Apart from the author’s personal life stories, the book offers no new contributions to the quest to understand who Jesus is. Even more disappointingly, Smith’s informal tone seems inauthentic at multiple points, especially when he labors to insert popular phrases into stories or to seem knowledgeable about pop culture while insisting on a degree of separation from it.

I can, however, recommend visiting jesus-is.org. While there take a few minutes to explore the scope of the project, and consider contributing your own understanding of who Jesus is.

So What?

Judah Smith asks a question worth answering: Who is Jesus? Put differently, how do you fill in this blank: Jesus is ______?

Judah Smith. Jesus is _____: Find a New Way to Be Human (Thomas Nelson, 2013). ISBN: 9781400204755.