Bad Religion, Good News: An Honest Guide for the Spiritually Disappointed

It's time to face the church's checkered past--and present.

We know that Christians across time have participated in or upheld grave wrongs. We also know that religious wrongdoing is more than just history. Many have suffered church-related trauma because of others who profess to follow Christ. So how do we hold the church's historic and ongoing sins? Is the best alternative to leave the faith--and do these questions make us bad Christians?

After four decades in the same congregation as well as a career in campus ministries, Scott A. Bessenecker has faced plenty of disappointment with the church. Yet he has found a richer spirituality by honestly facing harms done by those who follow Jesus. In Bad Religion, Good News, he offers a way to hold understandable disappointment alongside the conviction that God is good. Speaking openly about the church's sins can help us examine the ways we've been wounded--and perhaps wounded others. Healing begins with an honest confrontation of wrongdoing.

This invitational guide will help you move through disappointment with the church and embody the prophetic alternative to domination that the church was always meant to be.

Scott A. Bessenecker has spent his entire adult life working in one Christian organization and attending one local church community--plenty of time, he says, to be both a victim of and participant in the sins of the church.

Bessenecker serves as the director of global engagement and justice for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an interdenominational campus ministry. He is the author of The New Friars, How to Inherit the Earth, and Overturning Tables. He and his wife Janine live in Madison, Wisconsin, and have three adult children.