Going Deep is a fictional story that uses real life preacher Gordon MacDonald and his wife in a story of fellowship and church growth. The two come to the realization that their church should be filled with deep people and set out to create a program to train deep people. After setting up their program, they take several years to impliment the program and grow depth within a number of select individuals.
The idea is great - a church of deep people will glorify God by their Christlikeness more than a church of shallow people who don't know much about their beliefs and don't live fully committed lives that produce spiritual fruit: joy, kindness, faithfulness, patience, etc. This idea probably would have made a good "how-to" instructional non-fiction book. I think the fiction format could have worked if the story had been well-thought and more realistic.
When I pick up a book about "deep people", I expect to find something deep within its pages. Instead of giving readers an "Ah-ha" moment, this book is dragged across 400 pages in a painful diary format: Pastor woke up, ate breakfast, talked to Joe, went home, ate dinner. Next day, pastor called Pete, went home, talked to wife. The book drags on like this and by the time you are 50% through the book, they still haven't even decided how to impliment the learning program. The last part of the book is rushed through 2 years of "implimenting the program" by skipping weeks at a time between meetings. Prayer is described as "a one sentence "I'm thankful for..."." When there is a cultivating depth meeting, it's all that unrealistic corny dialogue that Christian books and movies are notorious for and there is no depth to the meetings or dialogue.
Example of rushing through growth meetings without any details: "AS THE WEEK SPASSED [Yes, that's an error in Kindle ebook], WE STUDIED THE LIVES OF OTHER biblical heroes...AFTER WE’D FINISHED STUDYING TEMPERAMENT, THE GROUP began studying the so-called spiritual disciplines. Gail and I outlined some of the ways the Bible called people to a life of devotion... We spent time talking about how to read various parts of the Bible and internalize what we were reading. We even looked at the structure of the Bible, its division into Older and New Testaments. One night we reviewed the sections of the New Testament and talked about the purpose of each of the small letters that Paul and the other apostles had written. Then there was the subject of meditation, or reflection, something more easily understood by the introverts and harder for the extroverts."
After completing the book, (without any disrespect towards the author) I must wonder if Gordon MacDonald took the time to sit down and actually think about what a real life successful program would look like. If he did, all those details that would create a successful program in real life, are left out of this book. This book has the feel of the author coming up with a good idea, not wanting to put much thought into how the idea would be carried out in real life, and just banging out a warm fuzzy fictional story, while he left out all the "deep" details.
I would not recommend spending your precious time reading this book. If you are looking for any good ideas on becoming deeper, you won't find it here. This isn't a bad book, but it isn't especially good either - long, drawn out, boring, slow to accomplish anything. By the end, I'm left going "that could have been so much better."
I received this book free of charge from the publisher in exchange for this review but I did really give my honest opinion
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