In our house, we call them God adventures. If you make following God your top priority, He often gives you big and little adventures to serve Him. It may be the neighbor next door, a ministry in another state or the people of another country. It is often through these adventures God sends your way that you can experience the most spiritual growth as you see God working and using you to reach others.
I think it is an important and godly concept to teach our children, so I was interested when offered the opportunity to review the book Outrageous: Awake to the Unexpected Adventures of Everyday Faith by Aaron Tredway.
Tredway played professional soccer. He is also a Christian. The book is about what happens when he combines the two and allows God to lead him to serve others and share his faith. Along the way Tredway has all sorts of adventures – many of them rather humorous.
This book doesn’t claim to be a Bible study or to deliver deep biblical truths. It is an entertaining way to get a glimpse of how God can work in the lives of Christians who are willing to develop and use the gifts God gave them to serve Him. Life for Tredway isn’t perfect, but one can’t deny the craziness of the journey is also part of the joy. It allowed him and now readers to see how God moves and uses people and events to place Christians where He wants them to teach others about Him.
I enjoyed the book. It was an easy, fun read and would be perfectly appropriate for teens and even some older children to read. Those who enjoy soccer would probably get an extra bit of enjoyment from the book as it does talk about soccer quite a bit. It is a more subtle way of helping your kids see the possibilities and the adventures God can and may give them if they trust and follow Him.
My only complaint about the book is that Tredway, while seemingly a man who puts obeying God as his top priority, dismisses the example of baptism by immersion as the consistent biblical model for conversion. I would encourage him to re-read Acts and study the history of conversions during the beginnings of the Church. It saddens me that he may not be teaching the full Gospel message. (It’s not 100% clear, but the implication is he is using the Sinner’s Prayer which was never scriptural, but introduced as a convenience in the last couple of hundred years.)
Your kids should already know how to become a Christian and hopefully may already have made that decision. The language is obscure enough that I wouldn’t let it stop me from sharing the book with my teen. The intent of your children following God where He leads them and serving and sharing their faith as they go is the focus and is communicated well. Better yet, read the book with your kids and talk about the adventures on which God has sent you and the members of your family. It’s a great faith building exercise.
This book was given to me in exchange for my honest review. An affiliate link is included for your convenience.