Young Adults Book Club: Garden City Review
Thank you for joining us for our first book of the Young Adults Book Club – Garden City by John Mark Comer. We have been reading this book together as a Young Adult community over the past three months and have absolutely loved hearing what you’ve been learning.
John Mark Comer is Pastor for Teaching and Vision at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon. He has written a number of books including Loveology, Garden City and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and hosts This Cultural Moment, a podcast exploring what it means to follow Jesus today.
In Garden City, Comer looks at work and rest.
At the outset, he takes us back to the beginning of how we are each God’s creation, created in HIS image. That is who we are, in opposition to what culture often says – that what we do defines who we are. It simply isn’t the case that our jobs shape our identity and sense of self-worth. This is far from the truth of who we are created to be.
I often get caught in this trap. I regularly fall into comparison, comparing myself to my successful siblings and friends, with their respected jobs, large pay packets and social status. As I’ve reflected on this often-subconscious thought pattern of striving for career ‘success’ as a way of defining my identity, I’ve been really challenged. I remember my dad saying to me in the first few weeks after he’d retired, ‘I feel like I have lost my identity.’ How often do we all fall into this way of thinking?
In Garden City, Comer reminds us that 95% of church congregations spend most of their time ‘working’ – whether this is paid ‘go to the office’ kind of work, or daily tasks like washing clothes or cleaning the house.
God cares about what we do. In fact, he created us to rule and reign (Genesis 1:26-27), and this involves work (‘tilling the land’). He is interested in the detail, and what our work brings to the world. God made us unique, with individual passions and desires, which, when used for the glory of God in our work, bring us profound joy. The great composer J.S. Bach signed every piece of music he wrote with Soli Deo Gloria – ‘to the glory of God.’ This should be the sole motivation behind our work.
Despite the fact that God calls us to live and work for a purpose, and has filled us with passions and dreams, he has also commanded us to rest. Rest is the focus of the second part of Garden City.
Comer reminds us that we are not machines. We cannot simply power through to ‘get the job done.’ We need to rest. However, rest is so much more than just one day off each week to recover from six days of work.
When my siblings and I used to come ‘home home’ from university – where we hadn’t stopped once amongst the busy social, sport, church and study schedules – we would crash. Our parents would say we were ‘detoxing’. For me it usually looked like getting ill and being irritable… And being #vulnerable here, this still happens now if I don’t make space for rest.
God knows we need to rest, and has commanded us to follow his example. He worked and created the world in six days, and on the seventh day he rested – the Sabbath. As his image bearers, we should work and rest too.
Sabbath rest is more than a day off. It’s an intentional time. It’s a day where we enjoy the fruit of our labour, we delight in God and his world, we celebrate life, we rest and we worship him.
The world is full of the consequences of a failure to rest well: fatigue, burnout, anxiety, depression, low energy, anger, emptiness, tension, worn-down immune systems and starved relationships. Wow. It is as if God knew what he was saying when he commanded us to rest!
Besides the physical, emotional and spiritual benefits of resting, Sabbath reminds us that God is God and we are not.
The final section of the book is entitled Garden City. It reminds us that our work and rest matter both now and forever – they have a bearing on eternity. In our resurrected lives, our work will be a joy, and not a toil or a burden. It will bring us peace, flourishing and life forever, working alongside Jesus.
All of this gives us perspective on now. Our work and rest are part of something greater. In everything we do, we want to fix our eyes on Jesus and work to glorify him.
Comer poses three big questions:
Do we feel our work is today something God has called us to?
Does our work benefit the community and make our world more ‘garden-like’?
Does it glorify God and add to the beauty of his creation?
This is where Comer’s big idea comes in – and to be honest I had to read through this twice to get my head around it!
Living in a Garden City reality means that work is the essence of following Jesus. It is using our work to cooperate with heaven’s invasion of earth. Whereas rest is all about memorial and worship. Rest in the form of Sabbath is a weekly signpost between the two worlds – the one we live in and the one to come.
As we come to the end of this book, and as I’m writing this, our Prime Minister is giving a daily address to the country at the end of our first week of drastic measures set in place relating to the coronavirus. We are only beginning to piece together the enormity of the situation – and the impact it will have on our nation and beyond, particularly in relation to work and rest. More than ever we should be challenged to be intentional about how we draw the boundaries between work and rest, but also to keep a hold of the perspective God gives us. He is ultimately to be glorified and honoured in all things.
I couldn’t recommend this book highly enough. It has drastically reshaped, and continues to shape, how I work and how I rest. It was incredibly easy to read with a beautiful layout. But it comes with a health warning: every time you pick it up and read even a sentence, prepare to be challenged.
I hope you have enjoyed this book as much as I have!
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Next up for the Onelife Young Adult Book Club: The Emotionally Healthy Leader by Peter Scazzero. You can get a physical copy from Amazon or find it on Amazon Kindle. This launches in March 2020 – happy reading!