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Healthy Faith and the Coronavirus Crisis
COVID-19 has transformed our everyday lives. It’s as if another world has arrived in the blink of an eye. Yet life is not on pause. We still need to live. The pandemic, like any other time, is a moment both of opportunity as well as challenge.
Healthy Faith in the Coronavirus Crisis is a briefing on how to thrive in a world of restrictions. Twenty leading Christian thinkers have come together to help you begin to navigate this strange reality.
Each contributor writes on their area of expertise, and topics covered include prayer, loneliness, work, singleness, marriage, parenting, grief, death, imagination, conversations, humour, and much more. They offer practical advice as well as helpful perspective from Scripture.
This is an essential resource for anyone looking to cultivate a healthy faith which infuses all areas of life during this disorienting time.
Healthy Faith in the Coronavirus Crisis is a briefing on how to thrive in a world of restrictions. Twenty leading Christian thinkers have come together to help you begin to navigate this strange reality.
Each contributor writes on their area of expertise, and topics covered include prayer, loneliness, work, singleness, marriage, parenting, grief, death, imagination, conversations, humour, and much more. They offer practical advice as well as helpful perspective from Scripture.
This is an essential resource for anyone looking to cultivate a healthy faith which infuses all areas of life during this disorienting time.
- GenresTheology
427 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 23, 2020
7 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
Luke Cawley
5 books21 followersWriter, currently work with a non-profit I helped set up, and spend a lot of my time speaking in settings like university campuses about issues of spirituality, culture and religion. Studied at Wheaton College, Cardiff University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Oxford University. Three lovely kids distracting me from finishing more books.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 19, 2020
The speed of production and the spread of authors is impressive. My review takes those factors into account.
There is a variety in the style, theology and quality of the chapters. Some are excellent (Mair, Searle, Winter, and others) while a couple seem to be an old talk with Coronavirus edited in (no offence intended...these must have been written under difficult circumstances).
However, the book is well worth getting and dipping into. The tone is very helpful. It is a solid guide to help us through these days. I am really glad it has been produced and that I read it. I will certainly be revisiting at least 5 of the chapters regularly.
There is a variety in the style, theology and quality of the chapters. Some are excellent (Mair, Searle, Winter, and others) while a couple seem to be an old talk with Coronavirus edited in (no offence intended...these must have been written under difficult circumstances).
However, the book is well worth getting and dipping into. The tone is very helpful. It is a solid guide to help us through these days. I am really glad it has been produced and that I read it. I will certainly be revisiting at least 5 of the chapters regularly.
May 19, 2020
Superb. Beautifully written, especially the opening section, really moving not simply informative. Then excellent wisdom for practical stuff of life. The chapters on parenting, on dealing with grief and on searching for a sense of home will be re read over and over. Brilliant, cheap as an ebook, should be distributed widely among Christians ASAP.
May 10, 2020
Pretty high standard for a book produced so quickly. Standout chapters from Matt Searles on the Psalms and Mark Meynell on the imagination. Some more patchy sections but that's to be expected. Lots of helpful things here.
July 3, 2020
The nice people at IVP sent me a copy of the manuscript for their new book; Healthy Faith and the Coronavirus Crisis to review, and I’m very glad they did. Subtitled, Thriving the Covid-19 Pandemic, this really is an excellent book.
The book is a multi-author volume with twenty bite-sized chapters, an afterward and nine appendices. As with any multi-author book, the style and the standard of the contributions varies. The writing could probably be described as popular-academic. The book does not shy away from difficult concepts and there are footnotes scattered throughout the text. However, it is the popular aspect of this popular-academic which really comes to the fore. This is an eminently practical book; informative and useful, and I would not hesitate to recommend it widely to believers and unbelievers alike. Each chapter has a selection of further resources, which are likely to prove very helpful.
It’s always difficult to tell what size a book is when you read it as a pdf, but my impression is that it is a normal-sized paperback. It has a little over 250 pages and the Kindle version will set you back £6.39 – it is worth every penny.
I am not going to try to summarise the book. Getting to grips with a wide variety of different content is beyond the scope of this review. The table of contents gives a good overview of what is actually in the book. My intention is to make some general comments and to highlight some issues of particular interest and then to post some illustrative quotes.
I have already mentioned that I would be happy to share this book with both Christians and non-Christians. This would appear to be the aim of the editors:
We asked each contributor to do three things; orient readers to their topic as it plays out during the COVID-19 pandemic, shed the light of Jesus and the Christian scriptures on the subject, and offer some practical advice. They were asked to write in a way which is intelligible to those unfamiliar with the Christian faith…
For the most part, this aim has been achieved. Although the content is unashamedly Christian, it appears to be very accessible. Some of the material – especially that which assumes that people are involved in the life of a church – is less relevant to people who are not Christians, but it is not presented in a way which excludes others. The first three chapters, in particular, which present an apologia for the Christian faith in the face of the pandemic will be of particular relevance in this context.
As a glance at the table of contents shows, this is a very wide-ranging book with chapters covering subjects as diverse as loneliness, grief, fear and humour. It is also a very honest book, at times brutally so. It does not shy away from the fact that we are facing a deadly disease that will kill people and that some readers will face a lonely death or bereavement. However, the book also brings hope, by clearly pointing us to the one who has overcome death who brings hope beyond this current age. Uncomfortable honesty, practical wisdom and hope based in Christ are the underlying themes in all of the articles. There is also a solid, if not always overt, theological basis to all of the content.
It is difficult to pick out any highlights. As a former biologist, I found the chapter on Viruses and God’s Good Creation fascinating (though I suspect it might challenge a few conservative evangelicals). The chapter which looked at learning from the persecuted church is also very helpful. But at this point, I’m tempted just to list the whole lot and say how much I enjoyed/was helped by them!
Who should read it? You should.
Those who are married might be tempted to skip the chapters on loneliness and singleness and the singles might want give the chapters on marriage and parenting a miss, but I would argue that there is a value in learning from the perspective of others.
CONTENTS
Section One: (re)orientation
1. Orienting to the New Reality (Luke Cawley)
2. Homecoming: The Art of Being Human (Kristi Mair)
Section Two: fragile life
3. Viruses and God’s Good Creation: How Do They Fit? (Paul Copan)
4. On Dying Well: Reflections of a Christian Medic (John Wyatt)
5. Dancing with Uncertainty: Lessons from the Persecuted Church (Eddie Lyle)
6. Grief and Comfort: Understanding and Responding to the Experience of Loss (Richard Winter)
7. Navigating Loneliness: Why It Hurts and How We Can Respond (Ed Shaw)
8. Heathy Fear: Keeping Calm and Considering Christ (Dan Strange)
Section Three: connected life
9. Stable Disruptions: Furlough, Unemployment, Front Line, and Our Constant Call (Ed Creedy)
10. Working in God’s World: A Time for Recalibration (Cal Bailey)
11. Connected Singleness: Distance Without Isolation (Kate Wharton)
12. The Shape of Marriage: Scriptural Principles (Dianne & Derek Tidball)
13. Communicating With Your Other Half: Tips from the Marriage Coaches (Julie & Keith Johnson)
14. Parenting: The Opportunities of Being Trapped With Your Kids (Rachel Turner)
Section Four: growing life
15. Church, Crisis and Creativity: A Chance for Revitalization (Krish Kandiah)
16. Prayer in Confinement: Postures and Practices for a Flourishing Faith (Jill Weber)
17. Encountering Scripture: Turning to the Psalms in Times of Trial (Matt Searles)
18. Viral Conversations: Extending the Hope of Jesus to Friends (Andy Bannister)
19. The Liberated Imagination: Realities Beyond Restrictions (Mark Meynell)
20. Infectious Laughter: Humour in an Age of Tragedy (Andy Kind)
afterword
God With Us: A Paradigm for Life During the Pandemic (Tom Wright)
appendices
i. A Psalm in the Epidemic: Trust Triumphs Over Fear (Pablo Martinez)
ii. How Hope & Patience Embrace Each Other: A Reflection (Pablo Martinez)
iii. Advice for Carers & Relatives: Practical, Medical, & Pastoral issues (John Wyatt)
iv. Current legal framework for end-of-life decisions (John Wyatt)
v. Sample Statement of Wishes and Values for a Christian Believer (John Wyatt)
vi. Safeguarding tips for churches (Thirtyone: Eight)
vii. Guidance for working and communication safely online (Thirtyone: Eight)
viii. Ten Tips for Working From Home (Luke Cawley)
ix. Sample Prayers (John Wyatt)
A few illustrative quotes:
But death wasn’t first introduced to Europe in January 2020. It’s not some exotic import previously only available from speciality retailers. Nor did the tight interconnectedness of the human race become a reality only once everyone morphed into potential carriers of a deadly pathogen.
Luke Cawley
We have never been more at home, and yet, we’ve never felt less at home.
Kristi Mair
We were once at home with each other and the one who made us. We were made to reflect the beautiful God — literally as those ‘in his image’ — and to care for the good world he had made. Yet, as good as this home was, we wanted more. A restlessness set in. Not an urge to journey to far-flung lands to find ourselves, or to take a little breather outside because things were growing intense indoors, but a restlessness to be more and to have more; to become the gods of our own world, a move towards independence rather than connectedness. So, as we pull away, God lets us go. But not without cost: as relationship with God dissolves, the candles are blown out, the spiders start creeping in and the cobwebs begin to surface. We start to crumble.
Kristi Mair
The way home, however, is threatened by danger. As some of our old maps used to say, ‘here be dragons’. One such sulphurous beast is death itself. When we chose to make our homes away from God, we became less human, and decay and death followed us. Wherever we go, we can’t shake it off. It is always lurking in the shadows. It is in the world, as much as COVID-19 always will be, and we are unable to escape it. Jesus slayed death through death. His own death. His broken body is the gate to the path home.
Kristi Mair
In order to die well, I have to be at peace with God and at peace with the most important people in my life. Strangely and wonderfully, a dying person is able to bless his or her loved ones by ‘completing’ or strengthening the most significant relationships at the end of life.
John Wyatt
Our ancestors were better prepared for death than we are today. By the age of ten, a century or more ago, most children would have attended several funerals of siblings and other relatives. We would have seen people dying in our homes. Today, because of the achievements of modern medicine, this is a rare occurrence.
Richard Winter
Christians should always be alert to the good that can come out of suffering: the cross of Jesus trains us to do this. Out of the deepest pain ever has come the greatest rescue ever.
Ed Shaw
Too often the church has looked a lot less like an emergency service, and more like a health club for paid-up members. But in this time of crisis, the public perception is changing.
Krish Kandiah
When our faith, our theology and our ministry methods are tested in the crucible of affliction, we may see much of our beloved traditions evaporate, but we could also find that refined in the fire is a much healthier church, fit for a new generation to take the gospel afresh to the ends of a world desperate for our good news.
Krish Kandiah
At this point, I should reiterate that I was provided with a free copy of the manuscript for this book in return for an honest review. While I appreciate this generosity, I have not allowed it to influence my review. If I thought the book was a stinker, I’d have said so. It isn’t a stinker, it is excellent and you should get hold of a copy. Well done, IVP!
The book is a multi-author volume with twenty bite-sized chapters, an afterward and nine appendices. As with any multi-author book, the style and the standard of the contributions varies. The writing could probably be described as popular-academic. The book does not shy away from difficult concepts and there are footnotes scattered throughout the text. However, it is the popular aspect of this popular-academic which really comes to the fore. This is an eminently practical book; informative and useful, and I would not hesitate to recommend it widely to believers and unbelievers alike. Each chapter has a selection of further resources, which are likely to prove very helpful.
It’s always difficult to tell what size a book is when you read it as a pdf, but my impression is that it is a normal-sized paperback. It has a little over 250 pages and the Kindle version will set you back £6.39 – it is worth every penny.
I am not going to try to summarise the book. Getting to grips with a wide variety of different content is beyond the scope of this review. The table of contents gives a good overview of what is actually in the book. My intention is to make some general comments and to highlight some issues of particular interest and then to post some illustrative quotes.
I have already mentioned that I would be happy to share this book with both Christians and non-Christians. This would appear to be the aim of the editors:
We asked each contributor to do three things; orient readers to their topic as it plays out during the COVID-19 pandemic, shed the light of Jesus and the Christian scriptures on the subject, and offer some practical advice. They were asked to write in a way which is intelligible to those unfamiliar with the Christian faith…
For the most part, this aim has been achieved. Although the content is unashamedly Christian, it appears to be very accessible. Some of the material – especially that which assumes that people are involved in the life of a church – is less relevant to people who are not Christians, but it is not presented in a way which excludes others. The first three chapters, in particular, which present an apologia for the Christian faith in the face of the pandemic will be of particular relevance in this context.
As a glance at the table of contents shows, this is a very wide-ranging book with chapters covering subjects as diverse as loneliness, grief, fear and humour. It is also a very honest book, at times brutally so. It does not shy away from the fact that we are facing a deadly disease that will kill people and that some readers will face a lonely death or bereavement. However, the book also brings hope, by clearly pointing us to the one who has overcome death who brings hope beyond this current age. Uncomfortable honesty, practical wisdom and hope based in Christ are the underlying themes in all of the articles. There is also a solid, if not always overt, theological basis to all of the content.
It is difficult to pick out any highlights. As a former biologist, I found the chapter on Viruses and God’s Good Creation fascinating (though I suspect it might challenge a few conservative evangelicals). The chapter which looked at learning from the persecuted church is also very helpful. But at this point, I’m tempted just to list the whole lot and say how much I enjoyed/was helped by them!
Who should read it? You should.
Those who are married might be tempted to skip the chapters on loneliness and singleness and the singles might want give the chapters on marriage and parenting a miss, but I would argue that there is a value in learning from the perspective of others.
CONTENTS
Section One: (re)orientation
1. Orienting to the New Reality (Luke Cawley)
2. Homecoming: The Art of Being Human (Kristi Mair)
Section Two: fragile life
3. Viruses and God’s Good Creation: How Do They Fit? (Paul Copan)
4. On Dying Well: Reflections of a Christian Medic (John Wyatt)
5. Dancing with Uncertainty: Lessons from the Persecuted Church (Eddie Lyle)
6. Grief and Comfort: Understanding and Responding to the Experience of Loss (Richard Winter)
7. Navigating Loneliness: Why It Hurts and How We Can Respond (Ed Shaw)
8. Heathy Fear: Keeping Calm and Considering Christ (Dan Strange)
Section Three: connected life
9. Stable Disruptions: Furlough, Unemployment, Front Line, and Our Constant Call (Ed Creedy)
10. Working in God’s World: A Time for Recalibration (Cal Bailey)
11. Connected Singleness: Distance Without Isolation (Kate Wharton)
12. The Shape of Marriage: Scriptural Principles (Dianne & Derek Tidball)
13. Communicating With Your Other Half: Tips from the Marriage Coaches (Julie & Keith Johnson)
14. Parenting: The Opportunities of Being Trapped With Your Kids (Rachel Turner)
Section Four: growing life
15. Church, Crisis and Creativity: A Chance for Revitalization (Krish Kandiah)
16. Prayer in Confinement: Postures and Practices for a Flourishing Faith (Jill Weber)
17. Encountering Scripture: Turning to the Psalms in Times of Trial (Matt Searles)
18. Viral Conversations: Extending the Hope of Jesus to Friends (Andy Bannister)
19. The Liberated Imagination: Realities Beyond Restrictions (Mark Meynell)
20. Infectious Laughter: Humour in an Age of Tragedy (Andy Kind)
afterword
God With Us: A Paradigm for Life During the Pandemic (Tom Wright)
appendices
i. A Psalm in the Epidemic: Trust Triumphs Over Fear (Pablo Martinez)
ii. How Hope & Patience Embrace Each Other: A Reflection (Pablo Martinez)
iii. Advice for Carers & Relatives: Practical, Medical, & Pastoral issues (John Wyatt)
iv. Current legal framework for end-of-life decisions (John Wyatt)
v. Sample Statement of Wishes and Values for a Christian Believer (John Wyatt)
vi. Safeguarding tips for churches (Thirtyone: Eight)
vii. Guidance for working and communication safely online (Thirtyone: Eight)
viii. Ten Tips for Working From Home (Luke Cawley)
ix. Sample Prayers (John Wyatt)
A few illustrative quotes:
But death wasn’t first introduced to Europe in January 2020. It’s not some exotic import previously only available from speciality retailers. Nor did the tight interconnectedness of the human race become a reality only once everyone morphed into potential carriers of a deadly pathogen.
Luke Cawley
We have never been more at home, and yet, we’ve never felt less at home.
Kristi Mair
We were once at home with each other and the one who made us. We were made to reflect the beautiful God — literally as those ‘in his image’ — and to care for the good world he had made. Yet, as good as this home was, we wanted more. A restlessness set in. Not an urge to journey to far-flung lands to find ourselves, or to take a little breather outside because things were growing intense indoors, but a restlessness to be more and to have more; to become the gods of our own world, a move towards independence rather than connectedness. So, as we pull away, God lets us go. But not without cost: as relationship with God dissolves, the candles are blown out, the spiders start creeping in and the cobwebs begin to surface. We start to crumble.
Kristi Mair
The way home, however, is threatened by danger. As some of our old maps used to say, ‘here be dragons’. One such sulphurous beast is death itself. When we chose to make our homes away from God, we became less human, and decay and death followed us. Wherever we go, we can’t shake it off. It is always lurking in the shadows. It is in the world, as much as COVID-19 always will be, and we are unable to escape it. Jesus slayed death through death. His own death. His broken body is the gate to the path home.
Kristi Mair
In order to die well, I have to be at peace with God and at peace with the most important people in my life. Strangely and wonderfully, a dying person is able to bless his or her loved ones by ‘completing’ or strengthening the most significant relationships at the end of life.
John Wyatt
Our ancestors were better prepared for death than we are today. By the age of ten, a century or more ago, most children would have attended several funerals of siblings and other relatives. We would have seen people dying in our homes. Today, because of the achievements of modern medicine, this is a rare occurrence.
Richard Winter
Christians should always be alert to the good that can come out of suffering: the cross of Jesus trains us to do this. Out of the deepest pain ever has come the greatest rescue ever.
Ed Shaw
Too often the church has looked a lot less like an emergency service, and more like a health club for paid-up members. But in this time of crisis, the public perception is changing.
Krish Kandiah
When our faith, our theology and our ministry methods are tested in the crucible of affliction, we may see much of our beloved traditions evaporate, but we could also find that refined in the fire is a much healthier church, fit for a new generation to take the gospel afresh to the ends of a world desperate for our good news.
Krish Kandiah
At this point, I should reiterate that I was provided with a free copy of the manuscript for this book in return for an honest review. While I appreciate this generosity, I have not allowed it to influence my review. If I thought the book was a stinker, I’d have said so. It isn’t a stinker, it is excellent and you should get hold of a copy. Well done, IVP!
August 8, 2020
I was so impressed with how quickly this book was released when Coronavirus first hit and we all went into lockdown. I’m not so impressed with how long it’s taken me to read it, but that’s entirely my fault and not a reflection of the book!
As you would guess from the title, the book talks us through how to correlate our faith with the coronavirus pandemic in a healthy way, when the atmosphere around is is the complete opposite, and we might be tempted to draw away from God.
Split into 20 chapters, each is written by a different contributor and brings a different specialism and knowledge to the situation. Chapters like work, marriage, singleness, grief and loneliness.
And although it’s written by 20 different people, it flows really well and reads as a cohesive book rather than just separate articles, which was really nice. I think the reason it took so long for me to read is because a lot of the topics felt really close to home and I wasn’t ready to read it.
As you would imagine, each chapter is filled with biblical knowledge, pointing us towards the God who is with us in these unprecedented times:
It also challenges us to draw closer to God rather than pulling away, choosing prayer rather than anger to get us through the crisis.
I’m not going to individually review each chapter, because I think if you’ve got this far into the review, you should probably pick up a copy of the book and check it out – the kindle version was pretty cheap last time I looked.
I think while obviously written and focused on the coronavirus times, the book will be a useful reference when we hopefully get through this to the other side. Chapters like the one on the Psalms are a good guide for all times, not just in a pandemic, so I see myself returning to this book again in the future, hopefully when my head (and the world) is in a better place.
As you would guess from the title, the book talks us through how to correlate our faith with the coronavirus pandemic in a healthy way, when the atmosphere around is is the complete opposite, and we might be tempted to draw away from God.
Split into 20 chapters, each is written by a different contributor and brings a different specialism and knowledge to the situation. Chapters like work, marriage, singleness, grief and loneliness.
And although it’s written by 20 different people, it flows really well and reads as a cohesive book rather than just separate articles, which was really nice. I think the reason it took so long for me to read is because a lot of the topics felt really close to home and I wasn’t ready to read it.
We come to appreciate more than ever the wonder inherent in simple things like friendship, walks in the park, holidays, hugging or even just going to the pub.
As you would imagine, each chapter is filled with biblical knowledge, pointing us towards the God who is with us in these unprecedented times:
Because Christ came to remove from us the tyranny of the fear of death (Heb. 2:14–15), we can live in confident hope, carry out our daily tasks and selflessly serve others even in the most trying times.
It also challenges us to draw closer to God rather than pulling away, choosing prayer rather than anger to get us through the crisis.
As we seek to love others through this time, perhaps the most useful weapon in our arsenal is one of the simplest. We have a clear and direct line to God. He always hears our prayers, so let us be a praying people.
I’m not going to individually review each chapter, because I think if you’ve got this far into the review, you should probably pick up a copy of the book and check it out – the kindle version was pretty cheap last time I looked.
I think while obviously written and focused on the coronavirus times, the book will be a useful reference when we hopefully get through this to the other side. Chapters like the one on the Psalms are a good guide for all times, not just in a pandemic, so I see myself returning to this book again in the future, hopefully when my head (and the world) is in a better place.
June 19, 2020
A mixed bag, but some really powerful chapters.
Want to read
July 15, 2021All right, the pandemicclearly isn’t going anywhere, so it’s time to read all those books I bought a year (!) ago...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews