Heather Zempel
InterVarsity Press, 2012, 208 pp., $15.00
As the pastor of discipleship at National Community Church in Washington, D.C., Heather Zempel has garnered experience in how to do small group ministry and discipleship well and how it can fail. She’s upfront in saying her experience has led her to the conclusion that “community is messy. And discipleship is hard.” You probably already can tell Community Is Messy is not going to be a book about 7 Easy Steps to the Perfect Small Group Bible Study.
Zempel takes a realistic and well-grounded approach to biblical community. She understands that while developing community is difficult, it is also very worth the effort. She even goes so far as to say the inherent mess of community is directly proportional to transformation and growth. Messiness is not something to be avoided in community, but expected and in some respects sought after.
If you’d benefit from insight to the failed experiments another church/pastor has encountered in developing small groups, though certainly not exclusively, there is plenty of that here. Despite all the mess and failures, there is a beauty to the portrait given here of a group of people who understand and accept the messiness of doing life together and want to learn to grow in and out of it.
