The Way Of The Kingdom: Seizing The Times For A Great Move Of God, by Kim M. Maas

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Chosen Books in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

It would be a lot easier to respect what this author (and others like her) have to say about the way of the kingdom if one did not have to consider her to be a credible eyewitness to what she has seen. To take but one example in this book, towards the end of this small volume the author frets about how a trip to a troubled ministry with a dishonest lead pastor who was inflating the numbers of people attending to bolster his own shaky credentials led the author to suffer the “sweet agony” of the Spirit moving her to do something and that she felt she had almost lost the chance to do “kingdom violence.” This case, and others like it, are demonstrations of the ways that the author (and others like her) let their own religious traditions and the language of those traditions interfere with a firm and genuine understanding of the Bible and our own behavior. The author quotes plenty of scripture here and certainly makes some worthwhile points, but in the end we are urged to accept this on the grounds of the author’s own expertise as a spiritual guide, and that is a dubious thing at best.

This book is a relatively short one at about 200 pages in length and it is divided into ten chapters. The book begins with a foreword by Mark J. Chironna, and after that are acknowledgements, a prologue, and an introduction. After this the book talks about whether the reader is “the one” (1), a discussion of the great temptation (2), ears to hear (3), and the least in the kingdom (4). There is a lengthy discussion about matters of conflict, including its inevitability (5), kingdom violence (6), war and peace (7), and perfect peace (8), where the author discusses how it is that persecution is a sign of the advancing nature of God’s kingdom on this earth. The book then closes with a discussion of how death has lost its sting (9) and how the author believes that we are the violent who seize the kingdom by force (10), as well as a conclusion, an appendix on violence by another author, and endnotes.