Review: Fed Up With Flat Faith by Kathy Howard

Fed Up with Flat Faith is for those Christians who know their faith could be more active, more real, more dynamic, but don’t know how to make the step from flat to vibrant. Writing from her own experience, Kathy Howard describes five attitudes that she believes we must adopt to revitalise our faith:

Attitude #1: Relationship over Religion
Attitude #2: Surrendered to the Saviour
Attitude #3: Remember Christ’s Forgiveness
Attitude #4: Living for His Purposes
Attitude #5: Eternal Perspective

None of these are new. But unlike many books which merely diagnose the problem, Fed Up with Flat Faith also provides us with five actions we can take to reignite the fire in our faith:

Action #1: Diligently Read and Study the Bible
(she says “Intimacy cannot be built through someone else’s three-minute devotionals”)
Action #2: Connect with God in Worship
Action #3: Obey God to Experience His Blessings
Action #4: Stay vitally connected to a local church
Action #5: Participate in God’s Saving Work
(but don’t do everything. She says “We are too quick to add commitments to our lives and too slow about removing them.”).

As Christians, we are probably already doing some of these things, but it’s a challenge to do them all, and the author speaks from her own personal experience, which she shares. She also points out that we do have ups and downs in our Christian walk:

“To experience a fiery faith, we must go beyond merely knowing about these attitudes and actions. We must humbly submit ourselves to their truth and then follow God in complete obedience.”

Fed Up with Flat Faith is well-grounded in the Bible, with quotes from a range of modern and classic Christian authors such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, AW Tozer, Rick Warren and Lysa TerKeurst, and includes a comprehensive list of resources to help in personal bible study at the end.

It’s a quick read, and while the vocabulary is simple and the style easy to read, the words are challenging and thought-provoking. Those have to be the tests of any book that seeks to improve our relationship with God or the way we live our faith. In that, Fed Up With Flat Faith succeeds.

Thanks to New Hope and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review. You can find out more about Kathy Howard at her website.