Book Review: Authentic Church - Vaughn Roberts

Vaughn Roberts, Authentic Church: True Spirituality in a Culture of Counterfits, InterVarsity, 2011 What does it mean to be an “authentic church”? Vaughn Roberts, in his, Authentic Church: True Spirituality in a Culture of Counterfeits, examines Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians to examine this very question. Roberts takes an expository approach to the 1 Corinthians study, looking at the questions of culture raised in the epistle, rather than beginning with today’s cultural questions and looking for answers. The Corinthian church, as perceived in the epistle, manifested a number of practices that demonstrated its compliance with cultural fads and a lack of authenticity. By utilizing this methodology, Roberts searches out a model of spiritual authenticity as evidenced in the Bible, using the lessons to speak into today’s cultural context. In this way he attempts to limit his contemporary contextual bias in his hermeneutic, which is important as the premise of his book is that an authentic church and spirituality are not co-opted by the fads of culture. Roberts’ book was pulled together from a variety of sermons, and unfortunately it reads as such. His writing is preachy and often comes with an “us versus them” mentality. It is an obvious apologetic for an evangelical audience, taking for granted that Roberts’ readers take the Bible as authority. Yet, despite the chip on the shoulder tone of the book, Roberts tackles some significant cultural issues from a biblical perspective. This book will serve as a good accompaniment resource to an evangelical sermon or series on 1 Corinthians, but lacks the depth to truly study church authenticity in the midst of culture.