Blowing the Lid Off the God-Box: Opening Up to a Limitless Faith (Explorefaith.Org)

What’s in your God-box? Each of us, says author Anne Robertson, builds our own way of understanding God—our “God-box”-- and fills it up with bits of scripture, wisdom, and our experiences of God at work in our lives. It’s a perfectly good way to puzzle out what God means to us. Encountering God through our human limitations, we learn something about the meaning of Incarnation.

But to say that our experience of God is the only valid one is to put a lid on the box and create an idol. This book is about examining our God-boxes and bursting them wide open. Blowing the Lid Off the God-Box starts with the ministry of Jesus – who blew the lid off everyone’s God-box by constantly challenging his followers with the unexpected. Subsequent chapters examine the God-boxes we create with scripture, worship, and political and social agendas.

In a world marked by extremism on both the right and left, the author calls readers to spiritual balance as they learn to integrate others’ experiences of God, rather than insisting on their own.

Anne Robertson is a United Methodist minister who leads a parish in Dover, New Hampshire. Active in the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church, she is a regular columnist for Zion’s Herald, a national publication.Anne Robertson