Brian Berry
Group, 2012, 154 pp., $14.99
If you were anything like me when you first started in youth ministry—the demands, pressures, hours and the myriad challenges of working with adolescents in a church caught you off guard. Learning how to balance those demands is a critical part of learning to do the job well. Berry wrote As for Me and My Crazy House hoping it will help you live out healthy values in your family, your marriage, your community and yourself as you navigate a turbulent career in youth ministry.
All three sections of this book—healthy self as a gift to marriage, healthy marriage as a gift to family, and healthy family as a gift to community—lean heavily on anecdotal examples from Berry’s own experience, at times perhaps to a fault. You have to wade through a lot of Berry’s autobiography to find the nuggets of truth he’s advocating. That being said, it’s a fairly concise, clear and practical treatment of a very important subject matter.
If you, or someone you know, is neck-deep in the struggle to do life and ministry well, this would make an excellent gift for yourself or that person. Maybe slowing your pace long enough to read this is exactly what you need to enrich your soul and refocus your priorities.
