God Over Good: Saving Your Faith by Losing Your Expectations of God by Luke Norsworthy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

God Over Good is an approachable, relatable, personal book about faith and doubt. I’ve been a long-time listener of Luke’s podcast, “Newsworthy with Norsworthy,” so many of the main points and the stories were familiar. But since I’m somewhat late to this (about 3 years post-publication), they still seemed fresh.

I appreciate Luke’s honesty and vulnerability, which is definitely not easy to do in writing, much less for someone with a podcast audience and an active preaching ministry. But it’s his honesty that makes it work. Luke doesn’t really sugar coat anything. He, like many of us, has been disillusioned with God and on the brink with his faith. Speaking from experience as a minister, that’s a very precarious situation to be in. It can be downright scary.

If you read this book, be prepared to have many of your assumptions challenged. Through the power of story-telling, Luke is able to get us, his readers, to lower our own defenses, question our own preconceptions and expectations we have about God, and follow him on a journey to rediscover the beauty and the mystery of God revealed in Christ.

Overall, I think this book is needed more and more among our church members and pastors. When churches go into survival mode, the demand for adherence to “secondary” beliefs becomes a harsher battle ground. I’m afraid the dominoes have started to fall for many in our congregations. It’s time for a paradigm shift of what faith actually means and looks like going into the 2020s and a post-pandemic world.

I highly recommend God Over Good and Luke’s podcast, Newsworthy with Norsworthy.



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