Review – October 2010 – Grace & Truth Magazine
Picture Frame

Uniting Church And Home
By Eric Wallace

Publisher:Solutions For Integrating Church And Home
Copyright:© 1999 by Eric Wallace
Address:PO Box 630, Lorton, VA 22199
www.uchlink.org
Format:Paperback, 284 pages
Author Eric Wallace, a happily married father of six children, has been working tirelessly for the past 25 years – ministering to families and church leaders, and speaking at family and pastor’s conferences across the nation – to advance the cause of uniting church and home. The subtitle of his book tells us how the reader can help, as it is “A Blueprint For Rebuilding Church Community.”

In his preface, Wallace summarizes the challenge for the reader: “We are called to integrate the spiritual values taught at church into our lives at home; and we are called to integrate the love and support of the family into the life of the local church. The church and family need each other!”

To help the reader address this challenge, the author organized his book into the following four parts and 15 chapters:

Part One: The State Of The Church Today
1. A House Of Living Stones
2. The Strongest Structure
3. Becoming One In Purpose

Part Two: We Need Each Other
4. “Do We Have To Go To Church?”
5. “What Do They Want Now?”

Part Three: A Renewed Vision For The Church And Its Ministry
6. Back To The Drawing Board: The Church As Extended Household
7. How The Church Can Build Mature Leaders
8. God’s Heart For Generations
9. The Vision For Building Household Leaders
10. Bringing The Truth To Life

Part Four: Stages In Rebuilding
11. Rebuilding On Christ And His Gospel
12. Rebuilding The Household Of God
13. Implementing A Household Approach
14. From Separation To Integration
15. A Household Of Overcomers

To me, one of the most sobering thoughts in Part One was this: In many churches today, the “living stones” that are supposed to be building up the “spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:5) are all too often “doing their own thing.” Another was that most church goers today do not really understand that they are the real church, and that the church is not the building they happen to gather in.

In Part Two it was the list of reasons why people need the church (defined as “the ministry of believers”) that caught my attention. In Part Three Wallace summed up a big problem among Christians today by quoting Dallas Theological Seminary professor Howard Hendricks: “The problem is not that we don’t know enough, but that we don’t live what we know.”

From my perspective, Part Four contains the most important chapter entitled, “Rebuilding On Christ And His Gospel.” It begins with these words: “For the vision and plan presented in this book to have impact, we must rebuild upon the gospel of Jesus Christ. We must avoid the legalism that has enmeshed many churches in a guilt-induced and performancebased spirituality. We must be messengers of God’s grace into the lives of others. This chapter explains who we are in Christ and how His relationship with us is the foundation for our relationship with others.”

Uniting Church And Home is not available from Grace & Truth, but it can be purchased from the publisher or various on-line sources.

Reviewed By Larry Ondrejack