The Gift That Keeps On "Smashing Those Sacred Cows into Oblivion"

Nice review of my book from the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding. Many thanks to Walt Mueller, who also endorsed the book. Makes a good Christmas gift to older high school students, college students and above, and the parents and pastors who deal with them, if I do say so myself.

We need people who help us recognize the sacred cows that are so familiar to our lives that we don’t even know they exist. And, we need those people to take us a step further, helping us to catch a vision for smashing those sacred cows into oblivion so that we might grasp and live God’s grand vision for our lives.

In his book, Deliver Us From Me-Ville (David C. Cook, 2008, ISBN #978-1-4347-0009-4), David Zimmerman takes us on an aerial tour of Me-Ville, the place where many North American Christians have laid down their roots and have called “home” for a long, long time. Zimmerman masterfully and simply exposes the lay of the Me-Ville land, helping us see how living there keeps us from living fully in the Kingdom of God. What Zimmerman delivers is a compelling call that we can either follow, or choose to walk away from—as the Scriptures tell us—with deep sadness.

Deliver Us From Me-Ville is a timely and challenging guide out of worshipping and serving the contemporary “holy trinity” of me, myself and I, reminding us that our purpose only can be found in the relentless pursuit of Christ and His Kingdom. This is a book that you can read and teach, prayerfully asking God to challenge our materialistic and selfish American-Dream distortion of Christianity, while providing a road map to the place where we belong.

People Are So Nice!

The irony is not lost on me that I have asked people point-blank to say nice things about my forthcoming book about narcissism, and I am not blind to my own bloated blog-ego in posting those nice words for public viewing. Nevertheless, in addition to the folks whose endorsements have already served as blog posts, I've recently been sent the following kind comments from people who are truly thoughtful in every sense of both words. You would love these people, and you would love their books. So go get em.

“David Zimmerman offers a thoughtful look at what it means to live missionally. His words will help move you to a more God-centric life—the one you were created for.”
—Margaret Feinberg, author of The Organic God and national speaker

“David Zimmerman’s wry and witty Deliver Us from Me-Ville is a wonderfully insightful look into today’s self-consumed society. Never preachy, but always packed with delicious allusions, footnotes, self-deprecating asides, Me-Ville entertains even as it instructs. David knows his Bible. He also knows The Blues Brothers, Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What’s NOT to like?
—Robert Darden, associate professor of Journalism at Baylor University and author of more than two dozen books, including People Get Ready and the upcoming Jesus Laughed

“As I engaged with this book and began to discover the masterful way that David exposes the veiled, yet heinous human pride residing in all of us, I understood why David is the humble servant of Christ that he is. I found myself laughing at his stories one moment and feeling rightly convicted the next. Deliver Us From Me-Ville continues to whisper its message into my soul months after finishing the book. Reading this book is dangerous to our self-centered schemes and well-managed facades of spirituality.”
—Mike King, president of YouthFront, pastor at Jacob’s Well Church in Kansas City, and author of Presence-Centered Youth Ministry

“Dave Zimmerman offers a timely and challenging guide out of worshipping and serving the contemporary ‘holy trinity’ of me, myself and I, reminding us that our purpose can only be found in the relentless pursuit of Christ and His Kingdom. Deliver Us From Me-Ville challenges our materialistic and selfish American-Dream distortion of Christianity, while providing a road map to the place where we belong.
—Walt Mueller, president, Center for Parent/Youth Understanding and author of Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture