Gems from Grove

'Not the last but often the first'

When I was a lot younger than I am now, I remember looking down my nose at people who read Readers' Digest Condensed Books. Strangely, I now have more empathy with folk whose lives are so full that there simply isn't time for the unexpurgated version of anything much!

The publishers of the Grove Series of monographs have a slogan, ‘Not the last word but often the first’. And therein lies the usefulness of this series.

One can generally manage to justify reading 20 pages or so on a topic, and will do so if the topic is relevant and the 20 pages are 'informed' pages, which point the reader to further reading on the topic if they need or want it.

Grove Books, then, attempts to meet this need.

The latest monographs to cross my desk from the Cambridge-based publisher are Deirdre Offord's Betrayals of Trust (Pastoral Series 118) and Creativity and Ownership in a Digital Age by Stewart Clark and Mark Howe (Ethics Series 154).

Offord, among other things a British Diocesan Child Protection Advisor, summarises best practice in the area of handling the feelings and responses of congregations and groups whose trust has been betrayed by a Christian leader. This is a very practical manual. It does not pull punches, having no truck with ‘cheap grace’, but is earthed in Scripture and practical experience.

Clark and Howe, collaborating across the hemispheres, have attempted to bolt on to a theology of humanity a thoroughly Christian and very counter-cultural position on the vexed question of whether ideas are property to be bought and sold. They challenge the reader to ‘preach less about the threat of the internet and more about the...huge potential (it offers) for collaborative creativity with distant parts of the world-wide church’.

The authors are hugely complimentary about the approach of Scripture Union to making their resources available on-line and free of charge. [WordLive] They ask the reader what can be done to encourage Christian publishers to move in this direction.

Too busy to master the full story? I sympathise, but recommend the various Grove series as a good (and inexpensive) compromise. Find them here.

Review by Russell Morton

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