A Review of What Matters Most

A Review of What Matters Most by Leonard Sweet

By Adam Koppin

            What Matters Most: How We Got The Point But Missed The Person, previously released as Out of the Question… Into the Mystery, is a scholarly work by Dr. Leonard Sweet. Sweet is the founder of SpiritVenture Ministries, a professor of Drew University, a visiting professor at George Fox University, and as the reader will find out through reading, he has, and had his finger in several other pies.

            The book is 199 pages long, 12 pages of chapter-divided “Questions for Personal Contemplation and Shared Conversation,” and several pages of endnotes. Many people dismiss the number of endnotes as evidence of the scholar’s research, but it is something I look for in a work. The author clearly has done a lot of research, and has a wealth of knowledge, that he put into this book.

            What Matters Most focuses on the Christian’s relationship with others and the world around him, so it has that awkward feel of a cross between a devotional read, and scholarly effort. I would have a hard time finding a lay Christian reading this as a devotional, it is more of a scholarly read for vocational ministers and pastors. There were a lot of passages that really made me stop, and reconsider how I have been reading scripture. Sweet asks a lot of thought provoking questions, and fills the pages with anecdotal evidence and quotes. This is what I really appreciated about the book.

            What I didn’t like about the book is that I kept having to ask myself, “What’s the point?” At times I had trouble finding the connection points between anecdotes, passages, chapters, and sections.

            The book is divided into eight sections. The first sections describes that faith is a relationship, and each section after that breaks down our relationship with God, God’s story, other people of faith, those outside of the faith, God’s creation, symbols, and spiritual world. Personally, I turned off when I got to our relationship with God’s creation as I felt it got a little “green.” But again Sweet has the ability to ask questions that really makes you think. For instance, “Why do we have more of a problem with people worshiping trees, than we do when people worship money, titles, and possessions?” That’s a good question, but my answer would be, “Because they are actually worshiping that tree.”

            The book has a lot of redemptive qualities, but on the whole, I won’t read it all the way through again, and probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone either.

                I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.