Fearing Bravely

Risking Love for Our Neighbors, Strangers, and Enemies

By: Catherine McNiel

Narrated by: Catherine McNiel

Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. So why are so many Christians taught to fear their neighbors? The American church is known as a people who are afraid, who have been nurtured through fear into hatred, and who have moved from hatred to violence - or at least to neglect. This fear, too often lived out boldly in the name of Jesus, is a false religion.

God instructs us to welcome strangers. We are not to withhold hospitality or help from anyone in need. So why do we fear strangers, especially those needing hospitality, afraid that their presence may threaten what we have?

Jesus taught us to love our enemies. We are to pray for those who actively harm us. Instead, we create enemies in our minds, seeing anyone who thinks, believes, looks, or lives differently from us as dangerous, a threat to our way of living.

The Christian community exists to declare and demonstrate God’s love and to follow Jesus in practicing love over fear, even in unsafe times and places. It’s time to reclaim our brave fear of God and risk transformative love for the sake of our neighbors, the strangers among us, and our enemies.

We are people of the Kingdom. Fearing Bravely teaches us that we have nothing to fear. Instead, we can respond to our fear problem with a brave love that emerges from choosing to let our fear of God overcome our fear of everything else.

Catherine McNiel writes with conviction, wisely guiding us to recognize our fear and, with God's help, not let it limit us to love courageously all who are among us.

©2022 Catherine McNiel (P)2022 Catherine McNiel

Catherine McNiel ties it all together.

Ms. McNiel does an excellent job of putting biblical stories into historical context and relating them to modern life and practice. Her writing is thoughtful and thought-provoking while being accessible and easy to read. Ms. McNiel firmly, but gently reminds Christians to assist our fellow humans instead of giving in to our fears. Her book is well organized and provides many examples with strong references. This book helped me to improve my depth of understanding and to grow. I look forward to seeing more from this author.

Bullseye!

Oof. I wouldn't do it justice by trying to summarize it somehow, so I'll just say this: This one needs to work its way through the whole batch of dough!

A timely, challenging book

When I picked up this book, I was expecting to read about our polarized, fear-torn world, and how we can hate each other a little bit less. Instead, I read a book about how to love. In Fearing Bravely, Catherine McNiel paints a picture to show how to be a good neighbor to the stranger, the foreigner, the “other.” And she doesn’t take the ethereal way out, either. She tells concrete stories of real scenarios, offering up real-world suggestions for how to embrace fellow image-bearers of God. By the time she gets to the part about enemies, we can already see we have no way out of Christ’s commandment to love God, and to love our others... ALL others. Forgive the book review cliché, but this book made me uncomfortable, and I’m thankful for it.