Why do you believe in God? Why do you have faith? Why do you call yourself a Christian?

If you don't: Why does it make sense to have faith for those who do? How do they benefit from it? What are the advantages of being a Christian?

Several years ago, I sat down to articulate non-churchy answers to those questions from my own practical, hands-on experience of living out my faith for more than 30 years.

I started out with a long list of the "benefits" of being a Christian that I've experienced, and I kept distilling the list more and more to eventually just a handful-encompassing themes like loneliness, beauty, the meaning of life, suffering, and the fear of death-all as they relate to God. Early readers recognized those as central and age-old questions of the human condition-universal questions that everyone is trying to answer.

Philosophers and theologians have filled thousands of books with thousands of words about these questions, but Encountering Bare-Bones Christianity contains only about 20,000 words on 170 small pages. Why? First, that's just how I write. Second, in this hurried and unfocussed age, I sensed that brevity might be an asset rather than a stumbling block. And third, as "Bare-Bones Christianity" implies, this is about a Christianity stripped down to its essential parts without extraneous confessional and cultural preferences.

If you are a Christian, this book will powerfully remind you why you believed in the first place. If you're not, perhaps it will help you understand why others believe and what that might look like in your own life.