AUSTIN FISCHER
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US FOR THEM
Us versus them — it’s one of the oldest stories ever told, and we keep finding new ways to tell it.
What if this alleged holy war is better understood as an opportunity for a humble and creative collaboration? What if conservatives and progressives tell a better story together? What if we seek higher ground instead of partisan or middle ground? What if God doesn’t want to pull us to the right or to the left or to the middle? What if God wants to pull us up?
MEET
Austin
Austin Fischer is the Lead Pastor at Vista Community Church near Austin, TX, the author of multiple books, and a sought-after speaker. Austin holds a Master of Divinity. His work is orthodox but curious, feisty but friendly. He is married with three (loveable but feral) children.
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Other Books
FAITH IN THE SHADOWS
Too often, our honest questions about faith are met with cold confidence and easy answers. But false certitude doesn't result in strong faith - it results in disillusionment, or worse, in a dogmatic, overweening faith unable to see itself or its object clearly.
Even as a pastor, Austin Fischer has experienced the shadows of doubt and disillusionment. In Faith in the Shadows, he leans into perennial questions about Christianity with raw and fearless integrity. He addresses contemporary science, the problem of evil, hell, God's silence, and other issues, offering not only fresh treatments of these questions but also a fresh paradigm for thinking about doubt itself. Doubt, Fischer contends, is no reason to leave the faith. Instead, it's an invitation to a more honest faith - a faith that's not in control, but that trusts more fully in its Lord.
YOUNG, RESTLESS, NO LONGER REFORMED
Does it really matter? Does it matter if we have free will? Does it matter if Calvinism is true? And does what you think about it matter? No and yes. No, it doesn't matter because God is who he is and does what he does regardless of what we think of him, just as the solar system keeps spinning around the sun even if we're convinced it spins around the earth.
Our opinions about God will not change God, but they can change us. And so yes, it does matter because the conversations about free will and Calvinism confront us with perhaps the only question that really matters: who is God? This is a book about that question-a book about the Bible, black holes, love, sovereignty, hell, Romans 9, Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, C. S. Lewis, Karl Barth, and a little girl in a red coat. You've heard arguments, but here's a story-Austin Fischer's story, and his journey in and out of Calvinism on a trip to the center of the universe.
Featured Talks
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“Austin Fischer has written an important book for our time. As he puts it, ‘our zeal for justice and righteousness is so easily compromised by judgment and self-righteousness.’ Both pastoral and provoca- tive, Us for Them is a clear, uncomfortable, necessary, and ultimately hopeful work that calls Christians to embody the way of Jesus, which is to say, the way of love, humility, and kindness.”
JAY Y. KIM, pastor, WestGate Church
“In our increasingly polarized political landscape we are in constant danger of being conscripted as foot soldiers for cannon fodder in America’s culture wars. But surely Christians should have an instinct that we are called to a presence more noble than rhetorical trench warfare. Austin Fischer emphatically intuits this in his timely book, Us for Them. Fischer writes with intelligence, eloquence, and humor as he points us toward a transcendence that rises above the hate-politics of our current culture—a transcen- dence that is truly Christian.”
BRIAN ZAHND, author of The Wood between the Worlds
“Austin Fischer has quickly become one of my favorite cultural commentators. I find myself enthralled and impressed with his ability to synthesize complicated issues into entertaining observations and applications for the reader. He is an equal opportunity offender, and while I don’t agree with every word, I learn so much from what he writes and feel challenged in my own convictions. You will too! This is a book you’re going to want to share!”
JONATHAN POKLUDA, lead pastor, Harris Creek