The Relay By George Shamblin

Passing Along Your Faith in the Race to Save Christianity from Extinction

The Bible is laden with stories of those who've carried the baton before us, who've stumbled, who've preserved. Its equally laden with stories of God's chosen people falling away from their faith–often in the space of just a few short years.

So is Christianity itself in peril? "Of course no," Shamblin notes, "but under the right circumstanes, it is endangered in any given region of the world. Consider that, just a generation and a half after John Lennon outraged the West by quipping that the Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus,' Europe's percentage of practicing Christians is in single digits."

In THE RELAY, Shamblin catalogs the comparative successes and failures of nine individuals in passing along their faith to the next generations–from the father of all failure (Adam) to the ultimate Spiritual Rags To Riches success (Paul). At the center of his book, not only thematically butliterally (chapter six of eleven) is Jesus Christ, whose followers took "the race" to a whole new level, and a whole new arena.

While a relay makes for an apt metaphor for passing along our faith, Shamblin concludes, our goal as Christian is not to win a race, but to win the world. More than a message of profound affirmation, THE RELAY is a triumph of practical "How To" advice for anyone looking to take their own journey with the Lord to the next level—-and beyond.