Our readers love Peter Heck's heckfire. He just wrote a book for y'all.

Peter Heck is well known around these parts, but if you don't know him, you should!

He still holds the record for most-viewed article on our site, after all:

Peter's op-eds have provided spiritual and political grounding for our readers since the beginning of Not the Bee. You may know he's a pastor and public school teacher who lives in Indiana with his wife and three kids.

What you may not know is that he's been working on a book for three-ish years: A book that he released today.

I asked Peter to provide a bit of context about this book and why he wrote it. Here's what he had to say:

For a long time, I thought I understood how Christians were supposed to engage the culture: Speak louder. Fight harder. Push back.

If things were getting worse, it just meant we needed to be more aggressive, more strategic, more influential. But the more I tried, and the more I saw other Christians doing the same, I couldn't deny the obvious reality that it wasn't working.

Oh, there would be short-term successes and flashes of hope. But the trajectory of the culture wasn't changing. And I became convinced that at best, we were spinning our wheels. At worst, we were making things worse.

The deeper I got into Scripture while writing this book, the more uncomfortable realization I kept running into: the approach I had adopted wasn't really coming from Jesus.

It was coming from the world. The world's approaches, the world's strategies, the world's obsession with power and politics. That's a dangerous place for a Christian to build from, especially when we're talking about how to change hearts, minds, and culture.

Rebellious is a serious look at where we are at in the war of good vs. evil, but without the "here's how to win" advertising that's become all-too-common and way-too-over-the-top recently.

if you're tired of shallow takes on 'changing the world,' I think it will challenge and change you - in the best way.

(I know Christians don't spend their time arguing about anything these days, so I can't imagine that anyone will argue about this, right? 😉)

Regardless of whether you end up agreeing with all of Peter's thoughts, he has spent three years prayerfully developing this outside the terminally-online echo chamber. There are plenty of books that discuss how the Christian should engage culturally and politically, and that is an important topic for a church that detached itself from the culture and politics for too long.

But this book invites us to take a step back and look at our own souls. 👇

It's not another book about how Christians can leverage influence, navigate politics, or 'take back' culture. In fact, it challenges some of the assumption we make behind all of that.

What if we don't need a better plan … but the will to obey the one Jesus already gave us?

This book is less about fixing what's happening 'out there,' and more about confronting what's happening inside of us.

We don't have the power to control the world anyway. But God does. And throughout Scripture, He works to do that through people who are simply willing to be faithful - people shaped by truth, marked by grace, and surrendered to His Spirit.

That's the kind of 'rebellion' this book calls for.

Not louder voices, sharper arguments, or better tactics.

Different lives.

If you want to order a copy, I'll leave a direct link to his online store here.