Cultivated Wisdom
A Review of
Lost, Hidden, Small: Finding the Way of Jesus Where We Never Think to Look
Kate Haynes Murphy
Paperback: Broadleaf Books, 2025
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]
Reviewed by Elliott May
Did you know that watermelons can spontaneously combust? I didn’t. Neither did Kate Haynes Murphy, author of Lost, Hidden, Small: Finding the Way of Jesus Where We Never Think to Look. She found out the hard way, waking one morning to discover slimy chunks of decayed watermelon covering her kitchen. This occurred during a stressful season in Murphy’s life. As she tells it, her church’s attendance was dwindling and its finances cratering. All of her focus was on keeping the church afloat while putting out fires and trying to stay engaged in regular ministry and family life. One day, in the lead-up to a community event planned to rescue her church’s fortunes, a watermelon exploded in her kitchen. It led to a crucial insight: Murphy identified with the watermelon. “Jesus gave me a parable that I couldn’t ignore: The Sign of the Exploding Watermelon. My plans and my striving, my not giving up and trying harder – all of it was pressure cooking me from the inside out” (103).
This is just one of the memorable anecdotes that Murphy shares in Lost, Hidden, Small, an insightful and moving book. Murphy’s foundational argument is that Christians are not naturally attracted to the way of Jesus, occupied instead with an “idolatrous obsession with power, size, and reputation” (11). Lost, Hidden, Small is a trenchant critique of the church in North America, which Murphy argues has been overrun by an ideology that “says anyone who is faithful to Christ will be powerful, wealthy, and revered” (10). In her thinking, the church has come to understand success through growing buildings, budgets, and attendance metrics: the most successful churches are the biggest ones, the busiest ones, the wealthiest ones. Contemporary Christians have given themselves over to worldly metrics of success, seeking to cultivate cultural power and influence. But the way of Jesus is different, says Murphy. When Jesus describes the kingdom of God, he uses small and insignificant things as examples, like mustard seeds, lost sheep, lost coins. Thus, Christians must learn to see as Jesus sees. “Life with Jesus is learning to see like Jesus,” Murphy writes in the introduction. “Until we see, salvation looks like destruction, and what is sacred looks like garbage” (10).
Working from this thesis, Murphy provides twelve short, thematic chapters, organized in three sections, one for each of the words of the book’s title (lost, hidden, small). Each of the chapters functions independently and is generally framed around a moment or experience in ministry or family life that illuminates the topic at hand. Murphy is a compelling writer; the moments she shares are funny, interesting, and moving. The prose moves briskly and keeps the reader engaged throughout. Murphy uses anecdotes in which she herself is the learner. She describes painful conversations, revelations, and moments of being overwhelmed, when she is faced with questions or decisions that ultimately draw her more deeply into knowledge and experience of God.
Murphy especially emphasizes the need to think differently about both success and control. She argues that successful ministries measure success not by worldly standards of wealth and growth, but by faithfulness to their God-given vocation. Murphy chronicles numerous instances in which she confronts this issue in her own ministry, as in chapter seven, “Surrender.” “I preached sermons on faith,” she writes, “but I didn’t really have any. Instead of faith, I had determination” (97). As someone who works in parish ministry, I recognized the temptation to focus on building ministries that grow numerically, and if they do, to call it success. Murphy rightly calls readers to resist that mindset, both in ministry and in wider Christian life. After all, God is often found in the lost, hidden, and small things of this world.
Her reflections on control are theologically rooted, and they constitute some of the best sections of the book. But if the book left me wanting anything, it was a fuller picture of how the author’s insights played out in her own congregation. Throughout the book, Murphy describes struggling to avoid burnout and keep her church open. These challenges seem to lie in the past, during a time when Murphy was working to minister by her own efforts, before surrendering her plans to God. But we don’t hear very much about what came next; Murphy never elucidates in detail what it meant to think differently about success and control in her own church community. I wish I had learned more about how she thinks of success and control in her current ministry context.
Murphy can be sharp elbowed in these pages. That is often helpful, as she makes a passionate case for understanding that the gospel is made not for Christian comfort and wealth but for sharing the kenotic love of Jesus with the world. It is urgent work, and it requires a prophetic voice, which Murphy provides here. But her caustic commentary can be jarring, as with her comment on page 55 that “the baptism of Jesus is weird and problematic” or her note on page 182 that “Personally, I don’t talk about Esther at all because I hate her passive, subservient guts.” Usually these sharp comments are asides, not the main point she is trying to make. For me, these comments were distracting. Other readers may have a different experience.
Nonetheless, this is a timely, helpful, spiritually incisive book, full of wisdom cultivated through years of ministerial experience. My copy of this book is now full of underlining and highlights. One of my favorite lines is her observation in the introduction that we Christians too often assume that “whatever appeals to us must be holy” (11). Murphy is at her best when she is pushing the reader to think more expansively about God’s activity and presence in the church, “We still miss God’s presence in the places we refuse to look for it. We still believe our expectations are God’s limits” (131). There are many such observations here that I will be contemplating for a long time.
Elliott May
Elliott May is the Children, Youth, and Young Adult Minister at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. Elliott is also postulant for priest in the Episcopal Church, and he holds graduate degrees in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary and Boston University. Elliott lives near Boston with his wife and their two young children.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
