In a fractured world where there is confusion about purpose, direction and identity, Chris Cipollone offers his best attempt at articulating the meaning of it all in his second book, Here To Love.
Former pastor and now the head of holistic Christian wellness clinic Life to the Full, Mr Cipollone is no stranger to the integration of mental health and theology.
It was during his theological studies that he found himself in what he describes as “the deepest of pits” – lying on the floor of a psychiatric hospital. Out of this deep personal journey came a desire to help others find wholeness in Christ, leading him to write his first book, Down Not Out and open his clinic of Christian psychologists. It has now inspired his second book.
Here to Love draws from Jesus’ two commandments – love the Lord and love your neighbour.
“It’s an ambitious book,” he says. “If it’s true that all the law and the prophets hang off these two commandments, it will have impacts for mental health, and it goes so much broader!”
The book’s foundation is that everything in the Bible comes back to love. “After I’d been preaching for about five years, I felt like a one-trick pony,” Mr Cipollone says. “All my sermons kept coming back to love, and I wondered, ‘Was I running out of things to say?’ Then I started to test the concept.”
The catalyst for Mr Cipollone came after a Sunday of church services, when he noticed forgotten rubbish and began lugging garbage bags to the outside bin. “All the rubbish spilled over my shoes, and I thought, ‘If someone last night [after church] loved me, I wouldn’t be cleaning up this mess!’.”
What was at first a moment of frustration turned into an epiphany about the wide-reaching impact of love. “We think about love in the context of marriage, or where to serve, but it should apply right down to the garbage bins after church, or even something more mundane. I started looking at life asking, ‘Could love apply here?’”
As he kept asking this question, he found the same answer every time: everything really does hang off love. It was a message he felt all Christians needed to hear, especially those yearning for something more or recognising how short the world falls.
He hopes the book both increases unity in the church and inspires people to take this love out to a hurting world.
“My biblical thesis is that to love is to serve,” he says. “The more Christians can embody that principle into the world and church, Christians can live with more purpose and be the salt and light we need to be.
“My prayer is that the reader will have a new lens to view everything through. There is a way to see everything that is transformed by the mind of Christ. That lens is the lens of love, which is the lens of service. Can we live with more intentionality, purpose and clarity?
“And when we fall short, which we will, we can rest knowing that Christ is the fulfilment of [these commandments], not ourselves. And so we carry on the next day, purpose afresh.”
