Original Goodness: Reclaiming the Beauty of God, Ourselves, and the World

WHAT IF THE GOOD NEWS IS EVEN BETTER THAN YOU IMAGINED?

Many people sense something profoundly beautiful at the heart of Jesus’s life and teachings, yet struggle to reconcile that beauty with versions of Christianity marked by fear, shame, violence, and division. Original Goodness is written for readers caught in that tension — those who love the core of Jesus’s teaching but have grown disillusioned with a faith that no longer seems to reflect it.

Drawing on Scripture, Christian tradition, and psychology, Steve Sears — who, after serving in the local church for twenty-five years, followed Jesus out the door and into the world He loves —explores how fear quietly shapes our view of God, ourselves, and one another. He introduces the “cruciform God”: the self-giving, other-oriented, enemy-embracing love revealed in Jesus, and traces what changes when we let that love become the lens through which we see everything else.

Original Goodness is for anyone longing for:

• A faith rooted more deeply in love than in fear
• A vision of God shaped by compassion, grace, and self-giving love
• A circle of belonging that moves beyond “us and them”
• A gospel that invites us to participate in the healing and restoration of the world
• A way of seeing ourselves and all others that begins with goodness and beauty

This is not a book about leaving faith behind. It’s an invitation to rediscover it — whole, beautiful, and rooted in the goodness that was there from the very beginning.