Heather Bellamy spoke with Krish Kandiah, the Executive Director for Churches and Mission at the Evangelical Alliance

Heather: In terms of that thin veneer, do you think we're guilty as a western church of having a consumer-driven faith?

Krish: Yes, totally. I mean that vending machine God is a very popular picture of God, you know: that we just tell God what we want. We pray for it and if we believe hard enough and we pray long enough God will give us what we want. That isn't the way it works - we are not the centre of the universe: God is the centre of the universe and sometimes God will, as he does for Abraham, ask us to do things that we're not comfortable with or we're not happy with.

If God has never surprised you, if God has never asked you to do something that you don't want to do, chances are you're not worshipping God: you've just created a mirror image of who you want God to be, rather than the real God.

Heather: All this can sound a little bit tyrannical. If you're going to trust someone, you have to know someone; there must be trustworthy aspects to who God is. I know you quote CS Lewis's description of Aslan, who represents Jesus, when it says: 'Course he isn't safe but he's good - he's the king I tell you'. Is that a good description of God when we're trying to grapple with trusting him - not just being obedient out of intimidation or awe, but because of his goodness?

Krish: Definitely. I use the illustration in the book of when I was dating a girl who was in Germany and I was in England. We had a telephone appointment to speak to one another. I would phone - this is so long ago that we didn't have e-mail or mobile phones: we just had phone booths - and so I'd phone a call box in Germany and wait. One night I phoned at the right time - and I checked and everything - and I phoned 20 times and it never answered. At that point I could have come up with an explanation: this girl's obviously not interested in me anymore and she's left me and she's gone off with a nice-looking German lad and that's the end of the story. But what I did was I remembered the history that we had together in our friendship. I remembered what I knew about this girl and her character and it was out of that trust and reviewing her character and our history that I gained confidence to trust through a situation I didn't understand. I couldn't get an answer: I didn't know why things were happening.

I think the same is true with our faith in God, in that we have the story of the Bible. We have history with God: we've got what Jesus did for us on the cross and when he rose again. That's our evidence that God is faithful and trustworthy and reliable and that gives us confidence when we look to the future, that even if we don't fully understand what God's asking us to do or why he hasn't delivered what we wanted from him, we can still trust him.

Things worked out well with the girl too. We ended up getting married and six kids later we're still going strong.

You can buy Paradoxology by Krish Kandiah from Cross Rhythms Direct for only £13.29.