Lovely.
The mere fact that I am posting it anyway given my gunner tendencies should tell you how much I loved these books - highly recommend both.
SYNOPSIS/OVERVIEW:
Arriving at a destination requires planning, intentionality, and a clear
sense not only of where one is coming from, but where it is they wish to go. This is as seemingly simple as it is
obvious. Landing on definitions of the
means of transportation for the trip, however, can be a challenging task. Both The
Faith of Leap: Embracing A Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage (“Faith of
Leap”) by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch and Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local
Church (“Kingdom Conspiracy”) by Scot McKnight set out on their own
explorations of challenging readers to rethink the purpose of their own [missional]
lives. Is it about us, or is it about
God? The answer ultimately shapes not
only our personal journeys but our corporate missional journey as well.
Kingdom Conspiracy takes an
ecclesio-centric view of the kingdom in an effort to refocus our attention back
on the church as the crux of God’s plan.
McKnight immediately plunges into an extremely thinly-veiled and dichotomous
stereotype of “Skinny Jeans Kingdom” (social activists) and “Pleated Pants
Kingdom” (evangelicals), luring the reader into his point that “Kingdom
theology” is on the rise. But this
statement begs the more pressing underlying question he asks and answers
throughout the book… what is the kingdom?
In fact the more granular question both books seek to answer is this: what
is kingdom in this world as it
relates to the church and its mission?
McKnight argues that if we fail to understand the kingdom’s connection
to the church, we will get lost on our journeys as we look to find the place of
redemption. “There is no kingdom outside
the church,” he writes. (McKnight, 2014, p. 87). Frost and Hirsch agree: “The
Christian community, at least as Jesus intended it, is one of the most exciting
aspects of the gospel experience: the church is the frontier of the kingdom”
(Frost & Hirsch, 2011, p. 22).
IN
CONVERSATION
To illustrate his Skinny Jeans-Pleated
Pants viewpoints, Scot McKnight recounted a dinner conversation among a group
of pastors, whereby one pastor indicated that each of the seven mission trips he
had been on “had nothing to do with
telling people about Jesus or establishing a church or teaching the Bible, but
with service projects like building medical facilities” (p. 3). When McKnight asked that pastor if the young
man leading those mission trips used the word ‘kingdom’ for what he was doing,
the pastor responded affirmatively: “Over
and over” (p. 3). Admittedly, McKnight
says that the last thing the pastor uttered in summary was the most haunting to
him: “These young adults, God bless ‘em,
think ‘kingdom’ has nothing to do with ‘church’” (p. 3).
How anyone can miss this is an almost
affront to the three authors; yet while in agreement over that conundrum, the
approach of the books varies somewhat. Kingdom Conspiracy does a fantastic job
of pointing out what we all know but are perhaps afraid to say for fear of being
socially/politically or hypocritically unacceptable, and that is - the Skinny
Jeans activists are all about redeeming society while the Pleated Pants folks
are all about redemption for the individual.
The brilliance of McKnight is that he says both are looking in the wrong place! “The primary locus of redemption is in the
local church” (p. 85). And, he further asserts in a bold reproach to the
evangelical consensus (of “the kingdom of God” referring to God’s redemptive
rule and not His people) that au
contraire, you Pleated Pants wearers!…”The kingdom of which Jesus speaks is a people governed by a king” (p. 74).
When critics and scholars lay out two
opposing viewpoints, they typically compromise in the middle after pointing out
each side’s strengths and weaknesses.
Scot McKnight doesn’t take that approach whatsoever. Instead of arbitrating, he basically calls
out all the players by telling them to get in the [right] game: the one which
exemplifies the storyline of Scripture, precisely Israel’s story and what
“kingdom” meant to the Jews.
To that end, while Kingdom Conspiracy goes on to discuss how the conveying and
spreading of the kingdom story in an effective and contextual manner ought to
be done, Faith of Leap primarily conveys how those doing it ought to live (adventurously, courageously). McKnight’s opinion is that our understanding
of the biblical storyline affects our mission insofar as it requires conversion
(i.e. repentance and faith are described as a “surrender” to King Jesus) and
discipleship (being mastered by the Scriptural story). For him, spiritual growth is linked to the
kingdom’s inauguration. “To the same degree that the kingdom has been
inaugurated in Jesus, the kingdom can be realized among us. To the degree that the kingdom has not yet
been realized, it cannot be lived out in the present” (p. 39). Frost and Hirsch meanwhile, continue to pump
us up by playing to the inner adventurers and believers that we all are, or
could/should desire to be by having courage and “learning to live for something
that is more important than our own safety” (-Scott Bader-Saye, PhD, Duke
University; p. 34).
Contextually, McKnight shows how Jesus’
kingdom story set him against five competing stories (including the Pharisees,
the Essenes, and the Zealots) and surmises that likewise, faithfulness in the
kingdom mission means we must embed kingdom realities in our own context,
purposefully countering the ruling stories at work in our world today. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch call that “holy
urgency,” and they could not be more adamant about its importance in the
combined realms of living, learning, and leading in all areas of missional
orthopraxy.
Faith
of Leap has one primary focus as it relates to kingdom and church – the
inhabitants. Frost and Hirsch bravely venture
into relatively uncharted waters by exploring the risk, adventure, liminality
and the absolute necessity of communitas
people are willing to take for church, discipleship, mission and themselves. Between examples of men from Abraham (his
somewhat “unbalanced” action put him and his large household at risk) and
J.R.R. Tolkein (his Lord of the Rings Trilogy exemplifies the struggle of good
vs. evil and requires nothing less than everything, the “giving up” of our
lives in favor of a quest that is never a matter of one’s own desire but rather
one’s calling), their book inspirationally screams to its readers that we have
become complacent in the church today because the church today is not in
crisis. There is no tension. The Western church and its inhabitants have
been cruising along at such a big, safe, fictitious-growth-results rate that it
has not only become stagnant, it has become the most vulnerable it has been in
longer than anyone living today can remember.
The real outcome (and rub) of that vulnerability is that we find
ourselves right now, in this day, in
the position “of the utmost missional importance for church (people) to be as
we are meant to be, yet we live in a post-Christian, post-Christendom world, and
the result is that seventeen centuries of “Western church” have effectively
inoculated our culture against the gospel (p. 21).
That prevention of gospel-spreading, Faith of Leap (and I) would argue, stems
from the absence of any real tension or liminality
in people. It is exactly what is rendering
church, kingdom, people and mission paralytic.
Hearts are unmoved. Where are our hearts? They are bored, they are selfish, they
are safe, and they are uninspired. Thus,
we are unable to breathe any new life into anything or anyone. There is no [communitas] quest which requires a “by all means necessary”
sacrifice, which in and of itself is mind-boggling. How can we know the gospel message and NOT
employ that mentality to share it with those who don’t? As Frost and Hirsch say, “it is clear that
opting for more of the same is not going to resolve our problems. We must be willing to dream again, to
innovate, and to risk the rejection of peers who think that the status quo is
sufficient to the task” (p. 24). Crisis
in some real sense was normative for the church of Jesus, just as it is today
where gospel growth is highest – in persecuted churches in persecuted
countries.
“Rediscovering the meaning of the word
“movement” and relinquishing being administrators of a stifling status quo, or
worse, purveyors of fine religion,” is what Faith
of Leap urges us to do, because if we do this, we will experience the same
spiritual renewal and passion pervaded in the New Testament (p. 24). Frost and Hirsch further remind us that we
are people born of the missio Dei,
which means that the church is a result of the missionary activity of God and
not the producer of it (p. 21). Thus, the church is defined by its mission and
not the other way around! The mission of
redemption is not yet fulfilled; therefore, we are still on the Journey and we
had better get a move on, i.e. act
instead of sitting around doing more of nothing.
SUMMARY/BUILDING/OUTTAKES
Summarily, perhaps the best statement to
describe the heartbeat of both books is as follows: “In order to rediscover church as missional
adventure, we will have to start by reJesusing the church” (Frost & Hirsch,
p. 24). As we have seen, the church
equals kingdom equals people; thus people – as in we, the communitas “we” - need to start by reJesusing
ourselves. We need to stop asking
ourselves the wrong question of where the church fits into society. Why would we want to fit into society anyway…has
anyone seen it lately? Seriously, do
we even have any vision?
Instead we should be asking how society is
summoned into God’s society (McKnight,
p. 111). We must risk ourselves to the
truth that we believe is true, and we must stake our lives on the person and
promises of God. For in order to take a
proper Faith of Leap, we have to have
the courage to see things differently and step out into the unknown with little
more than a commitment to the vision of what Jesus wants from His world.
Is it about us, or is it about Him?
WORKS
CITED
Frost,
Michael and Alan Hirsch. The Faith of
Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure, & Courage. Grand Rapids:
Baker Books, 2011.
McKnight,
Scot. Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning
to the Radical Mission of the Local Church.
Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2014.