Exiles: Living missionally in a post-Christian culture, by Michael Frost
Reading this book could seriously change the way you think about church - and life. Frost starts by saying:
'This book is written for those Christians who find themselves falling into the cracks between contemporary secular Western culture and a quaint, old-fashioned church culture...'
Does that feel like you? For seventeen hundred years, in the western world, we have lived with a 'Christendom' culture. Frost defines Christendom as:
'…the religious culture that has dominated Western society since the fourth century. Awakened by the Roman emperor Constantine, it was the cultural phenomenon that resulted when Christianity was established as the official imperial religion, moving it from being a marginalized, subversive, and persecuted movement to being the only official religion in the empire.'
(Stuart Murray, slightly more caustically, says that in Christendom, the Church was 'the religious department of the empire.')
But for two hundred and fifty years, Christendom has been waning, and we now live in a 'post-Christendom' society. Murray describes post-Christendom as:
'… the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence.'
Does this sound familiar? The trouble is that many churches - and many individual Christians - are still living with a 'Christendom mindset.' But Christendom is over, and we need to get over it. Followers of Christ need to learn again what it means to live as exiles in a culture that is not sympathetic to our faith. Being exiles is a dangerous situation, and it needs dangerous responses. Frost says:
'Exiles are driven back to their most dangerous memories, their recollections of the promises made by Jesus and his daring agenda for human society. Exiles are prepared to to practice a set of dangerous promises, promises that point to the kingdom and are caught up with the prevailing values of the empire. Exiles will mock the folly of that empire by offering a dangerous critique of a society wracked by greed, lust, selfishness, and inequality. And finally, exiles will sing a repertoire of dangerous songs that speak of an unexpected newness of life.'
Dangerous Memories
This is all about the stories we tell ourselves that define who we are. Centrally, these are the stories of Jesus himself – a deeply disturbing and unsettling person. In the incarnation, Jesus went where we were, and became one of us - and he calls us as his people to follow him by going where people are and sharing our lives with them. Frost talks about going to 'third places.' (Your 'first place' is your home; your 'second place' is where you work. Third places are places where you hang out and relax with other people - pubs, clubs, and so on.) The trouble is that most Christians are so busy with churchy activities that we do not have any time to hang out with people who are not yet Christians. We need to break through this. We need to get away from the Christendom distinction between sacred places and secular places, and see that God is involved in, and present with us in, our daily lives, our working lives, not just when we 'go to church.'
Dangerous Promises
Do we live just like everyone else around us, or are we distinctive because we are followers of Jesus Christ? Here, Frost is talking about a shift from greed and self-righteousness to love and justice - a radical alternative to safe middle class consumerist Christianity. He identifies these dangerous promises:
- We will be authentic (we won't be shiny happy people)
- We will serve a cause greater than ourselves
- We will create missional community
- We will be generous and practice hospitality
- We will work righteously – as God's apprentice-children
There is so much more to be said about all of these. You really need to read the book. (Yes, you do. Really.) What a huge difference it would make to us as individual followers of Christ, to our churches, and to the world around us, if we started to live these promises.
Dangerous Criticism
So often, we find ourselves and our faith co-opted by the surrounding society. The first followers of Christ would not say 'Caesar is Lord,' because they recognised that there could only be one Lord, and that was Jesus. Dangerous criticism means standing against the idolatrous claims of our host empire. It means not letting our faith be co-opted in the service of the empire's agenda. Frost identifies three specific criticisms that we need to make of the contemporary western world:
- The critique: you have been an unjust empire (globalisation, consumerism, and the rise of corporations that are accountable to no-one)
- The critique: you have not cared for God's creation (destruction of the environment)
- The critique: you have not protected God's children (indifference to the persecution of Christians in other countries)
Dangerous Songs
Here, Frost is concerned about what genuine worship looks like. So often we think of worship as just those times that we spend in a church building singing songs. But worship is so much more than that: it is everything that we do to please God.
Frost is particularly scathing about what he calls 'Jesus is my boyfriend' worship and spirituality - pop-style love songs to Jesus. He explores what it really means to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.
This is a provocative book, which will probably challenge and infuriate you equally. However, whether you shout 'amen,' or hurl it at the wall, it will get you thinking about what it really means to follow Jesus Christ as an exile in today's post-Christian world. And that has to be good.
Author Michael Frost is professor of Evangelism and Missions at Morling College in Sydney, Australia. He is the director of the Centre for Evangelism and Global Mission, and the co-author (with Alan Hirsch) of The Shaping of Things to Come: innovation and mission for the 21st-century church.
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