ReJesus: a wild Messiah for a Missional church

by Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch

Someone once challenged us that in heaven there'll be no mission only worship. We couldn't disagree more. Sure, we won't be feeding the poor or planting churches. Those missional activities will cease when every knee bows, every tongue confesses, and every tear is wiped away. But in the world to come, we will still be charged with the task of declaring Jesus' rule over all of life. We are looking forward to that unhindered mission of the new age and to worshipping through the process of offering our world back to God.

- From 'ReJesus: a wild Messiah for a missional church,' by Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch (page 181).

Frost and Hirsch's earlier book 'The Shaping of Things to Come' is one of the most influential books on missional church. In 'ReJesus' Frost and Hirsch call us to look again at the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, and to put him at the centre of everything we do - as churches and as individual Christians.

At it's heart this is a book about Christology - the doctrine of who Jesus is. But it's very far from being a dry theoretical treatise. Rather, it's a challenge to follow Jesus personally, and to re-shape our lives to be like him - to be 'Re-Jesused.'

One way Frost and Hirsch do this is by telling the stories of a lot of people who they describe as 'little Jesuses' - people who showed in their lives what it meant to follow Jesus, often at great personal cost.

Frost and Hirsch aren't afraid to take on some favoured Evangelical idols. Here's what they have to say about worship:

… worship as the Bible characterizes it cannot be limited to singing praise and worship songs to God. Although it includes this, it is far more all-encompassing than that. Worship is nothing less than offering our whole lives back to God though Jesus. It is taking all the elements that make up human life, (family, friendships, money, work, nation etc.) and presenting them back to the One who gives them their ultimate meaning in the first place. But what is discipleship if it is not the same type of action? Sure discipleship is taking all that is me (body and soul) and over a lifetime directing it to God through Jesus. But the discerning reader would immediately notice that this sounds like a good definition of mission as well, because mission, insofar that it involves us, entails the redemption of a lost world and bringing it back to God. This is what constitutes the biblical idea of holiness - the redemption of the everyday and of everything in oneness in response to God. (page 125)

Read the introduction

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