07.31.06

Exiles: Review part 1

Posted in culture, emergence, gospel, reviews at 10:01 am by len

Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture
Author: Michael Frost
Publisher: Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Pub., 2006
333 pages

Brian McLaren writes that “this book is for exiles: Christians who find themselves caught in that dangerous wilderness between contemporary secular Western culture and an old-fashioned church culture of respectability and conservatism. Frost pleads for such Christians to embrace a dynamic, life-affirming, robust faith that can be lived confidently in a world that no longer values such a faith.”?

While neither Frost nor McLaren reference the idea, I was later reminded of a concept from biological science: the ecotone.

“An ecotone is an edge betwen two different ecosystems, a place of great diversity, of greater life and death than the more static populations of single ecosystems. It is a place where borders are crossed, where animals live differently and more dangerously than they do on their safer home turfs.”?

Mike is most recently the co-author with Alan Hirsch of “The Shaping of Things to Come,”? one of the must read books of the past five years. He is also professor of evangelism and missions at Morling College in Sydney, Australia. Mike wrote me a few weeks ago and asked if I would be interested in reviewing EXILES.

When the book arrived I pondered the wisdom of my agreement. At 333 pages, this is a lengthy read. I read the first chapter the next day, and began to get excited. Mike has divided the book into four parts, structured around four concepts offered by Walter Brueggemann in Cadences of Home. In that work Brueggemann offers “disciplines of readiness.”? He frames it like this:

I imagine that like Israel, our American history has run its course in three moves from land yearning to land abusing to land losing, or conversely from sovereign promise to sovereign demand to sovereign absence. Now, in our wonderment, bafflement, and sometimes despair, we wonder if the plot has run out, or if like in our ancient paradigm, a new word can be uttered about God"s stunning newness.

Of course we do not know if such a word can be spoken. We cannot coerce such a word from God, for the word is sovereign in freedom as in newness. Nor could we silence such a word if it were uttered. We can, however, at the sorry end of our present narrative, consider our readiness and prepare ourselves for the utterance of such a word. For that reason we need disciplines of readiness, acts to be undertaken with intentionality and discipline, to leave us ready if God should make new moves among us. This new readiness should permit a rethinking of what exiles must do that usually is not done by preexilic people. This new beginning is a new circumstance, not easily acknowledged by old-line and mainline faith, a circumstance that permits and requires fresh disciplines. From the assertion of the gospel in Isaiah 40-55, I suggest six such disciplines of readiness that are crucial for the receiving of God"s newness and for converting exile into homecoming. (118)

”? DANGEROUS MEMORIES reaching back to Abraham and Sarah. Israel was tempted to substitute more reasonable and respectable memories rather than embrace the ambiguity and embarrassment of such messy heroes.
”? DANGEROUS CRITICISM that mocks the deadly Empire. We need two kinds of critique. First, we need an ongoing religious critique of the tamed gods of the Empire (commercialized Christianity). Second, we need the political critique of entrenched power, wherever we find it.
”? DANGEROUS PROMISES that imagine a shift of power in the world. The kingdom of God will come. The poem of Isa.54:1-3 is first despairing, but then affirms a wild and outrageous hope.
”? DANGEROUS SONGS that predict unexpected newness of life. We sing a new song and affirm a reality we have not fully experienced. Worship is a political statement.
”? DANGEROUS BREAD free of all imperial ovens. The food God gives is reliable. Hardness of heart comes when we think the Empire controls all the resources.
”? DANGEROUS DEPARTURES of heart and body and mind, leavings undertaken in trust and obedience. Israel looked forward to a time of freedom from exile. Similarly, we need to imagine a time when we leave behind consumerism, ambition, and militarism for other territory.
”? DANGEROUS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of how life really is. Our God is good; but He is not safe. We sometimes cry out for the elusive Presence, and acknowledge like the early Apostle that we are “hungry and thirsty, homeless and ill treated.”?

Frost"s thesis is that Christendom has collapsed. He quotes Stuart Murray that “post-Christendom is 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 developed to express Christian convictions are in decline.”? (Murray, Post-Christendom, 19)

Naturally, this is a matter of deep grief for many. For others, most of those who will read this review, it is also a moment of profound hope. We can rediscover ourselves as exiles, as a missional movement. Brueggemann offers his disciplines as a way for exiles to maintain a faithful witness in an alternative community.. or communitas.. an alternative culture. Frost will expand on the first four in the list above. He summarizes his approach in pages 15-24, then closes with the call to be generously angry, relating the story of George Orwell. Orwell began as a depressed, withdrawn writer who discovered the storys of Charles Dickens. He emerged as a man with a purpose, committed to exposing injustice and untruth, full of vision and ideals. Frost concludes that the work of the exile is not the discovery of a new gospel, but a rediscovery of the life of Jesus. Chapter two looks at Jesus the exile, and chapter three shows how we follow Him… these are our dangerous memories.

Next: Dangerous Memories..

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