Re-Jesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch is the first of (I hope) many titles I will read and review for The Ooze Viral Bloggers.Frost and Hirsch pull material from their former collaborative effort, The Shaping of Things to Come and personal works, Exiles (Frost) and The Forgotten Ways (Hirsch) by reminding individuals and church communities not to forget that Jesus needs to be at the center of our mission.
Throughout the book they sound an alarm to the reader that Christianity's focus is Jesus. But they also creatively reveal that there have been many "pictures" (in some cases literally) of Jesus that have shaped not only our view of him but our living out what we think it means to be a follower of him (see Chapter Four: "Bearded-Lady Jesus, Spooky Jesus, Ordinary Galilean Jesus).
For the individual they claim:
"...it is time to recover a vital and active sense of Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us, the life he laid down for us to follow. His passions and concerns must become ours."
For the church community:
"...we believe that the church must constantly return to Jesus to find itself again, to recalibrate, to test whether we are indeed in the faith. The inference is that by and large the church as we currently experience it in the West has to varying degrees lost touch with the wild and dangerous message that it carries and is duty bound to live out and pass on."
While there are times that the book slips into more theological terminology than I was prepared for it is not simply for the audience of pastors and church leaders who will inevitably make up it's primary readership. All followers of "Jesus" (I intentionally used quotation marks because for some we may at times be following a different version of him) would receive a much-needed challenge to recalibrate our lives to the life and message of the true Christ revealed in the Gospels.
The straight-forward, no-holds-barred, yet conversational approach Frost and Hirsch take is the kind of jolt the church needs today. Where in many cases our "creative" and "relevant" sermon series packaged in TV show titles, our American Idol-looking stages, our trendy-dressing pastors, our Starbucks coffee-serving cafes and even our recent adoption of social/global issues have become the focus... we need to be reminded that:
"...we can hold up the models of church we find around us today... against the example found in the Gospels and the New Testament, and we can ask some serious questions about the disjunction we find there. It is time to recalibrate the church around the person of Jesus rather than around marketing ploys developed for a shallow consumeristic age."
Some find books like this to be attack on the church or look at those who say such things to be "anti-church". Frost and Hirsch provide a response to this that needs to be heard:
"...we have presented some rather pointed criticism of the way church is being done in the West. This has riled some readers and led some critics to suggest that we don't love the church, but we submit to you that it is our very love for the church that motivates us to write what we do. And besides, there is a difference between liking the church and loving the church the way Jesus commands us to. To be sure, we do not like gatherings of strangers who never meet or know each other outside of Sundays, who sit passively while virtual strangers preach and lead us in singing, who put up with second-rate pseudo community under the guise of connection with each other, who live different lives from Monday to Saturday than they do on Sunday, whose sole expression of worship is pop-style praise and worship, who rarely laugh together, fight injustice together, serve the poor together, eat together, pray together, raise each other's children together, serve the poor together, or share Jesus with those who have not yet been set free... But if it's a family of Jesus followers striving, no matter how inadequately, to be Christlike, holistic, peace-loving, worshipful, devoted, graced, holy and healthy then we will love it with every ounce of physical and emotional strength we have."
Re-Jesus is a glaring reminder for us to live a Jesus-centric life and for our church communities to be Jesus-centric in all we do. As followers of Jesus we have to believe that if we desperately cling to the Jesus of the Gospels we will be changed, our church communities will be transformed and the world around us will be moved forward in the redemption process in distinctly evident ways.
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