A Complete Review of Frost's _Exiles_

There can be no question that Michael Frost is a thoughtful guy, a critic with a deep and thoroughgoing desire to live victoriously after the manner of Christ. The first half of the book is a withering but good-natured critique of Christendom, especially its American, evangelical manifestations, which have departed in so many subtle ways from the liminal, exilic calling that Jesus modeled for us. Frost's extended meditation on what God's incarnation in Jesus implies for our mission on earth is passionate, moving, profound and relatively free of facile pap. His argument that the church must aggressively rid itself of unholy alliances with earthly kingdoms -- in the first half of the book, that means governments and quasi-governmental institutions -- is compelling. It is reminiscent of Roxburgh's little jewel on liminality and the church, and it is unfailingly practical.

Unfortunately, Frost apparently finds it impossible to believe that the kinds of exilic values he holds, and that he urges on the rest of us, are compatible with political conservatism, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary that he does not bother to consider or cite. The second half of the book is little more than Frost's grandstanding and rapid-fire recitation of liberal talking points. His finely tuned sensitivity to nuance and paradox in the first half of the book gives way to an incoherent strafing run fueled by contempt for George W. Bush, corporations (Frost inexplicably neglects to observe that corporations are themselves people and could not exist without the personal investments of people -- and especially the publicly held ones that are responsible for a tremendous amount of the wealth that makes global-scale benevolence possible) and the diverse, multifaceted motivations for the current Iraq war. Frost justifiably deplores Western paralysis during many of the recent humanitarian crises across the world (e. g., Rwanda, Sudan, the Balkans) for our failure to stand courageously with the voiceless and downtrodden and oppressed, but then he turns a blind eye to the liberation of thousands of silent children and dissidents imprisoned (to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands wantonly exterminated) under the Hussein regime in Iraq, implicitly and blithely writing them off as unworthy of the very blood Frost rightly wanted us to shed in those other places. These latter chapters are classic paeans to modern, liberal myopia and simplistic, utopian politics, both of which are unworthy of such a thoughtful, engaging author.

In short, the second half of the book disappoints precisely because of the wonderfully high standard he set in the first half: returning to the scandalous person of Jesus and mining His life for direction for the modern, missional church. The second half of the book could have been written to those same standards in a way that relies on hopeful, prophetic discontent with the church he loves; instead, Frost's arguments devolve into a droning recitation of the Soros party line on everything from Wal-Mart's alleged, unmitigated pillaging of small-town America to the irredeemable evils of globalization to the baseless accusation that American political conservatism is raping the environment by refusing to ratify Kyoto -- the political left's environmental Buddha. He wilfully ignores -- or, less credibly, demonstrates his ignorance of -- the market mechanisms that actually benefit the environment, such as cap-and-trade strategies that have actually reduced SO2 emissions, as well as the incredible, ecological devastation wrought on the oil-rich states of Central Asia under the repressive Soviet regimes of the 1900s.

It would seem that Frost wants to have his cake -- eco-credibility for his ecologically responsible stance on energy efficiency -- and eat it, too, betrayed by his theologically grounded emphasis on drinking good, locally made beer (a woefully energy-inefficient manufacturing process if there ever were one). Frost fails to recognize that the very economies of scale that he resents on behalf of his environmental clients actually make possible the investments that large corporations are able to make in environmental protection.

The ironies of his conflicting positions -- what if the long-term, highest and ecologically best use of crude oil and coal is to make the (recyclable!) plastics he deplores instead of the airplane fuel he guzzles as he jets around the world preaching his seductive, social gospel? -- never seem to flower into an enlightening, salutary, cognitive dissonance. And that's too bad. The first half of the book is an inspiring tour de force. And that, by itself, is reason enough for Christians -- even those evil, red-state evangelicals -- to buy the book. Perhaps in his second edition, he will return to his roots and write a second half of _Exiles_ that retains his muscular, prophetic voice without so transparently aping the Michael Moores and Ted Kennedys of the world. Unless he does, he is unfortunately less likely to get a fair hearing by the very souls he ostensibly wants to engage.

qb

Michael Frost's _Exiles_

"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 of respectability and conservatism. This book is for the many people who wish to be faithful followers of the radical Jesus but no longer find themselves able to fit into the bland, limp, unsavory straitjacket of a church that seems to be yearning to return to the days when "everyone" used to attend church and "Christian family values" reigned. This book is for those who can't remain in the safe modes of church and who wish to live expansive, confident Christian lives in this society. This book is for those Christians who feel themselves ready (or yearning) to jump ship but don't want to be left adrift in a world where greed, consumerism, laziness and materialism toss them about endlessly and pointlessly. Such Christians live with the nagging tension of being at home neither in the world nor in the church as they've known it. Is there some way of embracing a Christ-centered faith and lifestyle that are lived tenaciously and confidently right out in the open where such a faith is not normally valued? I think so, but it will require a dangerous departure from standard church practice. It seems that the church is still hoping and praying that the ground will shift back and our society will embrace once again the values that it once shared with the Christian community...

"The death of Christendom removes the final props that have supported the culturally respectable, mainstream, suburban version of Christianity. This is a Christianity expressed by the "Sunday Christian" phenomenon wherein church attendance has very little effect on the lifestyles or values or priorities expressed from Monday to Saturday. This version of Christianity is a facade, a method for practitioners to appear like fine, upstanding citizens without allowing the claims and teachings of Jesus to bite very hard in everyday life...[This version of Christianity is disappearing] leaving only the faithful behind to rediscover the Christian experience as it was intended: a radical, subversive, compassionate community of followers of Jesus...

"I, for one, am happy to see the end of Christendom."

qb

A Few Assumptions We Seem to Make

1. "Inviting" is fundamentally equivalent to "going."

2. A Christian community must have a physical headquarters.

3. Bigger is necessarily better, numerically speaking.

4. Efficiency and standardization are paramount virtues for the Church.

5. We need one leader to conceive and articulate vision and ideas.

6. Dissent is inherently divisive and dangerous.

7. Marketing - segmenting, and then catering to those segments' whims - is essential to reach the modern world with the Gospel.

8. Prophetic and apostolic roles (even if not viewed as identical with or equivalent to the Apostles per se) are relics of another time and place.

9. The focal point of Christian life, and therefore the arena of outreach in which we ought to invest most of our resources, is the Sunday assembly.

10. We need more hirelings, not fewer.

11. The tithe's proper "storehouse" is the church tiller.

12. Institutional orthodoxy is of comparable rank to doctrinal orthodoxy.

13. If our building, our staff and our programming were taken away from us, our congregation as we have always known it would cease to exist.

14. Experimentation is as dangerous as dissent.

In a moment of raw candor a couple of months ago, a close friend challenged me to describe what "my" church would look like if I were to start from scratch. At the time, out of false humility, I demurred. I have since come to understand that it is possible (essential?) to re-imagine the church according to my current understanding and still exhibit the humility to know that my concepts are subject to error, correction and outright contradiction by God or His people. So I'm walking down that road my brother challenged me to walk...not with the intent of actually starting "my" own church (which is terrible language to use in reference to Christ’s church), but as a means of coming to a coherent sense of what I understand the mission of Christ's people to be so that I can act on that understanding, in faith and in cooperation with God's people.

Michael Frost (Exiles, Chapter 1) says that the church has lost something vital through the centuries as it got comfortable with its respectability and cultural status as the focal point of social life: the dynamic, shared, multifaceted leadership of apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic dimensions (see Eph. 4:1ff), preferring the safe predictability of the pastoral and teaching gifts. I do not for a moment believe that returning the apostolic, prophetic and evangelistic (A-P-E) dimensions to church leadership must diminish the pastoral and teaching (P-T) gifts; if anything, the rise of A-P-E amplifies the need for strong P-T dimensions as a corrective. We take new ground with A-P-E, and we settle it with P-T. But we expend all of our energies these days on P-T, except for those hollow "programs" of the church that are designed for "outreach," by which we mean ultimately "inviting the unchurched to get churched at our church." No wonder, then, that the culture sees us as self-indulgent posers. What does that religious mall out on in affluent, fast-growing suburbia say to Amarillo? "If we build it, they will come." And they laugh at us. They won't come, for the most part (except for the members we borrow temporarily from other fellowships!), because they suspect rightly that we're all hat and no cowboy. If we really believed what Jesus said and taught, we'd be unafraid to jettison the distinct trappings of middle-upper-class, white, cultural religion and go engage the very ones to whom Jesus went to proclaim the kingdom of heaven's presence among us: the poor, the downtrodden, the outcasts, the lepers.

We have lost the "go" from the Great Commission with an undue focus on the "as you go" aspect of the Greek/Aramaic used there. We seem to assume that "as you go" implies a sort of benign, passive, trickle-down, side effect of so-called "discipleship." Our local preacher is right to call us to intentionality; he has the right wine, in other words, he just has the wrong wineskins to put it in. McManus and Eldredge both have important things to say about this, but we've got to go further and more wisely with it.

I know I'm a little slow on the up-take, but I'm finally getting to where many of you already are and have been for some time. I'm asking you to help me (a) figure out how to get this message out there for discussion, and then (b) get this message out there for discussion. Or perhaps I should say that I want to help you get this message out there where we can evaluate it soberly and open-mindedly. Our contest is not with our local preachers per se; it really is with the entrenched spirits of myopia, stasis, comfort and cultural respectability that have us paralyzed and imprisoned in Christendom’s world view, from the grassroots all the way up (ugh!) to our leaders. Time for a breakout. Now, how to go about it?