Michael Frost - Keep Christianity Weird: Embracing the Discipline of Being Different

Mike Frost is one of the sharpest thinkers weve got. I dont just mean that hes clever (he is), but that his ideas cut through nonsense with prophetic clarity. And so, of course, this book does just that. Large swaths of the Western church are in dire danger of cultural assimilation at the precise time that our wider culture is looking for new ideas and alternative answers. Thank God, then, for Mikes message, which calls us back to the glorious weirdness of the gospel.

PETE GREIG, team leader of 24-7 Prayer International, senior pastor of Emmaus Rd, and author of Dirty Glory

Michael Frost reminds us with winsome prose and challenging clarity that if our neighbors dont see us living out our Christian faith together as alternative story, something has gone horribly wrong. Read this book and ignore the noise of conformity. If we do, the best days of the local church are just ahead of us.

TIM SOERENS, cofounder of Parish Collective and coauthor of The New Parish

Following the apostle Pauls advice to the Roman church, Do not conform to the pattern of this world, Michael Frost offers us a poignant meditation on the weirdness of our Christian faith. Keep Christianity Weird is the irresistible sort of book that I will read and reread to remind myself what it means to follow in the way of Jesus and in the footsteps of the faithful cloud of witnesses who have gone before us.

C. CHRISTOPHER SMITH, founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books and coauthor of the award-winning book Slow Church

Keep Christianity Weird is a provocative book, but only for people who need to be provoked. For the rest of us people who need a fresh reminder of the Good News or the great commission this book is a gift.

DAVE FERGUSON, lead pastor of Community Christian Church and author of Hero Maker: Five Essential Practices for Leaders to Multiply Leaders

Michael Frost calls us away from a generic, domesticated, deistic gospel and back into a wild, incarnate, neighborhood-focused, authentically weird, attractive Christianity which looks, oddly enough, just like Jesus and his Kingdom come.

AUBREY SAMPSON, church planter, teaching pastor, and author of Overcomer and The Louder Song (2019)

This book does not disappoint. With Michaels usual mix of biblical and historical wisdom, cultural exegesis, and keen wit, Michael invites us to be Gods peculiar people in the best possible ways.

DANIEL FUSCO, pastor of Crossroads Community Church and author of Upward, Inward, Outward and Honestly

Michael Frost invites us to open our eyes to the way of the Master and to reimagine what it means to be the people of God in our time. He looks at Jesus (the original weirdo) and numerous biblical and historical figures whose unusual ways of relating to the world around them reflected the Kingdom of God and brought about miraculous change. Michael reminds us of things we may have forgotten. Hold on tight.

AL ENGLER, director of Navigators Neighbors and Navigators Workplace

NavPress is the publishing ministry of The Navigators, an international Christian organization and leader in personal spiritual development. NavPress is committed to helping people grow spiritually and enjoy lives of meaning and hope through personal and group resources that are biblically rooted, culturally relevant, and highly practical.

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Keep Christianity Weird: Embracing the Discipline of Being Different

Copyright 2018 by Michael Frost. All rights reserved.

A NavPress resource published in alliance with Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

NAVPRESS and the NAVPRESS logo are registered trademarks of NavPress, The Navigators, Colorado Springs, CO. TYNDALE is a registered trademark of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Absence of in connection with marks of NavPress or other parties does not indicate an absence of registration of those marks.

The Team: Don Pape, Publisher; David Zimmerman, Acquisitions Editor; Elizabeth Symm, Copy Editor; Jennifer Phelps, Designer

Cover title illustration by Jennifer Phelps. Copyright Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version,NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Some of the anecdotal illustrations in this book are true to life and are included with the permission of the persons involved. All other illustrations are composites of real situations, and any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-63146-851-3

ISBN 978-1-63146-853-7 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-63146-854-4 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-63146-852-0 (Apple)

Build: 2018-08-15 14:57:17 EPUB 3.0

FOR CAZ

In 2015, I published a little book entitled Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People. It was a short manual on how to foster the kind of alternative Christian lifestyle that would be likely to, well, surprise our neighbors and provoke them to ask us about our faith. I was really trying to help Christians develop the habits that would shape them into generous, hospitable, Spirit-led, Christlike missionaries. As I explained in that book, it was their very difference from their dominant culture that made the early church such an intriguing community in its first few centuries of existence. And that intrigue led people to explore the beliefs that cultivated such a winsome community.

Today, church attendance, while becoming ever less popular, isnt an intriguing act. Indeed, in some quarters, just saying youre a Christian might conjure the assumption that youre a fundamentalist right-wing homophobe. Its become more repellent than intriguing.

Surprise the World was my attempt to help Christians think about what alternative practices, beyond mere church attendance, would arouse the curiosity of others, and to show the overwhelming goodness of the Kingdom of God.

My fear, however, has been that too many churches might have used that book simply to promote the five habits as a short-term project bolted on to the many other programs the church conducts. Many pastors contacted me to say they were doing a Surprise the World month in their small-group ministries and preaching through the contents of the book. Dont get me wrong, I was delighted to see so many people taking that book to heart. But Im afraid a month of promoting the five habits wont yield very much unless we can nurture a more pervasive worldview in our churches, one that sees the inherent weirdness, or strangeness, of the Christian experience. This was the key to my five missional habits: They must be habits. They must be expressions of a genuinely alternative lifestyle, one that shows our neighbors that theres a different indeed better way to be human in this world.