reJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church

In 2005, while en route to a speaking tour of the United Kingdom, we decided to treat ourselves to a stopover in Rome. As one does when in the eternal city, we visited the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica. It was every bit as beautiful as we had imagined. Everyone who sees St. Peter's agrees that it is a truly remarkable feat of human ingenuity, with perfectly designed shafts of natural light highlighting its artistic treasures, built on a scale designed to foster a feeling of spiritual awe.

Like all tourists we wandered, mesmerized, our necks craned upwards to take in the sheer grandeur of the cathedral. Not looking where we were going, we accidentally bumped into each other, and there in the middle of the room that represented the heart of global Christianity for centuries, we reflected on what we were seeing and asked each other where Jesus was to be found in this place. Certainly, we agreed, the architecture of the basilica was stunning, and the sculpture, windows, and ceiling were beautiful. But both of us had the same niggling question bubbling around in our minds: Where is the poor, itinerant rabbi from Nazareth?

We open this book with this story to illustrate our concern with what has been promulgated in Jesus' name throughout history. The name of Jesus has been invoked as central to movements that do not seem to be in accord with the Jesus we find in the pages of the Gospels.

For instance, the KKK's Bible-thumping reign of terror in Mississippi attempted to sanctify their actions with ardent prayers to Jesus. In the Vatican - one of the archetypal buildings dedicated to the religion that was founded on Jesus Christ - it is hard to locate the simple, hardy, revolutionary carpenter who is compellingly portrayed in the Gospels. At the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the Jesus of the Gospels competes with tsars and generals for the affections of the devoted. All of these are unsettling insights that speak directly to the purpose of this book because they raise disturbing questions about the continuity between Jesus and the subsequent religion established in his name.

In saying this, we don't mean to equate the Catholic or Orthodox churches with the Ku Klux Klan. We simply mean to identify instances in which a group's depiction of the person of Jesus is, to us, incongruous with the actual Jesus. Indeed, the discontinuity between Jesus and the religion that bears his name that we found in Rome and Moscow is by no means limited to those churches or denominations. Both Catholic and Protestant groups, right up to our present time and including even the newer Christian church movements, have traded in the radical way of Jesus for the seemingly greater grandeur of such religious expressions.

All this suggests questions that can be - indeed, should be - asked of all believers, churches, and denominations in any time and place:

• What ongoing role does Jesus the Messiah play in shaping the ethos and self-understanding of the movement that originated in him?
• How is the Christian religion, if we can legitimately call it that, informed and shaped by the Jesus that we meet in the Gospels?
• How do we assess the continuity required between the life and example of Jesus and the subsequent religion called Christianity?
• In how many ways do we domesticate the radical Revolutionary in order to sustain our religion and religiosity?
• And perhaps most important of all, how can a rediscovery of Jesus renew our discipleship, the Christian community, and the ongoing mission of the church?

These are not insignificant questions because they take us to the core of what the church is all about. Rather than call this reformation, we will call this task "Refounding the Church" because it raises the issue of the church's true Founder or Foundation. And in our opinion, nothing is more important for the church in our day than the question of refounding Christianity. It has a distinct poignancy at the dawn of the twenty-first century as we collectively attempt to address Christianity's endemic and long-trended decline in the West. We seem a little lost, if truth be told, and no quick-fix church-growth solution can be found that can stop the hemorrhage. There is no doubt that we face a spiritual, theological, missional, and existential crisis in the West.

We must admit that both of us are somewhat obsessed with mission and what it means to be a missional people. But we both remain convinced that it is Christology that remains even more foundational and therefore the primary issue. We have elsewhere asserted that it is Christology (the exploration of the person, teachings, and impact of Jesus Christ) that determines missiology (our purpose and function in the world), which in turn determines our ecclesiology (the forms and functions of the church)[1]. We have found no reason to revise our opinion on this, but over time we have only become even more convinced of the primacy of this formula. Both of us (together and apart) have written on books about a distinctly missional form of discipleship and ecclesiology[2]. In writing this book, we feel we are now getting to the nub of the matter. We are going back to the Founder and recalibrating the entire enterprise along christological lines.

The core task of this book therefore will be to explore the connection between the way of Jesus and the religion of Christianity. We will attempt to assess the Christian movement in the light of the biblical revelation of Jesus and to propose ways in which the church might reconfigure itself, indeed, recalibrate its mission, around the example and teaching of the radical rabbi from Nazareth. Where is the continuity? Why is what we experience as Christianity discontinuous with the way of Jesus? How consistent is our witness with his life and teachings? And can we move away from his prototypal spirituality without doing irreparable damage to the integrity of the faith? How far is too far?

Similarly, Jacques Ellul, the French theologian and philosopher, raises a disturbing historical problem for us to solve, a problem what he calls "the subversion of Christianity."

The question that I want to sketch in this work is one that troubles me most deeply. As I now see it, it seems to be insoluble and assumes a serious character of historical oddness. It may be put very simply: How has it come about that the development of Christianity and the church has given birth to a society, a civilization, a culture that are completely opposite to what we read in the Bible, to what is indisputably the text of the law, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul? I say advisedly "completely opposite." There is not just contradiction on one point but on all points. On the one hand, Christianity has been accused of a whole list of faults, crimes, and deceptions that are nowhere to be found in the original text and inspiration. On the other hand, revelation has been progressively modeled and reinterpreted according to the practice of Christianity and the church. . . . This is not just deviation but radical and essential contradiction, or real subversion.[3]

And while this might seem to be an overstatement, Ellul proceeds to back up his conclusions with some unnerving scholarship. To our thinking, no one has yet answered his questions in a satisfactory way. Yet they cannot be avoided if we are to re-establish ourselves as an authentic church in the twenty-first century. Therefore, among other things, we have taken it upon ourselves to further develop his concerns and to continue to raise the questions first posed by Ellul.

But this quest is not limited to the realm of scholarship and philosophy.

For example, at a more popular level, Erwin McManus takes up a similar theme in The Barbarian Way, in which he rails against the transformation of Christianity from a dangerous and revolutionary spiritual force into a "religious civilization." And rightly so. Is such a civilization, with its associated civil religion, what Jesus intended for the movement he started? Was it his intention to produce a domesticated religion with a fully-fledged mediating priesthood, cumbersome rituals, and dense theologies, along with all the other trappings of religions with ambiguous connections to the surrounding society and culture? Is this what Jesus meant when he came pronouncing the arrival of the kingdom of God or the tearing of the veil in the Temple at his death?[4]

So what's this book all about? It's all about Jesus, with direct implications for our discipleship, some radical challenges for our churches, and some suggested reformulations for our spirituality. In short, it's about reJesusing the church.

 

This is an edited excerpt from reJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost (Henderickson Publishers, December 2008). Used with permission.
To download the whole intro of the book, go to Alan's website: www.theforgottenways.org/blog

[1] Most recently, Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos; 2006), 143ff.; Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2003) 16ff.
[2] Michael Frost, Exiles (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2006). See also Alan Hirsch, Neil Cole, and Wolfgang Simson, Igniting Primal Fires, which explores Eph 4:11 ministry (forthcoming).
[3] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), 3.
[4] We think not. The idea of "one nation under God" is Israel's calling, not that of the church. One church under God is more like it. And the church is called to live among the nations, bearing witness, influencing, but never dominating.

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