Spring break reading...

Last year at one of my lovely annual check-ups, I sat in the office of my WHNP during the debriefing segment of the appointment. You know you have a great WHNP when you spend 1.5 minutes talking about the exam and 23.5 minutes talking about the gospel. She rocks.

She had just read a book by David Platt and was telling me that it had pretty much turned her world upside down. Mind you, she didn't really follow tradition to begin with, so seeing her get more radical was truly radical indeed.

I put Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream on my reading list and figured I'd get around to it within a year or so. Believe it or not, teaching English isn't too conducive to keeping up with my personal reading list. I have to be all literary and stuff.

Spring break rolled around, and I had, in unprecedented fashion, finished all my lesson plans and grading before the end of the last day before break. I decided to go ahead and start Radical. It is very good. Very solid. I think more than anything, I appreciate the humility in which Platt writes. Second to that, I appreciate his putting a proverbial finger on the reason why I've been so discontent in my own mundane walk with the Lord, as well as in my engagement (or lack thereof) in church for the past few years. I won't give away everything here -- it is well worth finding a copy online and ordering it yourself.

I do want to share a couple of paragraphs that I found especially meaningful, though. They had to be meaningful; I underlined the whole page.

... In our Christian version of the American dream, our plan ends up disinfecting Christians from the world more than discipling Christians in the world. Let me explain the difference.


Disinfecting Christians from the world involved isolating followers of Christ in a spiritual safe-deposit box called the church building and teaching them to be good. In this strategy, success in the church is defined by how big a building you have to house all the Christians, and the goal is to gather as many people as possible for a couple of hours each week in that place where we are isolated and insulated from the realities of the world aound us. When someone asks, "Where is your church?" we point them to a building or give them an address, and everything centers around what happens at that location.

When we gather at the building, we learn to be good. Being good is defined by what we avoid in the world. We are holy because of what we don't participate in (and at this point we may be the only organization in the world defining success by what we don't do.) We live decent lives in decent homes with decent jobs and decent families as decent citizens. We are decent church members with little more impact on the world than we had before we were saved. Though thousands may join us, ultimately we have turned a deaf ear to billions who haven't even heard his name.

Discipling is much different.

Whereas disinfecting Christians involved isolating them and teaching them to be good, discipling Christians involves propelling Christians into the world to risk their lives for the sake of others. Now the world is our focus, and we gauge success in the church not on the hundreds or thousands whom we can get into our buildings but on the hundreds or thousands who are leaving our building to take on the world with the disciples they are making. In this case, we would never think that the disciple-making plan of Jesus would take place in one service a week at one location led by one or two teachers. Disciple making takes place multiple times every week in multiple locations by an army of men and women sharing, showing, and teaching the Word of Christ and together serving a world in need of Christ. (Chapter 5: The Multiplying Community, 104-105)

Our family recently hit a rough patch that necessitated our stepping out from our disinfected world. Although from the outside it seemed like a decidedly fallen-world situation, we have seen the Lord already working out a plan that is far greater than we could have imagined. He has disciplined us, chastened us, stretched us, challenged us, undergirded us, gone before us, and blessed us. Only God could work all that into one situation.

As a result, we find our focus shifting a little from our disinfected culture to the world where we can actually share Jesus with others. It's a baby-step radical, but I think it's the beginning of something pretty special.