"ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church"

I don't know about you, but I'm bored with middle-class, good mannered religion. And just like God vandalizing the temple curtain, authors Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch spray graffiti on the church wall. But not out of contempt. They do it in deep love for her, asking her, asking you and I, to turn; to re-turn to the core of the founder. Jesus the Nazarene.

While the book is somewhat of a difficult read, I recommend trudging through it. Their sentiment about the church, especially in the West, resonates with me:

"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 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, eat together, pray together, raise each others' children together, serve the poor together, or share Jesus with those who have not yet been set free. We do not like the church if it's a fractured organization with hundreds of competing creeds, names, and doctrines, teaching a multitude of contradictory beliefs and insisting on compliance with a raft of recently invented traditions. 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."

Amen.