Up, down, all around (keep christianity weird - pt. 6)

We continue our way through Michael Frost's 'Keep Christianity Weird' by looking at chapter 6 today. This is a somewhat long and winding romp that touches on a lot of different topics. I think it is, perhaps, best summed up with this bit from early on (p.125):

"Jesus calls his followers to infiltrate every aspect of the empire, to bring flavor and light to its darkest and most tasteless corners, something the Pharisees were loath to do. They were terrified of offending the empire and had developed a form of Judaism that would have seemed inconsequential and provincial to the Roman authorities... Jesus was having none of that. He openly flouted their conventions and dismissed them for their fear and hypocrisy... And all the while he was gathering a people to himself, a strange society unlike anything the world had ever seen."

This is followed a couple pages later with this dandy little paragraph:

"This new way of life to live is the way of the weird. It's a completely alternate way of life from everyone else in the world. As we've seen, it requires a complete renewal of the mind by the Holy Spirit to achieve such a lifestyle. And it involves a new set of lived habits to reinforce these values and sustain them in your everyday life. It takes all the discipline of the Celts or the Cistercians. As a result, weird followers of Jesus will see the world entirely differently. They'll see things weirdly."

Frost then shares how he believes this "seeing things weirdly" works itself out in our world today. First, he says, WHEN TEMPTED TO CHOOSE SIDES, LOOK INSIDE... Second, WHEN TEMPTED TO LOOK AROUND, LOOK UP... but it's the third that really caught my eye.

WHEN LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE, LOOK DOWN
I'm not going to share what he meant by these capped statements (you'll have to get the book), but on pp. 139ff he shares the "five signs of the Parish Movement." This is his summary from their article, and what he believes "looking down" looks like:

1. Centering on Christ: Place-based communities of faith don't only believe in Christ but also see the Incarnational as the inspiration and shape of their work in the neighborhood.
2. Inhabiting Our Parish: Recovering the European Christendom idea of parish as a discrete geographical boundary of influence, place-based churches inhabit their place/parish by joining God's renewal in, with, and for their place. As Rice and Soerens describe it, place-based churches are "learning to accept our limitations as a gift from God, live with intentionality, be known by our actual neighbors and tangibly love those around us. We see to participate in God's renewal by listening to, serving, and caring for the land and the people where we live, work and play."
3. Gathering to Remember: Far from melting into the rhythms of their place to be indistinguishable from any other good neighbor, place-based believers meet together regularly to "remember the larger story of our faith, rehearse the kind of people God desires us to be in the parish, and encourage one another in love and discernment." In fact, the Parish Collective believes it is all the more crucial to gather together as they are contributing to God's renewal in the parish and as they collaborate with neighbors who don't necessarily share their faith in Christ.
4. Collaborating for God's Renewal: When you look down and truly encounter the depths of the problems confronting neighborhoods, it's impossible to believe the church can fix things by themselves. That's the old patronage model of service provision that allowed the church to do a great deal of good throughout history but impeded the church's level of meaningful connection with its neighbors. Place-based churches know they need to collaborate with neighbors from other traditions, faiths, and experiences and believe that doing so doesn't compromise their devotion to Christ.
5. Linking across Parishes: This is pretty much what the Parish Collective does. It helps place-based initiatives connect with other Christian communities, both regionally and globally, to learn together and encourage each other in this challenging but rewarding work.

Anyway... this seems a fairly disjointed ramble on this chapter. Thus the title of the post. It starts to bring things together from the book though, and these are some of the things I felt worth highlighting. I will share from the final chapter in a couple days...