“A Kingdom Here-and-Still-Coming”
A Review of
The Road to Missional:
Journey to the Center of the Church
by Michael Frost
Reviewed by Josh Wallace
The Road to Missional:
Journey to the Center of the Church
Michael Frost
Paperback: Baker Books, 2011.
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[ Read an Excerpt from this book … ]
I have a couple volumes by N. T. Wright sitting on my bookshelf. I’m sure that when I read them I’ll come away with a clearer understanding of the good news Jesus announces. Someday, someday I will read them.
Today, however, while I try to find God’s true and living way amid a job and a family, a church, a neighborhood, and a heart that desperately needs some hope, I could use something that responds a bit more immediately to my situation. No slight to Tom Wright’s many accessible books (especially his New Testament for Everyone commentaries), but I want something I can slip in my pocket, page through during a coffee break, or pass on to friends only mildly interested in theology or church or Jesus. I want someone to surprise and delight me with how Jesus’ good news invades the day-to-day world where I sometime find it hard to believe.
Michael Frost’s The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church has been in my pocket for the past few weeks (also in my backpack and a holiday travel carry-on bag). I’ve almost given it away twice. It’s the sort of book I’ve read on lunch at work; it’s the sort of book that I’d like to read through with a small group. This is a book that give me hope amid the daily grind.
That said, The Road to Missional certainly wasn’t what I expected it to be. Don’t buy the billing in the blurbs on the back cover. It sells The Road to Missional as a response to the “domestication of what is actually a very bold paradigm shift that makes missional nothing more than one more trick to see church growth.” I read that and expected a screed decrying the way “missional” has been co-opted by the Evangelical church. And, in honesty, I was looking forward to reading it. But inside I found far more than incisive rhetorical analysis of the use and marketing of “missional” in the past five year of Christendom.
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