The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out
The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out
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Product Description
Reformation is the continual reforming of the mission of the church to enhance God's command to reach out to others in a way that acknowledges the unique times and locations of daily life. This engaging book blends the integrity of respected theoreticians with the witty and practical insights of a pastor. It calls for a movement of missionaries to seek the lost across the street as well as across the globe.This basic primer on the interface between gospel and culture highlights the contrast between presentation evangelism and participation evangelism. It helps Christians navigate between the twin pitfalls of syncretism (being so culturally irrelevant that you lose your message) and sectarianism (being so culturally irrelevant that you lose your mission). Included are interviews with those who have crossed cultural barriers, such as a television producer, exotic dancer, tattoo studio owner, and band manager. The appendix represents eight portals into the future: population, family, health/medicine, creating, learning, sexuality, and religion.Mark Driscoll was recently featured on the ABC special The Changing of Worship.
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Driscoll’s sense of humor is rather twisted. His willingness to say aloud what others forbid themselves to even think is refreshing. His views are thought provoking. His concepts in practice are enlightening. Some people “will” find parts of Radical Reformission offensive. My parents were offended by the copy I gave them. But they are now buying more copies and recommending it to everyone. RR will show you how to use your freedom to set others free. Thank you Jesus for Pastor Driscoll.
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Mark Driscoll’s work on living on the balance of syncretism/sectarianism is critical to the church as we struggle between moralism and ‘selling out’. His work has had a profound impact on his church and church pastors across the country. This book is a must read whether you are an ‘emerging’ pastor or if you have been in the ministry for decades. I pray it is a wake up call to a radical but necessary place of tension.
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Started attending Mars Hill Church, where Mark Discoll is the head teaching elder, a little over a year ago. Only very serious problems can keep us away on Sunday. I’m twice the age of the average member/attendee, but Mark preaches old time religion applied to today’s culture and I and about 2,500 others seem very comfortable with both. Mark is very real, sometimes shocking and shows real grace. Week after week my wife and I ask each other “Is that the best sermon we’ve ever heard AGAIN?”
What you get in RR is what I see happening at Mars Hill, along with Mark’s humor and wisdom that’s beyond his years. I’ve been a believer for 35 years and I’m as excited about Jesus as I’ve ever been and due in no small part to the vision you read about in this book. Would I feel the same way if I wasn’t watching Mark practice what he preaches up close and personal? Maybe not, but when I read it, I could honestly say I saw RR being worked out and it’s authentic.
Read RR, log on to the MHC web site, stream the sermons, praise God and have a blast.
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It is one thing to be able to write with humor, it’s another to offer sound biblical principles to your message, but to do so while living out the message you preach is the main catalyst to the success and influence this book has.
I have the pleasure of being the preaching elder of a daughter church that Mars Hill is funding and helping to guide and plant here in San Diego, and I can say with full confidence that the reason this book is gripping (even after hearing many of these great stories and principles in our network) is because it is not some pie in the sky ideology about missional living, or some cold, removed, theological discussion with no connection to Christ. This message which Pastor Mark brings is absolutely critical as we face a post-Christian, post-modern, post-everything, culture which sees the church at times better than we do. We need to return to the often chanted and rarely applied mantra of semper reformanda. And we must be willing to cut dead weight from our traditions, and kill innovative programs for the sake of pragmatism, so that we can return again to the one, true God who reigns over history and has commissioned us to preach the God glorifying, sin crushing, people freeing gospel in our day.
David Fairchild
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Having plowed through at least 50 Christian books this past year, I have to say that Radical Reformission was one of my favorites. It was a fresh look at evangelism, and how we treat our neighbors. The prose flowed smoothly, and was enjoyable to read.
If you’re looking for a book that will help refocus you and your church, as well as a book that is challenging, please read Radical Reformission. I took a lot away from this book. While most Christian books seem to be regurgitations of each other, this book is not.
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Mark Driscoll accurately identifies the flawed thinking of both far left and far right extremes of the ostensibly Christian churches in the United States.
Professing Christians are often in the news when protesting something (as if Christians were supposed to be just another political special interest group). He states “Our (society’s) heart is a rock band, and culture is a loudspeaker, and if we do not like the music then spending lots of money and effort trying to `fix’ the speakers will not change the tune.” and if you do not understand that then you will not understand most of the book.
He also identifys and defines the difference between Universal and Particular sins. Universal sins are things that are wrong for all people at all times. Particular sins are wrong for certain people under certain circumstances. Liberal churches try to move Universal sin into the Particular (or not a) sin category while fundamental churches try to move Particular sins into the Universal sin category.
Those who want to engage the lost people of our sinful society should understand the concepts presented in Radical Reformission.
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Mark Driscoll’s book “Radical Reformission” is still haunting me and this is good. There needs to be a changing of the guard in the American church and it is being done by real people in real churches who are in love with a real Jesus. Mark points to the church of today and it is either Sectarian or Syncretist but it is to be neither. It must be very Biblical and involved in culture without being conformed to culture. His best chapter is six “The Sin of Light Beer: How Syncretism and Sectarianism Undermine Reformission,” and how he explains beer drinking and at the end has a man, who is a Christian, and owns a brewery explain his Christian walk. Driscoll explains very clearly from the Bible why drinking is not wrong but can be used wrongly just like anything else in this world. We need to repent, and I did, of my wrong attitudes and views of the Bible through the eyes of my culture. May I see more Biblically as a result of being challenged by this book.
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As we look at our culture and the church we can clearly see that the culture is not being reached. Some in Christianity just say the culture is too lost and it’s their problem. Others are trying to win over the culture with trying to be “more relevant” using cool music, flashy media, and entertaining them just like the movies do. But, as we look at the life of Jesus, neither of these approaches were taken. Pastor Mark Driscoll takes a good hard look at our culture and how we are to reach them Biblically and effectively. He will teach you how to reach the culture like Jesus did. Driscoll takes the zeal of the emergent church and mixes it with the truth of scriptures to provide a great answer to our great dilema of reaching culture for Jesus. The mission starts right outside your door. Are you ready?
Justin Bell
Calvary Chapel Camarillo Worship Ministries
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Having read this book, I have come away with four major points to ponder:
First, if Driscoll is the “godfather” of the emergent movement, so to speak, then the entire emergent movement (to the extent I have been able to read) has completely missed the point he was trying to make in this book. From Driscoll’s own statements in the book, the emergent movement as it exists today is nothing more than heresy. Heresy! That seems a far cry from what he originally proposed. One of my good friends said that from what I told him it sounded like emergents took Driscoll’s ideas and “ran wild” with them. That’s exactly what I think after reading through this book. Talk about an “adventure in missing the point!”
Second, if Driscoll is correct in what he says, then we have to completely overhaul our ecclesiology. We’ve got to see if we’ve become so entrenched in our traditions that the Gospel becomes irrelevant, or if we’ve gotten so fancy in our innovations that we compromise the Gospel and again make it irrelevant. The second half of that statement is exactly why I think the emergent movement has completely missed the point.
Third, if what he says is true about me, I’ve got some further sanctification to get cracking on. I’ve been convicted by some of the things I’ve read in here, and roundly encouraged towards a goal by other things I’ve read in the book as well.
Fourth, some of the people who have reviewed the book need to get a life and grow a sense of humor. This guy is funny. Funny. I did not in the least feel his handling of Scripture was irreverent; then again maybe my sense of humor is different from most other people’s. But I have never gotten such a knee-slapping laugh out of a book other than Christopher Moore’s “Lamb,” and that one was a parody of the Gospel! Much less, I have never laughed while reading a serious book like “Reformission.” When you can thoroughly enjoy someone laying some serious sanctifying smackdown on you, you know the book is good.
So, I’d recommend this book heavily to everyone who asks me about it. I’d recommend it over Brian McLaren any day.
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I really, really liked this book. So much so that I not only ordered my own copy, but I didn’t give back the one I borrowed, I gave it to someone else to read first.
Radical reformission is about a transformation of the church. Mark shares his philosophy regarding the church, and what it means for a church to be missional. This book combines powerful teaching with storytelling, and the typical driscoll humor.
I love the story of how he started in ministry. Mark accepted Christ, and then immediately decided to start a bible study (the same week!). He summarizes it like this “It then dawned on me that I had been a Christian for only a few days, had never been in a Bible study, and did not really know anything in the Bible other than the fact that I sucked and that Jesus is God.” Mark offered to let anyone ask any question, as long as they would give him a week to try to figure it out.
Mark is very transparent in this book, sharing both success and failures. After one very entertaining story about going to a gay cowboy bar (gotta read the book!) in which he was afraid to tell people he was a pastor, he said “I cared more about how I appeared to people than about whether I shared the passion of Jesus for those who are lost”
But the chapter on reformissional evangelism really hit home with me. I struggle with the idea that we expect people to jump through hoops to be part of the church, and Mark writes an incredible analogy on this point:
“In reformission evangelism, people are called to come and see the transformed lives of God’s people before they are called to repent of sin and trust in God. Taking a cue from dating is helpful on this point. If we desire people to be happily married to Jesus as his loving bride, it makes sense to let them go out on a few dates with him instead of just putting a shotgun to their heads and asking them to hurry up, put on a white dress, and try to look happy for the photos.”
Mark then explains “In our church in Seattle, as lost people become friends with Christians, they often get connected to various ministries (for example, helping to run concerts, helping to guide a rock-climbing expedition, taking a class on biblical marriage, helping to develop a website, joining a Bible study, serving the needy) and participate in them before they possess saving faith.”
This is a key difference between the emerging church and the traditional church. Traditionally churches require people to be members before they do things, which requires that they are already Christians. The emerging church is about exposing people to a life in Christ and using that to draw them in.
Mark challenges readers to engage culture rather than withdraw from it, but is careful to caution that engaging culture does not include sinning (e.g. things like fornication and drunkenness are not engaging culture, they are sin).
In a chapter entitled “the sin of light beer” Mark talks about the dangers of syncretism and sectarianism, and specifically utilizes the Christian church’s demonization of something God created for the joy of His people, alcohol, to make his point. I really love Mark’s conclusion in this chapter:
“Here’s what I’d like you to remember from this chapter: reformission is not about abstention; it is about redemption. We must throw ourselves into the culture so that all that God made good is taken back and used in a way that glorifies him. Our goal is not to avoid drinking, singing, working, playing, eating, love-making, and the like. Instead, our goal must be to redeem those things through the power of the gospel so that they are used rightly according to Scripture, bringing God glory and his people a satisfied joy.”
The conclusion of the book is profound in its own very post-modern way. Rather than wrap everything up into a neat little conclusion, Mark concludes the book by sharing his hopes and dreams for the city of Seattle and the ministry of Mars Hill. In essence, Mark shares what he prays will be the end result of putting into practice the things that he has been writing about through this book. That the world would be transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time.
Joel