Here Come the Radicals!
For us in the pews, testing ourselves must include deliberating about our vocations and whether we are called to missions, or to a life of dedicated service to the poor, or to creating reminders with art and culture of the gospel's transcendent, everlasting hope. Discovering a radical faith may mean revisiting the ways in which faith can take shape in the mundane, sans intensifiers. It almost certainly means embracing the providence of God in our witness to the world. The Good Samaritan wasn't a good neighbor because he moved to a poor part of town or put a pile of trash in his living room. He came across the helpless victim "as he traveled." We begin to fulfill the command not when we do something radical, extreme, over the top, not when we're really spiritual or really committed or really faithful, but when in the daily ebb and flow of life, in our corporate jobs, in our middle-class neighborhoods, on our trips to Yellowstone and Disney World—and yes, even short-term mission trips—we stop to help those whom we meet in everyday life, reaching out in quiet, practical, and loving ways.
Matthew Lee Anderson is the lead writer at MereOrthodoxy.com and the author of Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (Bethany House). He is studying for an M.Phil. at Oxford University.
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Jim Ricker
Xians who view life and Scripture through the lens of politics are not new and they are found both on the left and on the right (and everywhere in between). Always amazed at how those 'left-wing' people are corrupting the gospel but they obvious corruption by right-wing politicians is just as bad but mainly ignored by those who claim to be speaking for God and being 'biblicly-sound.' We have David Barton running around for years waging a false culture wall via right-wing politics and those on the right trying to make God a conservative.We have Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission claiming that the entire Tea Party movement is actually the work of God as part of a "spiritual awakening"the Religious Right to claim the Tea Party mantle are getting more and more blatant (March 2010). If we stop talking political smack and trying to make the other side anti-gospel because of a economic system, we'd be better off.
Roland Kuehn
I just had a visitor in my classroom (I teach public school grade who is doing some amazing work in Kenya but it comes at great personal cost and sacrifice. He does it joyfully without bragging or condemnation of others who are living more self or Disney centred lives. Since his talk, my students have been quoting one of the things he said: "if you can't sacrifice for it, you don't really believe it." In our often narcissistic culture (church included), we need to hear this message afresh and if it’s considered radical so be it.
Roland Kuehn
Like the prophets of the OT, like Bonhoeffer in Hitler's Germany, like Mother Teresa, and like Kierkegaard, people like Shayne are, by their lives and their words, awakening people from the slumber that comes from reducing the life transforming and world revolutionizing words of Jesus into to a safe intellectual assent/belief/religious cliché while in reality continuing to live for the pursuit of lesser gods such as money or self. Instead we are reminded that trusting in Jesus, that is the Jesus who wants to awaken us into something nothing short of a rebirth (now that's radical), means that we will not just merely believe but rather participate in the transforming, serving others, upside down Kingdom that takes place when we commit to living the kinds of authentic human/God shaped lives that Jesus has called us to. (And it is not hypocritical to publish as suggested in the article or we wouldn't have the words of Amos or Jeremiah or Isaiah or Bonhoeffer or Kierkegaard.)