Review - Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture

Review
Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture
Michael Frost


This book has had pretty good reviews all round, so I had to read it. If truth be told, it's been on my "current reading" list for some months. It went all the way to Australia with me, and back. Only now do I discover that while I was there, I was driving right past Morling College daily - I could have called in to see the author! He's doing a tour of the UK later in 2008, so I rather hope I can go to hear him speak anyway.

And I think that would be worth doing. Certainly some of the sections of the book are sit-up-and-take-notice-good. The central theme of the book is well-expressed by the title: that Christians - specifically, those of us living in Western society - are like exiles in the culture which surrounds us, cut adrift from the Christendom we once called home. Christians are called in the New Testament to live as aliens and strangers in the world, but the present position of the church vis-a-vis the rest of society is something we haven't experienced in well over a millennium.

So we get passages like this:

The experience that faced the Jewish exiles mirrors the church's experience today. In fact, the biblical metaphor that best suits our current times and faith situation is that of exile. Just like the Jewish exiles, the church today is grieving its loss and is struggling with humiliation. ... The passing of Christendom might be compared to the fall of Jerusalem, and there is no going back.

Such talk is at once refreshing - we don't often dare say such things - and challenging. If we admit that there's no foreseeable return to the way faith was practiced a century ago, say, then we have to reconsider, maybe, just what we are here for, and how to do it. I guess that is what the remainder of the book is about.

And that's where some of it seems to unravel. Much of it is a great re-imagining of what church ought to be about, or could be about. But that's inter-mixed with some frankly bizarre sections telling me how to improve my diet ("drink more water"; "don't overdo carbohydrates"; "eat more protein"...), and be good to the planet ("recycle plastics"; "replace ordinary lightbulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs" ...), and some half-baked economic theory. The principle is sound - I'm sure that missional living must impact how we shop and run our households, as well, as what we claim to believe - but the detail seems somehow ... small.

So, like Punch's Curates Egg, I'd have to offer the review "Good in parts". If you can get past the atrocious page design and font choice, the slight academic verbosity, and the curiously nit-picking social science norms for citation and referencing (frankly I don't care that the author referenced a particular web page on the 21st February 2006), this is an excellent and thought-provoking read.