I think radical gets a bad rap.
The most prominent way the word is used today in our day is found in the political realm. We find it often in opinion pieces about new civil war taking place between the radical left and radical right.
Understanding the term in this manner leads us to believe that radical means only favoring drastic social and political reforms. The extremes dominate and seek to impose a “radical” agenda on the unwilling.
This cultural understanding is so pervasive that it invades our religious applications as well. Churches have been divided against one another in our society in terms of radical progressivism or radical fundamentalism with the emphasis on the radical.
However, when I consider the textbook definition of the term I believe we’re missing something that is … well … meaningful.
Did you know that radical also means to go to the root of origin? The term can denote someone desiring to get back to the basics. If we’re getting back to basics in following Christ we are, in essence, taking a radical approach to our relationship with God. Not gonna lie, I’m emphatically embracing a radical relationship with Christ.
I wrote my own book on this radical approach.
I called it What He Said. My precise focus was a renewed and revitalized look at simply obeying what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. Our radical obedience to Jesus’ teaching in those words may be the refreshing example necessary to transforming our culture from the ground up.
My radical approach to Christ began with a little orange book.
Yes, I’m finally getting there.
I came across this little orange book in the most inauspicious of places … at the office. One of my employees was attending a new church in town. Their small group was reading and working through a book together. A little orange book that would plant seeds of deconstruction in my life.
Yes, I said deconstruction. Many of you may not be familiar with the term, concept, or the process. Simply stated, I began questioning a lot of doctrinal beliefs and found many were contrary to Christ’s clear teaching.
This has been a painful decade of wrestling with God as my doctrinal stances have been in flux during this process. I’ll talk about one of those today.
At this juncture in which this all started I was resting.
My life had been chaotic. The more I think about this time, the more God-glorifying stories arise. We had spent eight years in bi-vocational ministry ranging from Wynne to Batesville, Arkansas. We were on a sabbatical of sorts, looking for a church to heal and recover from that strain on our family.
We were in the second year of this period when I encountered this book. Many of you are likely familiar with it. The little orange book was called Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream written by David Platt.
We were struggling. Strapped with exhaustion and debt, we came across this book together. God used it to expose many understandings of the faith that had been missing in our walk. We were on the brink of a remarkable change and didn’t know it at the time.
Funny thing is that I’ve never owned the book. Well, not physically. I borrowed the book from my co-worker once their small group finished. After I read it, I returned it and later purchased a Kindle version.
The thing that reading the book convicted me of was the American Dream. My wife and I didn’t realize that we had chased it to the brink of collapse. We were fretfully overextending. Too much debt, too little money, even less free time.
We found a house that we fell in love with only to have the veneer slowly peeled away like a foundation-shifting crack in the wall.
Yes, we literally had a foundation problem. Big shoutout to my dad for helping me shore up the shims and keep the house from sinking.
However, the debt we were drowning in was causing our spiritual house to sink as well. But first, I had to escape from the American Dream mindset. We weren’t keeping up with the Joneses, but we did have things we wanted and those things added to our indebtedness.
Nearly a decade of bi-vocational ministry hadn’t taught me that the right programs wouldn’t be the right “fix” for the gospel message. What is had taught me was that my debt was out of control.
Kristy and I began putting a plan in place, piece-by-piece, to get our debt paid off and find financial freedom. We did this because we wanted to have resources with which to serve. This is where the little orange book comes in.
We were driven by comfort, in our lifestyle, and in our faith. We were at a church that made us comfortable, we were over-extended financially trying to make a comfortable existence.
In the process of it all, we left ourselves with no margin for what mattered most and what does matter in the age to come.
“We will not wish we had made more money, acquired more stuff, lived more comfortably, taken more vacations, watched more television, pursued greater retirement, or been more successful in the eyes of this world. Instead, we will wish we had given more of ourselves to living for the day when every nation, tribe, people, and language will bow around the throne and sing the praises of the Savior who delights in radical obedience and the God who deserves eternal worship.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
I was beginning to realize that I’m not the center of God’s plan, even in my own life.
In my quest for comfort, I was neglecting the gospel.
So much church life in America is centered around creature comforts. Seating, lighting, music, speaking … all used to bring us to a place of comfort for an easy Sunday morning. We pick our churches based on how well they provide the accoutrements that satisfy our needs.
I want to say, don’t blame the newer generations. Having served in several older generation churches I can attest that the same applies to earlier generations as well.
This became my first deconstruction, but I didn’t realize that is what it was at the time.
I think we just happen to be more wired toward the spoken word in our westernized society. We value the rhetoric of pulpit preaching and the authority of the institutionalized church on a grander scale than we do that of the simple power found in just living the gospel as the message itself.
I’ve spent so much of my life focused on preaching the right sermon, in the right setting, with the right songs, and the right amount of prayer/fasting/meditation. Jesus didn’t need any of that to empower the gospel.
I didn’t understand anything outside evangelization. I believed we needed a preacher or evangelist to get people saved.
I don’t any more.
“We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
I had been settling for a Christianity that centered around preachers, pulpits, programs, and services doing the work rather than one that called me to complete surrender to Christ.
Complete surrender means that I don’t get to dictate anything in the Church … and neither do you.
Why not?
The Church doesn’t belong to either one of us. The Church belongs to Christ, He is the head (Eph. 1:22, 5:23; Col. 1:18, 2:10). He sets the tone for the Church … and for your church. You didn’t die for the Church, He did.
Abandoning ourselves and our churches to the will of Christ is vital to Christianity escaping the clutches of American enculturation.
Admittedly, this thought scares the dickens out of me and triggers my anxiety.
I don’t like to not be in control of my life. I discussed that in Part 2 of this series of blog posts.
A surrendered life is an unsafe one. I wasn’t willing at that time to surrender complete control, but did begin giving up pieces of my life to Him. What a sad state I was in at the time?!
Yet, He patiently and graciously began working in my life in new ways and previously unfathomable directions. One of those directions was a trip to Uganda, which I’ll write about soon.
But next up, I want to discuss another deconstruction that was initiated in my life by Platt.
Deconstructing the concept of what it means to be “saved”.
I’ll leave you with his quote that opened my spirit up to this growth opportunity.
“Accept him? Do we really think Jesus needs our acceptance? Don’t we need him? Jesus is no longer one to be accepted or invited in but one who is infinitely worthy of our immediate and total surrender.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
Grace and peace!
If you liked this post, you just might enjoy my book, What He Said: Living the Sermon on the Mount, Transforming American Culture.
If you want to follow my journey, you can read each of the previous posts below:
Part 1 – That’s Me in the Corner: Sharing My Journey
Mark West, Xvangelical 