Michael Frost on the Power of Stories
So just to mix things up a bit, I thought I would post a series of quotes by Michael Frost. For those of you who don’t know Michael, he along with Alan Hirsch have been pushing leaders, churches, and movements to leave their comfortable lives and engage on God’s mission. What follows is a series of quotes from his message at Exponential East this year, as recounted by Matt Hill on his website, Matthill.org. I hope you enjoy!
People aren’t primarily moved or changed by bullet points or sermons. They are changed when you give them a different story to live into.
and
God captures not by force, but by the imagination of his fallen creatures.
and finally…
Encoded into the DNA of suburban American is “be safe”, “build houses,” “renovate your kitchen,” “send your kids to the best schools.” Left to their own devices they will be sucked into the American dream. The only thing that will draw them out is story….Stop only telling people that Jesus died on the cross for their sins. Tell them what it could look like if they lived like Jesus. Tell them the story of God and what it could look like if they saw heaven.
A Missional Bible Study Tip
A year or so ago I had a minor revelation that changed how I understood much of the New Testament. It’s a small thing that dramatically shifts how we understand the priorities of Jesus and the apostles. Are you ready?
Somewhere along the way I began to replace every occurrence of the phrase “the word” with “the message.”
You see, every time I read the phrase “the word,” my mind always pictured the Bible. So when I read that Jesus was “the Word” (John 1:1) I would always think Jesus is the Bible. This was really confusing and I’ve seen it cause some folks to deify the Scriptures.
But if I replace “the word” with “the message” I get something entirely different. Now when I read that Jesus is the word I understand He is God’s Message. He is what God would say in any circumstance. And this message became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).
So when Luke writes in Acts 13:49 that “the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region,” I know that Luke is talking about the spread of the Gospel and not the knowledge of Bible verses. In the same way, when Paul encourages the Thessalonians to pray that “the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you,” (2 Thessalonians 3:1), he’s asking them to pray that the message of the Gospel would be received powerfully.
All of this should shift the focus from accumulating Bible knowledge to actually being a part of knowing, embodying, and declaring God’s message that’s found so clearly in Jesus and the Gospel. This is why I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the minimum standards of discipleship is a functional knowledge of the Gospel.
What do you think? Would reading the Bible this way change how you understand what’s happening in the New Testament? And, is this approach dangerous in any way?
Photo Credit: Into the Promised Land, Joshua 18, Abandoned Bible, White Oak Bayou, Houston, Texas 0420091320BW by Patrick Feller
Missional Course Correction
“Too often churches have understood themselves to be taking God to a godless world rather than following God into a world in which God is already redemptively present.”
George W. Stroup as quoted by Leonard Sweet in Nudge.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 