Michael Frost Quotes & Sayings

It is important to note that the missional church combines the concern for community development normally characterized by the liberal churches and the desire for personal and community transformation normally characterized by the evangelical movement. This blurring of the old lines of demarcation between theologies, doctrine, and ideology within the church makes the way open for much more integrated mission to occur. It's like saying that we want to prepare like an evangelical; preach like a Pentecostal; pray like a mystic; do the spiritual disciplines like a Desert Father, art like a Catholic, and social justice like a liberal. — Michael Frost

Being more missional might actually mean doing fewer things. There is a Latin American proverb that says, "If you don't know where you're coming from, and if you don't know where you're going, then any bus will do." Some congregations are clearly riding too many busesl What they need is not more flurry, but more focus. Becoming disciplined about being a missional church can provide such a focus.[16 — Michael Frost

If the heart of Christian spirituality is to increasingly become like our founder, then an authentic comprehension of Jesus becomes critical. — Michael Frost

It will place a high value on communal life, more open leadership structures, and the contribution of all the people of God. It will be radical in its attempts to embrace biblical mandates for the life of locally based faith communities without feeling as though it has to reconstruct the first-century church in every detail. We believe the missional church will be adventurous, playful, and surprising. Leonard Sweet has borrowed the term "chaordic" to describe the missional church's inclination toward chaos and improvisation within the constraints of broadly held biblical values. It will gather for sensual-experiential-participatory worship and be deeply concerned for matters of justice-seeking and mercy-bringing. It will strive for a type of unity-in-diversity as it celebrates individual differences and values uniqueness, while also placing a high premium on community. — Michael Frost

We can no longer afford our historical sentimentality, even addiction, to the past. — Michael Frost

Many exiles leave the mainstream church and engage in the kinds of things we've looked at already: living an authentic life, struggling for global justice, showing compassion, pursuing vocation as a way of doing God's work. But often they do it alone, imagining that it's either the conventional church or no church at all. — Michael Frost

Simply beautiful! David Brazzeal takes the hospitality traditions of the French and the Brazilians and stirs in spiritual disciplines and alternative worship practices for a book on prayer unlike anything you've read before. He reminds us that time with God is a rich and delicious banquet that we share together, and not a drive-thru fast food meal we eat alone. Nourishing and indulgent. — Michael Frost

The missional church will take context seriously, but will also work on recovering the biblical narrative with its richness and potency for today's world. When story and context are equally embraced, we are beginning to think and act missionally. — Michael Frost

you know you've remade Jesus in your own image when he hates all the same people you hate! — Michael Frost

Mission is both the announcement and the demonstration of the reign of God through Christ. — Michael Frost

Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution, once surveyed a group of people who identified themselves as "strong followers of Jesus" and asked them, "Did Jesus spend time with the poor?" Around 80 percent replied in the affirmative, leaving a disturbing 20 percent of so-called strong followers of Jesus who think Jesus didn't spend time with the poor. That this could be the case should remind us of the levels of Christian ignorance about our founder and Lord. But the more disturbing fact is that Claiborne asked the same group, "Do you spend time with the poor?" Only 2 percent replied that they did. There is for many an almost complete disconnect between our beliefs about Jesus and our actions. This disconnection lies at the nub of the problem facing the church. — Michael Frost

The founding father of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, was noted as saying, "When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible. — Michael Frost

Our point is that to reJesus the church, we need to go back to the daring, radical, strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling, disturbing, caring, powerful God-Man. — Michael Frost

In the face of Jesus' dogged steadfastness, how could we but offer him our own loyal allegiance? As we have seen, our decision to serve Jesus should be made not in order to earn Jesus' grace but as a response to it. He who has given so much for us can rightly call us to lay down our lives for him. Recognizing that we will continue to stumble and fall short of his impeccable standard, we nonetheless strain onward out of gratitude for his mercy and kindness to us. Why do we serve the poor or preach the Gospel? Why do we continue with the otherwise foolish work of peace-making or justice-seeking? Not out of some neurotic fear of losing God's favor but precisely because we have tasted that favor and would do anything for the one who died to win it for us. — Michael Frost

a missional church is simply any church that organizes itself around the mission of God in this world. — Michael Frost

The Christian experience is not primarily formed by our liturgy, doctrine, or ecclesiology, as important as those might be. We are formed by the dangerous stories of our great hero. — Michael Frost

The Missional church always thinks of the long haul rather than the quick fix — Michael Frost

Therefore, we propose a rediscovery of Christology that includes a preoccupation with the example and teaching of Jesus for the purposes of emulation by his followers. — Michael Frost

Those who are taken captive by Jesus see mission not merely as a practice preferred by God but as an aspect of his very character. He is mission. Core to understanding God's nature is the realization that God cannot not be about the business of mission. — Michael Frost

important to note that the missional church combines the concern for community development normally characterized by the liberal churches and the desire for personal and community transformation normally characterized by the evangelical movement. — Michael Frost

I, for one, am happy to see the end of Christendom. I'm glad that we can no longer rely on temporal, cultural supports to reinforce our message or the validity of our presence. I suspect that the increasing marginalization of the Christian movement in the West is the very thing that will wake us up to the marvelously exciting, dangerous, and confronting message of Jesus. If we are exiles on foreign soil - post-Christendom, postmodern, postliterate, and so on - then maybe at last it's time to start living like exiles, as a pesky, fringe-dwelling alternative to the dominant forces of our times. As the saying goes, "Way out people know the way out."[8 — Michael Frost

Surely the challenge for the church today is to be taken captive by the agenda of Jesus, rather than seeking to mold him to fit our agendas, no matter how noble they might be. — Michael Frost

If your neighbors did an analysis of your life, what would they learn about the kingdom? — Michael Frost

Jesus is the center point where God's claim and human response correlate. — Michael Frost

The Come-To-Us stance developed over the Christendom period is unbiblical. — Michael Frost

Discipleship is rooted in a deep belief in the universal reign of God through Christ. To be a disciple is to acknowledge that reign and to embrace the lifelong journey of submitting more and more of every aspect of your life to His good, just, and peaceable reign, as well as alerting others to God's kingship by both word and deed. — Michael Frost

Let us ponder over this basic truth until we are steeped in it, until it becomes as familiar to us as our awareness of shapes or our reading of words: God, at his most vitally active and most incarnate, is not remote from us, wholly apart from the sphere of the tangible; on the contrary, at every moment he awaits us in the activity, the work to be done, which every moment brings. He is, in a sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle - and my heart and my thought. It is by carrying to its natural completion the stroke, the line, the stitch I am working on that I shall lay hold on that ultimate end towards which my will at its deepest levels tends.1 — Michael Frost

The renewal of the church in our time is dependent on the renewal of the gospel. And the renewal of the gospel requires the recovery of the centrality of Jesus for faith and thought. We must reJesus our theology as well as our churches. — Michael Frost