Marginal Christianity

          Ed Stetzer’s Subversive Kingdom is the best book I have read about church and mission from within a Soterian Gospel perspective.   He says many good and important things.   He unmasks typical evangelical shibboleths about things like growth, size, and being church-centric.   I love his use of the imagery that the church is in “rebellion against the rebellion” and to be a “subversive” presence in our society.   I think this is right on and I have used it in my own description of the church as “God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary movement.”   Stetzer’s sense of the scope of subversion required of the church in North America goes farther and is more genuinely incarnational than any other evangelical treatment of the same I am aware of.   He demolishes the idea that we are saved and simply pass time till we take our place in heaven (he calls this “the missing middle) and makes deft use of the New...

-you think of humans primarily as sinners in need of redemption (which we, of course, are) rather than divine image-bearers in primarily in need of restoration to their primal dignity and vocation of God’s royal representatives in the world and creation’s wise overseers; -you think Christ became human only because humans sinned and needed redemption; -you think that the forgiveness of sins is the end/goal of God’s redemptive work; -you think human destiny will be in a not-earth place (heaven) and in a not-earth kind of existence (immaterial, so-called “spiritual”) -you think the earth is not a part of God’s eternal plan.